Donald Trump’s eldest son exchanged a number of private messages with the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks during last year’s presidential campaign, according to a report in The Atlantic.
It says Trump Jr exchanged Twitter direct messages with WikiLeaks between 20 September and 12 October 2016.
In the messages, Wikileaks was seeking cooperation from Trump Jr in promoting emails stolen from senior Democrats and published by WikiLeaks. US intelligence officials have since concluded the the emails were hacked by Russian operatives.
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“The message went on to offer a link to wlsearch.tk – a search tool that facilitates the exploration of the database of leaked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, that WikiLeaks had by then begun to publish,” The Guardian reports.
“Trump Jr did not respond to this message,” says The Atlantic. “But just 15 minutes after it was sent … Donald Trump himself tweeted, ‘Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!’.”
Trump Jr broadcast the link via Twitter two days later, writing: “For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/.”
On 12 October, Trump’s running mate Mike Pence told Fox News “nothing could be further from the truth” when asked if the Trump team had any connection with Wikileaks.
Overnight, Trump Jr released what he said was the entire chain of messages between himself and WikiLeaks, which “one of the congressional committees has chosen to selectively leak”.
