President Donald Trump’s oldest son communicated with the Twitter account behind WikiLeaks, exchanging direct messages during the 2016 elections about leaked emails from Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign and other issues, a media report said today.
According to a report in The Atlantic, Donald Trump Jr. exchanged messages that continued until at least July 2017. The messages, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators.
The report details several direct messages between WikiLeaks and Donald Trump Jr., including requests to push out tweets highlighting the website’s work. The website released stolen e-mail messages from top Democrats during the campaign.
In one of the communication, the WikiLeaks Twitter account wrote to Donald Trump Jr. on September 20, 2016 saying, “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch. 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?”
Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks 12 hours later, “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around. Thanks.”
The communication is largely one-sided with most of the messages coming from the WikiLeaks.
Trump Jr. reacted to the report and tweeted screenshots of the exchange that he had with the transparency organisation.
"Here is the entire chain of messages with @wikileaks (with my whopping 3 responses) which one of the congressional committees has chosen to selectively leak. How ironic!," the President's oldest son said in his tweet.
Democrats swiftly reacted to the report, saying Trump Jr. should provide more information. Democratic congressman Adam Schiff says the report “demonstrates once again a willingness by the highest levels of the Trump campaign to accept foreign assistance.”
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal says the Senate Judiciary Committee should subpoena the documents and force Trump Jr. to testify.
The messages were turned over to Congress as part of various ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.
“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., was quoted as saying by The Atlantic.
(With AP inputs)
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