A company that the Trump campaign hired last year during the election contacted Wikileaks to see if they could get a database of the 33,000 emails that Hillary Clinton deleted from her server:
Here’s more:
CNN – The head of a data analytics company linked to the Trump campaign contacted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016 regarding thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails kept on a private server while she was secretary of state, according to four sources familiar with the outreach.
Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, sent an email to several people including top Donald Trump donor Rebekah Mercer, relaying that he had emailed Assange seeking access to emails from Clinton’s private server to turn them into a searchable database for the campaign or a pro-Trump political action committee, two of the sources said.
Cambridge Analytica was hired in the summer of 2016 as part of the Trump campaign’s three-pronged data operation, which was led by Brad Parscale and overseen by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. No one from the Trump campaign was copied on the email, the sources said. Nix sent the email in summer 2016, two sources said, but it is not clear whether he sent it before or after Cambridge Analytica was brought onto the campaign.
The attempt at collaboration raises fresh questions about the willingness of people associated with the Trump campaign to work with Wikileaks for political gain. The site, which publishes leaked documents, released hacked emails in July from the Democratic National Committee and in October from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. US intelligence has said the Podesta emails were stolen by Russia and handed over to WikiLeaks through an intermediary.
It appears beyond dispute at this point that the email took place. Julian Assange affirmed this today:
I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November last year] and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks.
— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) October 25, 2017
He also said that he turned Cambridge Analytica down which means, if true, no money or data was ever exchanged.
So I think all we’re talking about here is intent and not an exchange of anything except for an email. Add to that this statement from the article:
Nix sent the email in summer 2016, two sources said, but it is not clear whether he sent it before or after Cambridge Analytica was brought onto the campaign
If I had to guess, I’d say it was probably after they were brought on with the campaign. But it is conceivable that it occurred before the campaign hired them. After all they are a data analytics company and maybe it would be a better selling point to say ‘hey we’ve got Hillary’s deleted emails’. The only problem with that theory is that Trump donor Rebekah Mercer was a big investor in Cambridge Analytica – maybe the biggest – so odds are they were going to hire the company anyway, which they proceeded to pay almost 6 million (cha ching) over the course of the next 5 or 6 months.
In any event, it doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of substance here. Nothing was exchanged (that we know of now) and no Trump campaign officials were even listed on the email.
Also I’d be remiss if I didn’t say this story smells like a much needed media counter story to the fact that Hillary and the DNC paid big money for the research into the mostly uncorroborated and very salacious dossier. I mean c’mon, it hits the very next day after the Hillary story broke?