One of President Donald Trump's most influential backers wanted a campaign-affiliated data-analytics firm to organize the hacked Hillary Clinton-related emails released by WikiLeaks in order to boost the Trump campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
According to the Journal, Trump donor Rebekah Mercer on Aug. 26, 2016, passed along to the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, an email she'd gotten from someone she met at a campaign event for then-GOP presidential primary contender Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
The email writer suggested the Trump campaign or an allied super PAC should index the WikiLeaks emails to make them more searchable, the Journal reported, citing an unnamed source. Mercer wanted to know if that was something Cambridge Analytica or the Government Accountability Institute — a conservative nonprofit that focuses on investigative research — could do, the Journal reported.
Nix replied that he'd already reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in June 2016 to ask him to share Clinton-related emails so the company could aid in disseminating them — and Assange turned him down, the Journal reported.
In an email that copied Peter Schweizer, who co-founded the Government Accountability Institute with Trump adviser Steve Bannon in 2012, Nix added that he believed Schweizer was working on creating an index of the Clinton-related emails, the Journal reported. Nix said he would order a team to "assess the feasibility of expanding this work."
Schweizer replied he was working on putting the emails in a searchable database, the Journal reported, adding the institute created an internal database of the emails but didn't release it publicly.
Nix's outreach to Assange came about a month before WikiLeaks began releasing its trove of emails in July 2016, which included messages stolen from the account of Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and from the Democratic National Committee. Intelligence agencies later determined the Clinton-related emails had been stolen by Russian intelligence and given to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks has denied.
According to the Journal, the exchange between Nix, Mercer and Schweizer didn't reference the 33,000 emails from Hillary Clinton's State Department tenure that she had deemed personal and said she had deleted.