Holy shit!!!

Courtesy of The Daily Beast: 

A lawyer for Julian Assange has claimed in court that President Trump offered to pardon Assange if the WikiLeaks founder agreed to help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Assange’s lawyers said on Wednesday that former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal in 2017, a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published. WikiLeaks posted the stolen DNC emails after they were hacked by Russian operatives.

The claim that Rohrabacher acted as an emissary for the White House came during a pre-extradition hearing in London.

Assange has argued that he should not be extradited to the U.S. because the American case against him is politically motivated. He spent almost seven years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in Central London claiming that he would be jailed in the U.S. if he wasn’t granted asylum. He was kicked out of the embassy last year.

His lawyers told the court that Trump’s alleged offer to pardon Assange proved that this was no ordinary criminal investigation.

Edward Fitzgerald, who was representing Assange in court, said he had evidence that a quid pro quo was put to Assange by Rohrabacher, who was known as Putin’s favorite congressman.

Fitzgerald said a statement produced by Assange’s personal lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, included a description of “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.”

Well the first thing that the Trump folks will do is to point out that Assange is not exactly a trustworthy witness, and that is a fact.

However it should also be pointed out that Wikileaks was pro-Trump from very early on and that Assange vehemently denied that he got his information from the Russians, so this is a complete reversal of his former narrative.

That could be attributed to an attempt to gain sympathy from the Birtish legal system, and to stay out of the American courts altogether, or it could simply be that he is now ready to tell the truth. 

If this pans out it could be the smoking gun that proves Trump was working in cahoots with the Kremlin to hide the fact that Russia was behind the DNC hacks.

In other words, yes this is a holy shit moment.