President Trump’s love affair with WikiLeaks appeared to be over Thursday, as the man who once stood on a campaign stage cheering the leakers now says he knows nothing about it.
The hacker website’s founder, Julian Assange, was dragged from his hiding place in Ecuador’s London embassy earlier in the day and now faces extradition to the U.S. on charges of conspiracy to leak secret information.
Mr. Trump, who benefited from WikiLeaks’ activities in the 2016 presidential election, professed to be out of the loop now.
“I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing,” the president said at the White House. “I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange.”
It’s a stunning turnabout for a man who had told cheering throngs of supporters in the closing days of the 2016 campaign they “gotta read” what WikiLeaks published, calling the site a “treasure trove.”
“Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks,” he said.
“It’s like Clyde saying that Bonnie ’was not his thing,’” said Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University.
The website has sown chaos for governments across the globe since its 2006 founding, and it spawned heated debates about whether Mr. Assange was a crusading journalist or a massive security threat who needed to be shut down.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, in 2010, saw Mr. Assange as the latter, during a 2010 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I would argue it’s closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers,” Mr. Biden said.
“This guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.”
Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, one of the Democrats running to unseat Mr. Trump next year, said in 2017 she is “no supporter of WikiLeaks” and accused the group of doing “considerable harm” to the nation.
In 2013 when lawmakers tried to craft a shield law for journalists, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, now another Democratic presidential candidate, raised concerns over whether the effort would end up protecting WikiLeaks and similar outlets.
“I’m concerned this would provide special privilege to those who are not reporters at all,” Ms. Klobuchar said at the time.
The 2020 Democrats were markedly silent Thursday as Mr. Assange was arrested.
The big exception was Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an Assange defender who told CNN on Thursday that the U.S. is retaliating against a man who sparked important debate about civil liberties and military action in the Middle East.
“That is why this is such a dangerous and slippery slope,” Ms. Gabbard said. “Not only for journalists, not only for those in the media, but also for every American that our government can and has the power to kind of lay down the hammer to say ’Be careful, be quiet and fall in line, and otherwise we have the means to come after you.’”
Some Democrats were quick to point out the irony of the president’s flip-flop from cheering adoration to now overseeing prosecution.
“While President Trump may ’love WikiLeaks’ for flooding the airwaves with information stolen by the Russian government, Mr. Assange is in fact a tool of Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence service,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel.
Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department says Mr. Assange conspired with former intelligence officer Chelsea Manning to crack passwords at the Department of Defense in 2010.
The president said Thursday that whatever happens next is up to Attorney General William Barr.
He was far more expansive in 2016.
That fall, as Mr. Trump aimed for an upset victory, he shuffled papers from a Pennsylvania lectern and read aloud Hillary Clinton quotes from WikiLeaks, which published a trove of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.
From talk of having “both a public and private position” on policy to appearing to downplay the threat of terrorism, the comments Mr. Trump read to an adoring crowd — one month before Election Day — painted an unflattering portrait of Mrs. Clinton.
“We have to go back to WikiLeaks. Ohhh, WikiLeaks,” Mr. Trump told a cheering crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
It’s part of a broader Trumpian shift on leakers overall.
Though he weaponized Democratic emails during the campaign, he now rails against staffers who leave his administration to write tell-all books or those who dish out damaging anecdotes to the daily press.
A person familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking said Thursday the main distinction is the president was “being sarcastic” during the campaign and that the Justice Department is the chief voice on the criminal case.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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