Assange bombshell

Lawyer tells hearing Australian was offered pardon by Trump

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange plans to claim during an extradition hearing that the Trump administration offered him a pardon if he agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 US election campaign, a lawyer for Mr Assange said.

Mr Assange is being held at a British prison while fighting extradition to the US on spying charges. His full court hearing is due to begin next week.

At a preliminary hearing held yesterday in London, lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said that now-former Republican congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, visited Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in August 2017.

Mr Fitzgerald said a statement from another Assange lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, recounted: “Mr Rohrabacher going to see Mr Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange … said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”

Responding to the lawyer’s claims, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said: “This is absolutely and completely false.”

Emails embarrassing for the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked before being published by WikiLeaks in 2016.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser said that the evidence was admissible in the extradition case.

Mr Assange appeared at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court yesterday by video-link from Belmarsh prison, where he is being held as he awaits his extradition hearing.

US prosecutors have charged the 48-year-old Australian computer hacker with espionage over WikiLeaks’ hacking of hundreds of thousands of confidential government documents. If found guilty, he faces up to 175 years in jail. He argues he was acting as a journalist entitled to First Amendment protection.