GOP Congressman Sought Trump
Deal
on WikiLeaks, Russia
California’s Dana Rohrabacher asks for pardon of
Julian Assange in return for evidence Russia
wasn’t source of hacked emails
By Byron Tau, Peter Nicholas and Siobhan
Hughes
September 16, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- WASHINGTON—A U.S. congressman contacted the
White House this week trying to broker a deal
that would end WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange’s U.S. legal troubles in exchange for
what he described as evidence that Russia wasn’t
the source of hacked emails published by the
antisecrecy website during the 2016 presidential
campaign.
The
proposal made by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R.,
Calif.), in a phone call Wednesday with White
House Chief of Staff John Kelly, was apparently
aimed at resolving the probe of WikiLeaks
prompted by Mr. Assange’s publication of secret
U.S. government documents in 2010 through a
pardon or other act of clemency from President
Donald Trump.
The
possible “deal”—a term used by Mr. Rohrabacher
during the Wednesday phone call—would involve a
pardon of Mr. Assange or “something like that,”
Mr. Rohrabacher said. In exchange, Mr. Assange
would probably present a computer drive or other
data-storage device that Mr. Rohrabacher said
would exonerate Russia in the long-running
controversy about who was the source of hacked
and stolen material aimed at embarrassing the
Democratic Party during the 2016 election.
“He would
get nothing, obviously, if what he gave us was
not proof,” Mr. Rohrabacher said.
Mr.
Rohrabacher confirmed he spoke to Mr. Kelly this
week but declined to discuss the content of
their conversation. “I can’t confirm or deny
anything about a private conversation at that
level,” he said in a brief interview. He
declined to elaborate further.
A Trump
administration official confirmed Friday that
Mr. Rohrabacher spoke to Mr. Kelly about the
plan involving Mr. Assange. Mr. Kelly told the
congressman that the proposal “was best directed
to the intelligence community,” the official
said. Mr. Kelly didn’t make the president aware
of Mr. Rohrabacher’s message, and Mr. Trump
doesn’t know the details of the proposed deal,
the official said.
In the
call with Mr. Kelly, Mr. Rohrabacher pushed for
a meeting between Mr. Assange and a
representative of Mr. Trump, preferably someone
with direct communication with the president.
“I would
be happy to go with somebody you trust whether
it is somebody at the FBI; somebody on your
staff,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. The California
congressman said he would be pleased to talk to
CIA Director Mike Pompeo, but that the agency
“has its limitations” and wanted “to cover their
butt by having gone along with this big lie.”
The CIA was one of the intelligence agencies
that helped determine in January
that emails from prominent Democrats were stolen
by Russian intelligence and given to WikiLeaks.
Mr. Pompeo
has said that WikiLeaks is akin to a foreign
hostile intelligence service and is an adversary
of the U.S. “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile
intelligence service and talks like a hostile
intelligence service,” Mr.
Pompeo said in an April speech
where he criticized the organization for
stealing secrets from democratic governments all
while receiving the backing of authoritarian
states.
The CIA
declined to comment further.
The U.S.
has confirmed the existence of an investigation
into the disclosure of classified material to
WikiLeaks that was opened after the publication
of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S.
government documents in 2010. Mr. Assange or the
organization have never been publicly accused of
wrongdoing. He and the group have said their
actions were important in bringing transparency
to the powerful institutions and governments and
is akin to journalism.
Mr.
Rohrabacher, who has long been a pro-Russia
voice in Congress, traveled to London in August
to meet with Mr. Assange, who has been living in
Ecuador’s embassy since 2012 to avoid arrest and
extradition to Sweden
on allegations of sexual assault.
Mr. Rohrabacher’s travel wasn’t paid for by the
U.S. House of Representatives and wasn’t an
official government trip, aides said.
The
organization said in a statement that Mr. Assange
didn’t request a pardon at any time during his
conversation with Mr. Rohrabacher. The
organization didn’t address whether Mr. Assange
asked Mr. Rohrabacher to carry a message to the
president.
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“Mr.
Assange explained that the ongoing attempts to
bring a prosecution against WikiLeaks and its
staff for its work documenting the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars are unconstitutional, widely
condemned, should immediately cease and that the
continuation is an abuse of process for improper
purposes,” WikiLeaks said in a statement about
the August meeting between Mr. Assange and
Mr. Rohrabacher.
U.S.
officials haven’t said whether they have
formally requested Mr. Assange’s extradition or
whether he has been secretly indicted by a grand
jury.
After the
visit to London, Mr. Rohrabacher said in a
statement that Mr. Assange “emphatically stated
that the Russians were not involved in the
hacking or disclosure of those emails.”
Mr.
Rohrabacher has also publicly stated his desire
to arrange some sort of meeting between Mr.
Assange and Mr. Trump or his representatives in
media interviews after the visit. He told the
Los Angeles Times on Thursday that he had talked
to “senior people at the White House” about
presenting Mr. Assange’s evidence.
But his
contact with the White House chief of staff and
the idea of a deal between the Trump
administration and Mr. Assange that would end
the legal jeopardy faced by WikiLeaks hasn’t
been previously reported.
WikiLeaks
came under U.S. scrutiny after the publication
of more than 250,000 classified U.S. State
Department diplomatic dispatches. During the
2016 campaign, the organization also published
thousands of emails stolen from the servers of
prominent Democrats and Democratic political
organizations.
The U.S.
intelligence community later concluded that the
Democratic emails were stolen and released at
the direction of the Russian government, as part
of a multipronged influence campaign aimed at
boosting Mr. Trump at the expense of his
Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. In a January
report, the intelligence agencies said they had
“high confidence” that Russian hackers stole
emails from U.S. victims and released them
publicly using WikiLeaks, another website called
DCLeaks and a hacker persona known as Guccifer
2.0, among other channels.
Other
Russia tactics, directed from the highest levels
of the Russian government, included efforts to
hack state election systems and disseminate
through social media and other outlets negative
stories about Mrs. Clinton and positive ones
about the Mr. Trump, the report said. Russia
denies any interference, while Mr. Trump has
called the investigations into possible
collusion between his campaign and Russia a
“witch hunt.”
During the
campaign, Mr. Trump praised WikiLeaks for
releasing negative information about Mrs.
Clinton and other Democrats. At an October 2016
rally, he told a cheering crowd: “I love
WikiLeaks.”
Since
taking office, however, Mr. Trump’s
administration has signaled that it considers
stemming the leaking and dissemination of
classified information to be a priority.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions described the
case against Mr. Assange as a “priority.”
Mr.
Rohrabacher is known as an iconoclast within the
Republican congressional caucus. In addition to
holding views on U.S.-Russian diplomatic
rapprochement that put him outside the
mainstream of his party, he has used his perch
in Congress to push issues like the legalization
of marijuana.
He serves
as the chairman of the subcommittee on Europe,
Eurasia and Emerging Threats, which has
jurisdiction over Russia-related issues within
the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
—Shane
Harris and Del Quentin Wilber contributed to
this article.
Copyright
©2017
Dow Jones & Company,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This
article was first published by
WSJ
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