White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham slammed accusations made by lawyers of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard from Assange’s lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, that President Trump offered the Australian whistleblower a pardon contingent on him lying about how his organization gained access to leaked emails from Democratic National Committee and then-candidate Hillary Clinton. Fitzgerald said former California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher was instructed by Trump to visit Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he was living under asylum, and offer a deal if Assange said, “Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”
Grisham shot back at the claims, calling the alleged deal a “complete fabrication and a total lie.”
“The President barely knows Dana Rohrabacher other than he’s an ex-congressman,” said Grisham. “He’s never spoken to him on this subject or almost any subject. It is a complete fabrication and a total lie. This is probably another never ending hoax and total lie from the DNC.”
Grisham on Assange: “The President barely knows Dana Rohrabacher other than he’s an ex-congressman. He’s never spoken to him on this subject or almost any subject. It is a complete fabrication and a total lie. This is probably another never ending hoax and total lie from the DNC”
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) February 19, 2020
Assange faces 18 charges in the United States, including conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, for his role in publishing DNC emails during the 2016 presidential election.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2018 investigation into Russian collusion in the presidential election found a back channel between Wikileaks and the Russian Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU. Mueller, however, found no direct connection between Trump and the Russian intelligence network.
Assange, who published a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables at the beginning of the Iraq War, faces 175 years in prison if found guilty of computer-related crimes in the U.S.
