Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix said Thursday he asked the office that handles his speaking engagements to contact WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in “early June 2016,” after reading a newspaper report that WikiLeaks planned to publish a trove of Clinton-related emails. He said Mr. Assange was asked “if he might share that information with us.”
“We received a message back from them that he didn’t want to and wasn’t able to, and that was the end of the story,” Mr. Nix said at the digital conference Web Summit in Lisbon. He called the exchange “very benign.”
On June 13, 2016, after weeks of negotiations, the company shipped a contract to the campaign, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Nix and a Trump campaign representative signed the contract on June 23, a person familiar said.
The exact date of Mr. Nix’s outreach to Mr. Assange is unclear. On June 12, 2016, Mr. Assange told U.K. television that he had Clinton-related emails “pending publication.” In July, WikiLeaks began publishing emails stolen from the account of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and from the Democratic National Committee.
In August 2016, top Trump donor Rebekah Mercer asked Mr. Nix whether his company could help better organize the Clinton-related emails WikiLeaks was releasing, the Journal previously reported. Mr. Nix responded that he had reached out to Mr. Assange two months earlier and had been rejected, but that he would have employees at his company look into it further.
Cambridge Analytica is partly owned by Ms. Mercer and her father, hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer. Mr. Mercer made his first donation to Mr. Trump on June 21. Mr. Bannon served on Cambridge Analytica’s board and held a stake in the company worth at least $1 million, according to his financial disclosure released by the White House.
