US President Donald Trump says he does not have an opinion about the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who faces the prospect of extradition to the United States over the publishing of secret official information.
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British police arrested Assange on Thursday after Ecuador withdrew its asylum that had allowed him to take refuge in the country's embassy in London for seven years.
"I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing. ... I don't really have any opinion," Trump said to reporters before a meeting with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in.
On the campaign trail during the 2016 presidential election, Trump repeatedly praised WikiLeaks.
Shortly before the election, Trump said, "I love WikiLeaks", after it released a cache of hacked Democratic Party emails that harmed the candidacy of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
US prosecutors have charged Assange with conspiring with former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to access a government computer.
It was part of a 2010 leak by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of US military reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and American diplomatic communications.
Manning was convicted by court martial in 2013 of espionage and other crimes for providing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to Wikileaks, though the final 28 years of her sentence were later commuted by then president Barack Obama.
Assange's indictment was made secretly last year and unsealed on Thursday.
He faces up to five years in prison if convicted, with legal experts saying more charges were possible.
The indictment said that Assange in March 2010 engaged in a conspiracy to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on US Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a US government network used for classified documents and communications.
Australian Associated Press
