FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

WikiLeaks slid into Trump Jr.’s Twitter DMs asking for favors

Donald Trump Jr. secretly exchanged Twitter messages with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election, a largely one-sided conversation that nevertheless saw the president’s son granting minor favors, according to a new report from The Atlantic.

Donald Trump Jr. secretly exchanged Twitter messages with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election, a largely one-sided conversation that nevertheless saw the president’s son granting minor favors, according to a new report from The Atlantic.

Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks corresponded via Twitter DMs that began in September, 2016, when the account reached out with information about an anti-Trump PAC. The eldest Trump son at first seemed eager to rub elbows with Julian Assange, the fugitive founder of the organization. When asked about the URL putintrump.org, a site funded by the Progress for USA Political Action Committee and founded by tech businessman Rob Glaser, Trump Jr. even offered to “ask around” about it.

Advertisement

Trump Jr. also tweeted a link after the organization requested him to do so, but the Twitter conversation soon sputtered out, and Trump Jr. stopped responding to the messages in October, according to The Atlantic’s report.

But WikiLeaks continued to send escalating requests to Trump Jr., asking for Trump’s tax returns and offering advice on how Trump should handle losing the election, the expected outcome at the time. The organization made the case that leaking the tax returns would mitigate the inevitable — MSNBC or the New York Times obtaining them — while also helping to legitimize WikiLeaks against criticisms that it was trying to help Trump get elected.

The messages obtained by the Atlantic also show Assange’s organization, under the impression Trump would lose, urged him to fight the results as “rigged” and not to concede the election. Trump Jr. appears to have ignored all of them, although he did tweet out his own emails pertaining to a Trump Tower meeting with several Kremlin-linked Russians just a few hours after the WikiLeaks account made a final plea that he release the emails to them.

But perhaps most bizarrely, a month after the election, WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to ask his dad to ask Australia if Assange could become its ambassador to Washington, D.C. To aid him, WikiLeaks included a suggestion for how Trump might pitch Assange to Australia as “a real smart tough guy.”

“That’s a real smart tough guy and the most famous australian [sic] you have!’ or something similar,” the organization wrote in the direct message to Trump Jr. “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.”