MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2019) US President Donald Trump was simply joking during his 2016 presidential campaign when he said that he loved WikiLeaks, the organization that has been involved in leaking classified US government data, but now his administration is treating the matter with utmost seriousness, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said.
In 2016, Trump said that he adored WikiLeaks and loved reading materials on the website. After last week's arrest of the organization's founder, Julian Assange in connection with the US extradition request, the president, however, denied knowing anything about WikiLeaks and said that it was not his thing.
"Clearly the president was making a joke during the 2016 campaign, certainly we take this seriously. In fact, our administration is the only one that's done anything about it," Sanders told Fox news on Sunday, when asked to explain Trump's contradictory remarks.
On April 11, Assange was arrested by the UK police at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been taking refuge for the past seven years, fearing his extradition to Sweden, where he faced sexual assault charges, and subsequent extradition to the United States for his classified data leaks.
The charges in Sweden have been since dropped but Assange remained in the embassy under political asylum until April 11, when Ecuador revoked the asylum and allowed the UK police arrest the whistleblower.
The United States now accuses Assange of conspiring with former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning and helping her break into a classified US government computer and leak data related to the United States' activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Guantanamo Bay prison, and US diplomatic cables. The charges can bear an up to five-year prison term.
