'Clearly a joke': White House explains away Trump's 'I love WikiLeaks' comments

The recent arrest of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has put the White House in the awkward position of having to explain away US President Donald Trump's previous praise for the whistleblowing website.

It turns out all Trump’s fanboying of WikiLeaks back in 2016 when they released Hillary Clinton’s “treasure trove” of emails was just a joke.

Now that Assange has been arrested and indicted in the US for conspiracy to hack a government computer network in 2010, Trump’s affection is gone. “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing,” he said dismissively earlier this week, leaving others to do the awkward explaining.

“Look, clearly the president was making a joke during the 2016 campaign,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said about the sudden change of heart.

She also assured Fox News that the Trump administration “certainly” takes the issue “seriously” now, then quickly turned it into an attack on the Obama administration.

“In fact, our administration is the only one that’s done anything about it,” she said. “We’re the only ones that have taken this whole process seriously in actually doing something to solve the problem.”

Sanders said the only reason Assange is being “looked at” at all is the fact that he worked with US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who handed him classified US documents back in 2010, adding that it was Obama who commuted Manning’s sentence. Trump himself has called Manning a “traitor” before.

The media could not help but pounce on the opportunity to remind the White House about the president’s past statements – MSNBC even made a point of counting how many times Trump had mentioned WikiLeaks, and came up with an impressive 141 in the final month of his campaign alone.

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