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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Sunday that President Donald Trump was only joking when he repeatedly praised Wikileaks before the 2016 election.
"Look, it's clear the president was making a joke during the 2016 campaign," Sanders told Fox News Sunday.
Sanders said the Trump administration "was certainly taking seriously" the case against Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, who was arrested on Thursday for conspiring to hack into US government computers in 2010.
The current candidate, Trump, told his supporters over 140 times in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election that he liked Wikileaks, an organization that publishes classified information from anonymous sources.
At the time, Wikileaks had posted tens of thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee that caused damage to its opponent, Hillary Clinton.
"I love Wikileaks," Trump told the crowd at a rally in Pennsylvania on Oct. 10, 2016. About two weeks later, he praised the controversial Web site as saying that he was "in a rush." 39, a "treasure" at a campaign event in Michigan.
"Damn, I love reading these Wikileaks," Trump told rallying in Ohio on November 4, 2016.
But the president claimed to know nothing about Wikileaks when he was interviewed on the site on Thursday.
"I do not know anything about Wikileaks. It's not my thing, "he told reporters at the White House. "I know that there is something to do with Julian Assange."
His comments are just the last seemingly contradictory remarks he made about Wikileaks and Assange. Despite having tweeted about Assange several times in recent years, Trump asserted last November that he knew nothing about the 47-year-old computer programmer.
"I do not know anything about him. Really, "Trump told reporters at the time. "I do not know much about him. Truly not.
Assange was arrested in London after lifting his status of diplomatic immunity. the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he had been locked up for almost seven years. His expulsion from these places exposes him to extradition by the United States.
In case of conviction, Assange incurs up to five years in prison.
- This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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