White House: Trump was 'joking' when he praised WikiLeaks over 140 times

It is a well-known fact that Trump “loves WikiLeaks.”

“WikiLeaks, I love Wikileaks,” Trump declared at an October 2016 campaign rally.

But now, after Trump claimed just last week to “know nothing” about WikiLeaks following the arrest of the group’s founder, Julian Assange, the White House is struggling, as per usual, to spin Trump’s easily debunked lie.

“Look, clearly the president was making a joke during the 2016 campaign,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed to “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. That would be an awful lot of joking, given that Trump heaped praise on WikiLeaks more than 140 times in the last month alone of the campaign.

“Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks,” Trump said again just days before the election.

Over and over again, he cited WikiLeaks’ publication of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove,” he said at a rally on Oct. 31.

But now Trump’s “love” of WikiLeaks is an embarrassment, so he and his team are trying to pretend it never happened.

On Friday, Mike Pence even tried to argue that Trump’s “love” for the organization that helped him during the campaign by trying to embarrass Clinton “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.”

Of course, every single attempt has thus far failed. Trump knew plenty about WikiLeaks when was excitedly talking about it over and over again in 2016. And his frequent declarations of love, recitation of details from the published emails, and calls on Americans to read them sounded very much like an endorsement.

Now this third attempt from Sanders — that Trump was merely joking 141 times — is as incredible as the others. Trump never cared about the legality of WikiLeaks’ practices when he thought it was helping get him to the White House.

It was funny to Trump that WikiLeaks was doing real harm to Clinton’s campaign, and he laughed about it plenty during his rallies. His celebration of WikiLeaks was absolutely serious.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.