Top Trump donor asked data firm to help organize hacked WikiLeaks emails

A top donor to President Trump’s 2016 election effort asked the campaign’s data firm if it could help organize hacked emails released by WikiLeaks on Hillary Clinton, according to a new report.

A source familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that Rebekah Mercer, a billionaire supporter of Trump, exchanged emails with Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix about the hacked emails.

{mosads}The Journal reports that Mercer asked Nix if his firm could compile the hacked emails related to Clinton and make them more easily searchable after she received the suggestion from a person she met at a event supporting Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

The Cambridge CEO reportedly responded to Mercer’s request, saying he had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, asking him to pass along Clinton-related emails, according to the Journal.

Assange said on Twitter this week that he declined the request.

I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November last year] and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks.

— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) October 25, 2017

The Journal also reports that Mercer and Nix exchanged emails with Peter Schweizer, the co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative research group co-founded by former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon and funded by the Mercer family.

Schweizer told the two in an email that he was working on creating a searchable database of the Clinton-related emails, but it was never released publicly, a source told the Journal.

The Daily Beast reported this week that Nix reached out to Assange about locating Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails.

Clinton’s emails, which were deleted from the personal email server she used while serving as secretary of State, were a major focus of the Trump campaign. During one rally, Trump said he hoped Russia could help find the emails. 

The House Intelligence Committee earlier this month requested information from Cambridge Analytica about its work from Trump’s campaign as part of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.