Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) joined SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Monday’s Breitbart News Tonight, saying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was previously prepared to provide him with “physical proof” that WikiLeaks’ source for Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails was not the Russian government.

Rohrabacher described the “Russia collusion” narrative as “total baloney.” He said, “By now, everybody knows that this idea that Trump was colluding with the Russians in order to get them to do things like steal the DNC emails and then release them through WikiLeaks, the public knows that’s just total baloney [and] an excuse. In fact, all they’re doing is trying to cover up the fact that they themselves are undermining our Constitution by preventing our president from assuming his authority that was given to him by the voters.”

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Rohrabacher spoke of his meeting with Assange in August 2017 at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, U.K. He stated, “I knew the one man who could prove that it was all baloney was Assange. So I went to see him in London, and he confirmed for me that the Russians did not give him the DNC emails. He had physical proof of that, and he was going to let me see that and have that, but only once, I found an agreement so he wouldn’t get arrested when he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Unfortunately, this was in the middle of having a special prosecutor, [and] any discussion with Trump and myself that mentions Russia will be used as an excuse by that special prosecutor to just quadruple all the areas of investigation into me and into Trump. So it is standing there. I’ve been waiting because I know that we’re not going to give this special prosecutor any more ammunition than he needs to try to destroy this president.”

Rohrabacher rejected news media characterizations of him as a de facto fifth columnist Kremlin agent. He called for cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in combating Islamic terrorism. He remarked, “I spent my whole life fighting communism, but we won the Cold War, and the Soviet Union has collapsed, and I think now when we have radical Islam as our main enemy, we should be cooperating with Russia in order to defeat that enemy. That has been portrayed to people as if I am some sort of pro-communist or something, when, in fact, it just makes sense for us to try to find ways of cooperating to defeat this horrible enemy that threatens all of Western Civilization.”

Rohrabacher added, “The news media has story after story as if I’m Putin’s favorite congressman. Give me a break. On top of it, I am the chairman of the subcommittee on foreign affairs that has the jurisdiction of overseeing our relations with Russia. I have actually had meetings [with Russians], and that’s being portrayed to everybody as if I’m colluding with them to hurt the United States. My constituents understand who I am, and they’re not buying into that.”

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.