US President Donald Trump promised to pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he denied Russia leaked emails of his 2016 election rival’s campaign, a London court was told on Wednesday.
The revelation came at a case management hearing at Westminster Magistrate’s Court before Monday’s formal start of Washington’s extradition request for him to face espionage charges.Assange’s defence cited a statement from Robinson in which she said that Rohrabacher had been to see Assange and said “on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange… said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks”.
WikiLeaks later published the emails, which proved politically damaging to Clinton, before the November 2016 vote.None of them is related to the DNC hack and instead concern WikiLeaks’s publication of diplomatic and defence cables about US campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said during a joint press appearance with Putin during their July 2018 summit in Helsinki.