President Trump’s team strategized about how to take advantage of a WikiLeaks operation against rival Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2016, a campaign adviser told special counsel Robert Mueller.
“[B]y the late summer of 2016, the Trump campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks,” Mueller’s report states.
Attorney General William Barr released a redacted version of the long-awaited report Thursday, noting that Mueller did not find any criminal coordination between the Trump team and WikiLeaks. But, based in part on testimony from Trump campaign strategist Rick Gates, Mueller found that senior members of the campaign and outside allies thought WikiLeaks’ release of damaging emails from Clinton’s campaign would boost Trump’s presidential prospects.
“Beginning in June 2016, [redacted] forecast to senior Campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release information damaging to candidate Clinton,” the report said.
Much of the supporting evidence is redacted because publication would cause “harm to [an] ongoing matter.” Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone has been charged with obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to Congress about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks during the campaign.
Mueller’s report states that Russian intelligence hacked the email accounts of Clinton campaign officials, as well as the computer of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The Russians “then exfiltrated data related to the 2016 election from these accounts and computers, and disseminated that data through fictitious online personas (DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0) and later through WikiLeaks.” The report adds, “Both the GRU and WikiLeaks sought to hide their communications, which has limited the Office’s ability to collect all of the communications between them.”
Gates testified that then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort “expressed excitement” about WikiLeaks’s release of DNC emails in July 2016. Manafort, who was indicted in 2017 on unrelated fraud charges, “told Gates to keep in touch … about future WikiLeaks releases.”
The Republican candidate was also on the watch for the new documents. “Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming,” the report says. Mueller ties that prediction to a phone call, but other details about the conversation are redacted. He also points to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s June 2016 statement that he had obtained “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”
Barr said in his morning press conference that Assange’s publication of the documents “would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy.” He added, “Here too, the special counsel’s report did not find that any person associated with the Trump campaign illegally participated in the dissemination of the materials.”
