Assange says WikiLeaks rejected request by data firm tied to Trump

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday that he had rebuffed a request for help last year from the head of a data firm that worked for Donald Trump and is now facing congressional scrutiny.

On Twitter, Assange said he had been approached before the 2016 election by Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Trump during the final months of the campaign. Assange did not disclose what kind of help Nix sought, only that he had declined the request.

“I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica,” Assange wrote, “and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks.”

But The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that Nix had emailed Assange looking for copies of more than 30,000 emails that were deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private server. Clinton has said that the emails were personal in nature.

A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica did not respond to requests for comment.

It is not clear precisely when the two men corresponded. CNN reported on Wednesday that the emails were exchanged in the summer of 2016. Cambridge Analytica was being paid by a rival campaign — that of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — through early June, according to Federal Election Commission records. By early summer, Cambridge Analytica had also begun wooing the Trump campaign, which hired the firm in June. The firm’s principal owner is the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, who backed Cruz before switching his allegiance to Trump.

It is also unclear why Nix would have believed that Assange had copies of the missing emails. Earlier last year, WikiLeaks had posted a searchable database of more than 50,000 emails from Clinton’s private server, all of them previously released by the State Department. But Trump himself seemed eager to find the missing emails: At a campaign rally in July, Trump publicly asked Russia to obtain the deleted emails.

The communication with Nix could more closely link the Trump campaign and Assange, whose website has published thousands of emails stolen from Democratic officials. U.S. intelligence agencies believe the documents were originally obtained by Russia-linked hackers. Another Trump adviser, the political consultant Roger Stone, has disclosed that he was in touch with Assange through intermediaries; during the campaign, Stone occasionally previewed WikiLeaks releases of stolen emails from Democratic officials.

Cambridge Analytica has drawn criticism inside and outside the Republican Party, both for its claim to be able to classify voters by psychology and for exaggerating its role in Trump’s upset victory. Former Trump campaign officials have said publicly and privately over the last year that Cambridge functioned as one of several data and analytics vendors for the campaign.