President Trump and others in the Trump Organization were alerted to the availability of documents hacked by WikiLeaks during the presidential race, though those files were already public at the time.
Trump himself, as well as his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and others in his company were offered a decryption key and web address to view the hacked documents in an email from a sender named Mike Erickson.
CNN initially reported the email was sent on Sept. 4, 2016, which would have meant that the campaign early access to the files. But subsequent reports by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press stated that the email was actually sent on Sept. 14; CNN has corrected its report to the same date.
The timing of the email is important, because the documents Erickson pointed to had already been made public by WikiLeaks on Sept. 13.
The email from Erickson was obtained by the House Intelligence Committee, which is looking into Russia’s role in the 2016 election, including possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Congressional investigators are trying to determine whether the email was an attempt to offer the Trump campaign access to the hacked materials, as well as who Erickson is.
Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump Jr., told CNN that his client did not recall receiving the email and did not take any action on it. He told the Post Trump Jr. received “a ton of unsolicited emails like this on a variety of topics” during the campaign.
The message came just a few weeks before WikiLeaks and Trump Jr. began communicating via Twitter direct messages. Trump Jr. told congressional investigators he did not remember receiving the email.
Last month, Trump Jr. released a series of Twitter direct messages with WikiLeaks exchanged in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
Those direct messages were sent just before the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Russia had been behind the hacks at the Democratic National Committee and was leaking that information through WikiLeaks and a hacker identified as Guccifer 2.0.
This report was updated at 4:02 p.m. EST