Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the
height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent
a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest
son and campaign surrogate. “A PAC run
anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. “The PAC
is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is
‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?” (The site, which
has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech
entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.)
The next morning, about 12
hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. “Off the record I don’t know who
that is, but I’ll ask around,” he wrote on September 21, 2016. “Thanks.”
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The messages, obtained by The Atlantic,
were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They
are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and
the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show
WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence
community believes
was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had
hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of
increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging
the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged,
and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian
Assange ambassador to the United States.
“Over the last several months,
we have worked cooperatively with each of the committees and have voluntarily
turned over thousands of documents in response to their requests,” said Alan
Futerfas, an attorney for Donald Trump Jr. “Putting aside the question as to
why or by whom such documents, provided to Congress under promises of
confidentiality, have been selectively leaked, we can say with confidence that
we have no concerns about these documents and any questions raised about them
have been easily answered in the appropriate forum.” WikiLeaks did not respond
to requests for comment.
The messages were turned over
to Congress as part of that body’s various ongoing investigations into Russian
meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. American intelligence services have
accused the Kremlin of engaging in a deliberate effort to boost President
Donald Trump’s chances while bringing down his Democratic rival, Hillary
Clinton. That effort—and the president’s response to it—has spawned multiple
congressional investigations, and a special counsel inquiry that has led to the
indictment of Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, for financial
crimes.
Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored
the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its
requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org,
for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to “ask around.” According
to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian
interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the
investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first
message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump
campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump
son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then
forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point
during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had
published stolen documents and was already
observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.
WikiLeaks played a pivotal role
in the presidential campaign. In July 2016, on the first day of the Democratic
National Convention, WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Democratic
National Committee's servers that spring. The emails showed DNC officials
denigrating Bernie Sanders, renewing tensions on the eve of Clinton’s
acceptance of the nomination. On October 7, less than an hour after the Washington
Post released the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged
about sexually assaulting women, Wikileaks released emails that hackers had
pilfered from the personal email account of Clinton’s campaign manager John
Podesta.
On October 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote again.
“Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story,”
WikiLeaks suggested, attaching a
quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to “just
drone” WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
“Already did that earlier
today,” Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. “It’s amazing what she
can get away with.”
Two minutes later, Trump Jr. wrote again,
asking, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” The day
before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted,
“Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks.”
WikiLeaks didn’t respond to
that message, but on October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr.
“Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications,”
WikiLeaks wrote. (At a rally on October 10, Donald Trump had proclaimed,
“I love WikiLeaks!”)
“Strongly suggest your dad
tweets this link if he mentions us,” WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to
the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump’s followers dig through
the trove of stolen documents and find stories. “There’s many great stories the
press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it,”
WikiLeaks went on. “Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”
Trump Jr. did not respond to
this message. But just 15 minutes after it was sent, as The Wall Street
Journal’s Byron Tau pointed out,
Donald Trump himself tweeted,
“Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided
by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”
Two days later, on October 14, 2016,
Trump Jr. tweeted
out the link WikiLeaks had provided him. “For those who have the time to read
about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right
here: http://wlsearch.tk/,” he wrote.
After this point, Trump Jr.
ceased to respond to WikiLeaks’s direct messages, but WikiLeaks escalated its
requests.
“Hey Don. We have an unusual
idea,” WikiLeaks
wrote on October 21, 2016. “Leak us one or more of your father’s tax
returns.” WikiLeaks then laid out three reasons why this would benefit both the
Trumps and WikiLeaks. One, The New York Times had already published
a fragment of Trump’s tax returns on October 1; two, the rest could come out
any time “through the most biased source (e.g. NYT/MSNBC).”
It is the third reason, though,
WikiLeaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will
dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” WikiLeaks explained.
“That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton
will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a
‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.” It then provided an email address and link
where the Trump campaign could send the tax returns, and adds, “The same for
any other negative stuff (documents, recordings) that you think has a decent
chance of coming out. Let us put it out.”
WikiLeaks didn’t write again until
Election Day, November 8, 2016. “Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think
it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING
the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he
might do,” WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35pm, when the idea that Clinton would win was
still the prevailing conventional wisdom. (As late as 7:00pm that night,
FiveThirtyEight, a trusted prognosticator of the election, gave
Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.) WikiLeaks insisted that
contesting the election results would be good for Trump’s rumored plans to
start a media network should he lose the presidency. “The discussion can be
transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC
corruption, etc.,” WikiLeaks wrote.
Shortly after midnight that
day, when it was clear that Trump had beaten all expectations and won the
presidency, WikiLeaks sent him a simple message: “Wow.”
Trump Jr. did not respond to
these messages either, but WikiLeaks was undeterred. “Hi Don. Hope you’re doing
well!” WikiLeaks
wrote on December 16 to Trump Jr., who was by then the son of the
president-elect. “In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed
pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after
Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that
Australia appoint Assange ambassador to [Washington,] DC.”
WikiLeaks even imagined how
Trump might put it: “‘That’s a real smart tough guy and the most famous
australian [sic] you have!’ or something similar,” WikiLeaks wrote. “They won’t
do it but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start
following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the
Clintons.” (On December 7, Assange, proclaiming his innocence, had released
his testimony in front of London investigators looking into accusations that he
had committed alleged sexual assault.)
In the winter and spring,
WikiLeaks went largely silent, only occasionally sending Trump Jr. links. But on July 11,
2017, three days after The New York Times broke the story about Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting
with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to
Russia’s powerful prosecutor general, WikiLeaks got in touch again.
“Hi Don. Sorry to hear about
your problems,” WikiLeaks wrote. “We have an idea that may help a little. We are
VERY interested in confidentially obtaining and publishing a copy of the
email(s) cited in the New York Times today,” citing a reference in the paper to
emails Trump Jr had exchanged with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who had helped
set up the meeting. “We think this is strongly in your interest,” WikiLeaks
went on. It then reprised many of the same arguments it made in trying to
convince Trump Jr. to turn over his father’s tax returns, including the
argument that Trump’s enemies in the press were using the emails to spin an
unfavorable narrative of the meeting. “Us publishing not only deprives them of
this ability but is beautifully confounding.”
The message was sent at 9:29 am on July
11. Trump Jr. did not respond, but just hours later, he posted the
emails himself, on his own Twitter feed.
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