LONDON - US President Donald Trump offered to pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he said that Russia had nothing to do with WikiLeaks' publication of Democratic Party emails in 2016, a London court heard on Wednesday .
At Westminster Magistrates' Court, Assange's barrister, Edward Fitzgerald, referred to a witness statement by former US Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher who had visited Assange in 2017, saying that he had been sent by the president to offer a pardon. Assange, 48, who spent seven years holed up in Ecuador's London embassy before he was dragged out last April, is wanted in the United States to face 18 counts including conspiring to hack government computers and violating an espionage law.Almost a decade after his WikiLeaks website enraged Washington by leaking secret US documents, Woolwich Crown Court in London will begin hearings on Monday - with Assange present - to decide whether he should be sent to the United States.