California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London this week, his office confirmed in a statement on Thursday morning.

The meeting, which was first reported by conservative news outlet The Daily Caller, lasted about “three hours,” according to the statement. Assange had wanted to meet with Rohrabacher to tell him that “Russia was not behind” the leaks of Democratic National Committee emails that were hacked during the election.

The US intelligence agencies that assessed the hacks and the leaks concluded unanimously that Russia orchestrated them to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and bolster President Donald Trump’s campaign.

But Rohrabacher – who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats and has been described as “Putin’s favorite congressman” for his pro-Russia views – said that Assange “emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.”

Their conversation “ranged over many topics, said Rohrabacher, including the status of WikiLeaks, which Assange maintains is vital to keeping Americans informed on matters hidden by their traditional media,” according to his spokesman, Ken Grubbs. “The congressman plans to divulge more of what he found directly to President Trump.”

Grubbs told Politico on Monday that Rohrabacher was traveling to London “to meet up with his wife to celebrate their 20th anniversary,” but did not mention the Assange meeting.

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Grubbs later told Business Insider that while the anniversary was the initial reason for the trip, “the Assange possibility came up within the last several days.”

The Justice Department has been weighing bringing criminal charges against WikiLeaks, which leaked top secret diplomatic cables and military documents in 2010 and disclosed CIA hacking tools in March. The CIA, FBI, and NSA concluded in January that WikiLeaks had “actively collaborated” with Russia’s “principal international propaganda outlet RT” as the DNC emails were leaked throughout last summer.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo called Assange a “narcissist” and a “fraud” in April, and deemed WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence actor.”

But Rohrabacher wanted to meet with Assange, Grubbs said, because “he wanted to know if Assange could shed light on the origin of the DNC leaks, the media having shown little of such inquisitiveness.”

Asked why the Congressman wasn’t prepared to accept the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia hacked and leaked the DNC emails, Grubbs replied: “Because over time he’s learned that the intel community has not been completely reliable and that its ‘assessment’ of the leaks was more of a subjective consensus than hard evidence.”

Foto: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks on the balcony of the Embassy of Ecuador in London source Thomson Reuters

Grubbs confirmed that Charles Johnson, a far-right blogger, was instrumental in arranging the meeting, which he said was Rohrabacher’s idea.

Rohrabacher, for his part, didn’t condemn WikiLeaks when it leaked the CIA’s hacking tools in March; rather, he told far-right media outlet Breitbart that the revelations showed that the US is “sliding … into an authoritarian mode where the government is running the lives of the people.”

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told his colleagues last year that he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin “pays” Rohrabacher, whose contact with and sympathy for pro-Russian entities has long been viewed with suspicion.

A complaint filed with the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control late last month alleged that Rohrabacher and his staff director, Paul Behrends, violated the Magnitsky Act when they reportedly met with officials from the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow in April 2016 and accepted a “confidential” anti-Magnitsky document which they then took back to Capitol Hill.

“Changing attitudes to the Magnitsky story in the Congress … could have a very favorable response from the Russian side,” says the document, which was obtained by Business Insider. The Magnitsky Act leveled sanctions on high-level Russian officials accused of human rights abuses and corruption.

The July 21 complaint alleged that Rohrabacher “made personal introductions for lobbyists advocating the Russian government’s…position against the Magnitsky Act.”

Those people, according to the complaint, include Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin – both of whom attended a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower last June to discuss a possible repeal of the Magnitsky Act.

Grubbs responded to the complaint by characterizing Browder’s OFAC filing as an attempt to obfuscate Russia’s side of the story and slamming the wealthy investor as “a billionaire tax exile.”

This story has been updated to include additional comments from Rohrabacher’s spokesman.