It’s friday night. Here we go...
Kyle Griffin
@kylegriffin1
WSJ: Rebekah Mercer in Aug. '16 asked Cambridge Analytica CEO if the firm could organize WikiLeaks-released emails.
Trump Donor Asked Data Firm If It Could Better Organize Hacked Emails
August 2016 exchange between Rebekah Mercer and Cambridge Analytica’s CEO shows efforts to leverage Clinton-related messages
www.wsj.com/amp/articles/trump-donor-asked-data-firm-if-it-could-better-organize-hacked-emails-1509133587
Trump donor Rebekah Mercer in August 2016 asked the chief executive of a data-analytics firm working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign whether the company could better organize the Hillary Clinton -related emails being released by WikiLeaks, according to a person familiar with their email exchange.
The previously undisclosed details from the exchange between Ms. Mercer and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix show how an influential Trump supporter was looking to leverage the hacked Clinton-related messages to boost Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Nix emailed Ms. Mercer and some company employees that he had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to offer help organizing the Clinton-related emails the website was releasing. The new details shed light on the timing of Mr. Nix’s outreach to Mr. Assange, which came before his company began working for the Trump campaign.
On Aug. 26, 2016, roughly a month after Mr. Trump formally became the Republican nominee, Ms. Mercer passed along to Mr. Nix an email she had received from a person she met at an event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), whose presidential campaign she had initially supported during the GOP primaries, the person familiar with the exchange said. The email’s author suggested to Ms. Mercer that the Trump campaign or an allied super PAC ought to better index the WikiLeaks emails to make them more searchable, the person said.
Ms. Mercer forwarded the email to Mr. Nix, whose firm had started working for the Trump campaign in July 2016 after previously working for the Cruz campaign, according to the person. In the email, Ms. Mercer asked Mr. Nix whether the suggested organization of the emails was something Cambridge Analytica or the Government Accountability Institute—a conservative nonprofit that focuses on investigative research—could do, the person said. Ms. Mercer has sat on the board of the institute, which has received funding from her family.
Mr. Nix responded that he had reached out to Mr. Assange two months earlier—in June 2016, before Cambridge Analytica had started working for the Trump campaign—to ask him to share Clinton-related emails so the company could aid in disseminating them, the person familiar with the email exchange said. He said Mr. Assange had turned him down. That outreach and subsequent rejection was confirmed by Mr. Assange earlier this week on Twitter.
Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by Ms. Mercer and her father, hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer. Mr. Mercer made his first donation to Mr. Trump on June 21.
In an email that copied Peter Schweizer, who co-founded the Government Accountability Institute with Trump adviser Steve Bannon in 2012, Mr. Nix added that he believed Mr. Schweizer was working on creating an index of the Clinton-related emails, the person said. But Mr. Nix said he would order a team to “assess the feasibility of expanding this work.”
Mr. Schweizer replied to the email, copying Mr. Nix, Ms. Mercer and other Cambridge Analytica employees, saying that he was working on putting the emails in a searchable database, the person familiar with the email exchange said. Government Accountability Institute created an internal database of the emails but didn’t release it publicly, according to a person familiar with the effort.