Vice President Mike Pence said in an interview aired Friday that President Trump’s claim back in 2016 that he loves WikiLeaks was not an endorsement of the group.
“I think the president always, as you and the media do, always welcomes information,” Pence told CNN’s Dana Bash Friday. “But that was in no way an endorsement of an organization that we now understand was involved in disseminating classified information by the United States of America.”
Mike Pence claims to my colleague @DanaBashCNN in an interview that Trump’s touting of Wikileaks in 2016 – “I love Wikileaks” – was not an endorsement of the organization. pic.twitter.com/aOvIKh5Waa
— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) April 12, 2019
“WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” Trump said at a 2016 rally, holding up a piece of paper he claimed was one of their new leaks.
Since the election, Trump’s opinion on the rogue organization has soured with him most recently claiming he knows “nothing” about the group in the wake of Julian Assange’s arrest Thursday morning.
“I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing and I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange. I’ve been seeing what’s happened with Assange,” Trump said Thursday.
WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange who used the organization to leak government secrets in what he claimed was an attempt to make governments more transparent.
[Related: Trump faces legal and political hazards once Assange returns to the US]
