The Trump campaign said that only voter data obtained from its partnership with Republican National Committee “played a key role” in helping President Trump win the 2016 election after it was reported that the CEO of the data analytics firm hired by the Trump campaign offered reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The statement from Michael Glassner, executive director of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., however, did not deny the Assange link that the WikiLeaks founder himself said was true on Wednesday.
“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,” Glassner said. “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.”
He added: “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.”
Assange said that it was true that Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, offered to provide him assistance with 33,000 emails he claimed to have recovered from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November last year] and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks,” Assange tweeted Wednesday.
Nix told a third party he had contacted Assange about assisting releasing the emails, the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday.
Because the 33,000 Clinton emails deleted from her unauthorized private server were never released, it is unclear whether WikiLeaks obtained them.
Special counsel Robert Mueller, along with House and Senate intelligence committees, are investigating whether the Trump administration colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
