When Donald Trump was in Ohio, he declared:
“Boy, I love reading WikiLeaks.” In Michigan, he proclaimed: “This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove.” In Pennsylvania, he confessed: “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks.”
It was the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and Trump was WikiLeaks’ number one salesman. But on Thursday, with the
website’s founder Julian Assange under arrest, the US president was singing a different tune. “I know nothing about WikiLeaks,” Trump said. “It’s not my thing.”
The jarring shift illustrated, critics say,
the shameless opportunism and hypocrisy of president. Whether it hints at anything about his alleged links to Russia remains altogether murkier.
Matthew Miller, former director of public affairs at the justice department, said: “
His ethics have always been situational at best so I’m not surprised he’s out disclaiming any knowledge. He has no concern about the broader ethics of any situation, only what’s best for him. It’s pretty simple, really.”
The anti-secrecy site was once lionised by the left for holding the American political establishment and military industrial complex up to the light. In 2010 it released, in cooperation with publications including the Guardian, more than a quarter of a million classified cables from American embassies around the world.
Back then, Republicans expressed fury at Assange. Trump himself said: “I think it’s disgraceful. I think it should be like death penalty or something.”
Just six years later, it was a very different story.
WikiLeaks came to be seen as a tool of the Trump election campaign as, with his explicit encouragement, it published emails from Democrats believed to have been stolen by Russian intelligence operatives.
In July 2016, a dump of Democratic National Committee material appeared designed to embarrass Hillary Clinton on the eve of the party convention. In October, emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, were published just minutes after the release of a video in which Trump was caught boasting about groping women.
Seizing the gift, candidate
Trump cited WikiLeaks 141 times at 56 events, according to a count by NBC News. He was breezy and blase about how the hacked emails were obtained. A poster of Assange hung backstage at his debate war room, the Associated Press reported.
The relationship between the campaign and WikiLeaks – and indeed Russia – remains shrouded in mystery. Behind the scenes, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, was in direct communication with WikiLeaks in the final stages of the 2016 campaign.
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Originally Posted by Warlord
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