Rebekah Mercer, a top Trump donor, contacted the CEO of the data analytics firm the Trump campaign hired and asked if the company could better organize the emails related to Hillary Clinton that were being released by WikiLeaks, a report said Friday.
Mercer forwarded Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, an email in August 2016 from a person she had met at an event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that the Trump campaign should help organize the hacked emails concerning Clinton to make them more searchable, according to the Wall Street Journal.
She then asked whether this was possible for Cambridge Analytica or the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to investigative research.
Nix reportedly responded that he had already contacted WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, in June and asked him to share the emails with the company so they could help disperse them, but said Assange had denied his request.
Assange appeared to confirm Wednesday that Nix offered to provide him assistance with the 33,000 emails he claimed to have recovered from Clinton’s unauthorized server from her time serving as secretary of state.
“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.
Mercer and Nix also corresponded with Peter Schweizer, co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, and Schweizer shared that he was developing a searchable database of the Clinton-related emails. However, the database was never unveiled, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Special counsel Robert Mueller, along with House and Senate intelligence committees, are investigating whether the Trump administration colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
The House Intelligence Committee requested Cambridge Analytica to provide information about their involvement in the Trump campaign in relation to the panel’s Russia probe.
