Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Sunday that President Trump was “clearly joking” when he repeatedly expressed his admiration for WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. When asked on Fox News Sunday how to reconcile Trump’s 2016 comments—which included “I love WikiLeaks”—with his Thursday claim that he knows “nothing” about the group because it’s “not my thing,” Sanders said that “Clearly, the president was making a joke during the 2016 campaign. Certainly, we take this serious.” The controversy comes just days after Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, was arrested at Ecuador’s London embassy and federal prosecutors moved to extradite him to the United States.