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(CNN)The head of a data analytics company linked to the Trump campaign …
Key members of President Donald Trump's campaign team scrambled …
The Trump campaign operation ... source for data analytics.” ADVERTISEMENT …
Trump campaign analytics company contacted WikiLeaks about Clinton emails
Story highlights
- Cambridge Analytica was hired in the summer of 2016 as part of the Trump campaign's three-pronged data operation
- News of the email exchange comes amid federal investigations into whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia
(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 Daily Beast first reported news of the email outreach.
It occurred as Trump increasingly criticized Clinton for deleting
thousands of emails from her private server. There is no evidence that
the deleted emails were ever hacked or that Wikileaks ever had
possession of them.
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.
News
of the email exchange comes amid federal investigations into whether
there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Parscale, the
Trump campaign's digital director, was interviewed Tuesday by the House
intelligence committee as part of that inquiry.
Assange confirmed the exchange in a post on Twitter Wednesday.
"I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November
last year] and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks," he
tweeted.
The 33,000 emails deleted from Clinton's private server have never materialized.
Nix and Cambridge Analytica, which is backed by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, did not respond to requests for comment.
After
the Daily Beast report published, the Trump campaign issued a statement
by campaign executive director Michael S. Glassner: "Once President
Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important
decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee
on data analytics. Leading into the election, the RNC had invested in
the most sophisticated data targeting program in modern American in
history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to
have worked with the RNC and its data experts and relied on them as our
main source for data analytics. We as a campaign made the choice to rely
on the voter data of the Republican National Committee to help elect
President Donald J. Trump. Any claims that voter data from any other
source played a key role in the victory are false."
The statement does not address contacts between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks.
In
Parscale's congressional interview, he denied there was any Russian
collusion with the campaign's digital operations, according to two
sources familiar with the matter. Many of the committee's questions for
Parscale were about the campaign's work with Cambridge Analytica, the
sources said. The committee asked the digital firm for documents earlier
this month, and Cambridge Analytica said it was cooperating.
Parscale downplayed the campaign's connections to Cambridge Analytica, one of the sources said.
He
began working for the Trump Organization's digital team in early 2015
before Trump officially announced his plan to run for office. Parscale
and employees from his firm, Giles-Parscale, incorporated some staffers
from Cambridge Analytica into their data operation. They also worked
with teams from data companies that were partnering with the Republican
National Committee.
In July 2016, Trump called on Russia to find the emails.
"Russia,
if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that
are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our
press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next," Trump said in a news
conference.
News of the outreach
comes after an earlier disclosure that a Republican operative, Peter W.
Smith, had been on the hunt for Clinton's missing emails during the
campaign. Smith spoke to The Wall Street Journal in May,
saying he and the colleagues he enlisted found five groups of hackers
claiming to have 33,000 deleted emails from the private server Clinton
used during her tenure as secretary of state.
He
said that he determined two of the groups were Russian. "We knew the
people who had these were probably around the Russian government," Smith
told the Journal. Smith was found dead of an apparent suicide weeks
after the interview.
Steve Bannon,
Trump's former White House chief strategist, was vice president and
secretary of Cambridge Analytica until he stepped down to run the Trump
campaign in August 2016, according to The New York Times.
The Mercers are investors in Breitbart News, the far-right site where
Bannon served as executive chairman before he ran Trump's campaign.
Political
strategist Roger Stone, Trump's long-time confidant, had boasted during
the campaign of knowledge about upcoming Wikileaks publication of
damaging documents, at one point telling the Boston Herald Radio that he
expected "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people to drop a payload of
new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. And that of course will
answer the question of exactly what was erased on that email server."
Stone was questioned privately by the House intelligence committee in September about the identity of his intermediary with Wikileaks.
An attorney for Stone told CNN, "Mr. Stone has complied with the committee's requests. No further statement will be issued."
After
the hearing, Stone said he answered the committee's questions other
than revealing the identity of his intermediary because that person was a
journalist and the conversation was off the record.
"I'm
not going to burn somebody I spoke to off the record," Stone said. "If
he releases me, if he allows me to release it, I would be happy to give
it to the committee. I'm actually going to try to do that."
Stone
has previously denied any contact with Assange and any advanced notice
of WikiLeaks release of emails belonging to Podesta.
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