Top Democrats on Wednesday pounced on reporting by CNN and The Daily Beast that a firm hired by President Donald Trump’s campaign asked WikiLeaks for deleted Hillary Clinton emails.
The Daily Beast reported that Alexander Nix, head of Cambridge Analytica, wrote in an email last year that he asked WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about the 33,000 emails that Clinton deleted during her tenure as secretary of state. CNN later reported that the company wanted to turn the emails into a searchable database for the Trump campaign.
Assange wrote on Twitter that he could “confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November last year] and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks.”
Responding to news commentator Keith Olbermann’s tweet calling that “treason,” Assange wrote, “We have confirmed the approach and rejection only. Not the subject.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who serves on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer it is a “very significant report” because it is “part of a pattern” of Trump campaign officials’ seeking dirt on Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
Rep. Adam Schiff (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, described the request as nefarious.
“If that’s true — and you have to take anything Julian Assange says with a grain of salt — but if that’s true, now this is a third effort to by those associated with the Trump campaign to reach out and interact with those who either stole or acquired emails,” he told Blitzer.
The other two, Schiff said, were Trump confidant Roger Stone’s interactions with an intermediary whom Stone has declined to name, and Peter Smith, an Illinois-based Republican operative who sought to obtain emails he believed were likely stolen by Russian hackers from Clinton’s private email server.
Michael Glassner, executive director of Trump’s campaign, issued a statement Wednesday downplaying the role that Cambridge Analytica played in the campaign. He said the campaign directed its energies toward a joint effort with the Republican National Committee.
“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,” he said in the statement.
Former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova told LifeZette that he does not see any criminal violation on the part of Cambridge Analytica unless it could be shown that company officials participated in illegally obtaining documents.
He said Democrats are desperate to divert attention from renewed questions over a Russian firm’s acquisition during the previous U.S. administration of a controlling interest in Uranium One, which holds a fifth of American uranium reserves.
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“They’re looking for any port in the storm,” he said. “They’re doing whatever they can to take away from Uranium One … What Schiff is trying to do is change the subject.”
DiGenova said the Democrats’ focus on Russia has “backfired” with revelations this week that the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign hired the firm that paid former British spy Christopher Steele to produce a “dossier” with salacious allegations against Trump.
“If they push this narrative further, they may find out something they really don’t want to know,” he said.
(photo credit, homepage images: Julian Assange, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Cancillería del Ecuador / Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore ; photo credit, article images: Julian Assange, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Cancillería del Ecuador / Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore / Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)
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