During the Presidential campaign Trump professed his love for Wikileaks, repeatedly saying “I love Wikileaks.” Here’s one example.
Trump’s eventual CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
With the arrest and indictment of Wikileaks leader Julian Assange, Trump changed his tune. Suddenly Trump is now barely aware that Wikileaks ever existed. When a reporter asked Trump if he still loves Wikileaks Trump responded, “I know nothing about Wikileaks, it’s not my thing.” This makes Trump’s love for Wikileaks of perhaps even lesser duration than his love for his two former wives, hard to say. Assange was indicted on charges he helped classified documents leaker Chelsea Manning crack the passwords of government computers to hack into them.
As the above video indicates, Wikileaks was very much once Trump’s thing. Incredible mashups are available of Trump talking about Wikileaks, literally scores, perhaps hundreds of times. Here is one such example.
Of course, Wikileaks can’t be a true Trump phenomenon unless he tweeted about it. He did, at least 14 times, all during the campaign. I present to you all the times (that I found) where Trump tweeted about the organization he now claims to know nothing about.
There is another thing to consider as you look at the dates those tweets were made. On October 7, 2016 the Director of National Intelligence and the head of the Homeland Security publicly released a joint statement warning of Russian efforts to meddle in the election and that WikiLeaks is part of that effort. The statement described WikiLeaks as essentially an agent of the Russian government.
It was three days after this public statement identifying Wikileaks as effectively a Russian agent that the future President of the United States first publicly declared, “I love Wikileaks.” Trump would favorably tweet about Wikileaks eleven times after that.
