Much of the last 5 or so years of American history have been interwoven with the history of Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
The whistleblower website has played host to a number of incredible classified documents that, when made public, reshaped the trajectory of governments, nations, and the international community.
Perhaps their most infamous release came during the 2016 election, when Assange’s outfit disclosed a great many emails absconded with from the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Within the trove of emails a scandal was laid out: Clinton and the DNC were colluding in order to make sure that rival Bernie Sanders had no shot at ever winning the nomination.
This sent Bernie supporters through the roof, and Clinton suffered at the polls because of it.
All the while, the act of disclosing the emails itself came under scrutiny. The left wanted to say that Russia was responsible for the hack, while the conservative crowd was convinced that a soon-to-be-murdered DNC staffer named Seth Rich downloaded the emails from a physical sever using a thumb-drive.
Wikileaks’ mastermind Julian Assange was eventually arrested on unrelated charges after being summarily kicked out of the Ethiopian embassy in London, where he had been taking refuge.
After sitting in jail for several months, new reports state that Assange has been offered the deal of a lifetime.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plans to claim during an extradition hearing that the Trump administration offered him a pardon if he agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, a lawyer for Assange said Wednesday.
Assange is being held at a British prison while fighting extradition to the United States on spying charges. His full court hearing is due to begin next week.
At a preliminary hearing held in London, lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said now-former Republican congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, visited Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2017.
Fitzgerald said a statement from another Assange lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, recounted “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr. Assange and saying, 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.”
This didn’t go over so well on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Responding to the the lawyer’s claims, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said, “This is absolutely and completely false.”
Assange has been at the center of a great many conspiracy theory on account of his clandestine work, and these mixed signals will almost certainly add fuel to that particular fire.
