Head of the Trump Campaign's data-analytics firm admits he reached out to Wikileaks for Hillary's deleted emails.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

Alexander Nix, who heads a controversial data-analytics firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s campaign, wrote in an email last year that he reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s missing 33,000 emails. 

On Wednesday, Assange confirmed that such an exchange took place. 

Nix, who heads Cambridge Analytica, told a third party that he reached out to Assange about his firm somehow helping the WikiLeaks editor release Clinton’s missing emails, according to two sources familiar with a congressional investigation into interactions between Trump associates and the Kremlin. (CNN later reported Cambridge backer Rebekah Mercer was one of the email's recipients.) Those sources also relayed that, according to Nix’s email, Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn’t want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own. 

The interchange between Nix—whose company made millions from the Trump campaign—and Assange represents the closest known connection between Trump’s campaign and Wikileaks.

Aha!

As we know Cambridge Analytica was funded by the Mercer family, and had deep ties with both Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn.

This was the Trump campaign's go to shop for analyzing voter data and formulating a strategy based on what they learned.

However that is an inconvenient reality and therefore the Trump folks must reject it.

Trump campaign issues statement downplaying Cambridge Analytica‘s role working for campaign, doesn’t address Assange/emails pic.twitter.com/N6L7MVtsse

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) October 25, 2017

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:

When Trump adviser Jared Kushner bragged to Forbes about his role in steering the Trump campaign to victory, he emphasized the merits of its unique data operation. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica,” he said, referring to the Robert Mercer-backed analytics company. “We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months.” The relationship was lucrative for the firm, too: Between July 29 and December 12 of last year, the Trump campaign reportedly paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. But on Wednesday, after the Daily Beast reported that its C.E.O., Alexander Nix, had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with an offer to help release Hillary Clinton’s missing e-mails, Team Trump moved to distance itself from the company. 

In a statement, Michael S. Glassner, the Trump campaign executive director, highlighted the operation's reliance on Republican National Committee data. “Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics,” he said. “Leading into the election, the R.N.C. had invested in the most sophisticated data-targeting program in modern American history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to have worked with the R.N.C. and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics.”

Nothing to see here, just move along. Move along dammit!

Apparently the Trump team still thinks there might be too many bread crumbs leading to the campaign's doorstep, so they also made this extraordinary move:

WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of emails apparently hacked from the Democratic National Committee was legal and specifically protected by federal law, the Trump campaign argued in a court filing Wednesday. 

Lawyers for the Trump presidential campaign came to the controversial transparency website's defense in a bid to defeat a lawsuit three Democratic activists filed in July accusing Trump's presidential campaign of conspiring to publish sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers and information suggesting that a Democratic National Committee employee was gay. 

The Trump campaign's motion to dismiss the case argues that WikiLeaks qualifies as the kind of online service that Congress rendered immune from legal liability through legislation passed more than two decades ago.

Do you know how they say that animals can smell fear?

Yeah, well I think I am getting a whiff of that myself.