Update 1:40pm CT, Dec. 8: According to the Washington Post, the WikiLeaks documents sent to Trump were widely available when they hit his campaign’s inbox. CNN reported the email was sent on Sept. 4, but the Post reports it was actually Sept. 14.
…
Members of President Donald Trump‘s campaign—including Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr.—were sent an email in September 2016 with a link to a website with hacked WikiLeaks documents and decryption key, according to a new report.
The email, sent on Sept. 4, came shortly before WikiLeaks spoke with Trump Jr. in a series of Twitter direct messages, CNN reports. It was also one month before the organization began releasing emails from former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The WikiLeaks email with the decryption key was handed over to congressional investigators, according to the news outlet.
Trump Jr. told congressional investigators this week he had no recollection of the email. It was reportedly addressed to Trump, Trump Jr., Trump Jr.’s personal assistant, and others.
It’s unclear if the email, sent by someone called “Mike Erickson,” was a genuine effort to give the Trump campaign hacked documents.
The new email appears to be another connection between Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks.
In November the Atlantic released a number of Twitter direct messages between WikiLeaks and Trump Jr. The organization asked then-candidate Trump’s son to leak them “one or more” of his father’s tax returns and gave him information about an anti-Trump PAC called PutinTrump.org, noting they had guessed the password in order to access it.
The requests from WikiLeaks also included a plea to have Trump appoint Julian Assange, the organization’s founder, an ambassador to the United States. Trump Jr. did not respond to the organization’s request to leak them his father’s tax returns.
You can read all of CNN’s report here.
Update 9:34am CT, Dec. 8: A reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted that the first time Trump Jr. tweeted about WikiLeaks coincidentally came on the evening of the email the campaign reportedly received.
The first time Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about WikiLeaks?
— Julian Routh (@julianrouth) December 8, 2017
The same day (Sept. 4) the Trump team received email offering a decryption key for hacked Wikileaks docs. pic.twitter.com/f0k1HPCwGT