Trump ‘data guru’ emailed Assange; so what?

The head of a data analytics firm working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign reached out to WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, reportedly offering aid in getting them published. WikiLeaks declined the offer.

The UK-based Cambridge Analytica is a data analysis firm that worked for the Trump campaign in 2016, helping the Republican candidate collect information on potential voters and target advertising. Its CEO Alexander Nix reached out to Assange last year about some 33,000 emails that Hillary Clinton had deleted from her private server, according to the Daily Beast.

Nix “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,” the Beast reported on Wednesday, under the headline: “Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up With Julian Assange.”

Assange quickly confirmed that Nix had reached out to him last year. He also said that WikiLeaks rejected the overture, deliberately not revealing what the subject of it was.

Big if true, as the favorite phrase of Twitter conspiracy buffs goes. Or is it?

Why, exactly, would contact between a data firm contracting with the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks be worthy of such breathless coverage?

“If the claims Nix made in that email are true, this would be the closest known connection between Trump’s campaign and Assange,” wrote the Beast.

Again, so what? That is where the CIA comes in. Mike Pompeo, the former congressman from Kansas who cheered the WikiLeaks’ release of materials obtained from the DNC in 2016, changed his tune after becoming director of the CIA.

“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia,” Pompeo said in April, calling Assange and his associates “demons” threatening American freedom and democracy.

Sure enough, a portion of this quote appears in the Beast story, with WikiLeaks described as “a tool of Kremlin spies.”

So if Assange is Russia, then with a little bit of Beast-ly editing an email exchange between “Trump’s data guru” and Assange becomes a “known connection” between Trump and Assange, and therefore proof positive of “Russian collusion” that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have been claiming since their devastating defeat last November.

Yet just last night, one of the major outlets pushing the Trump-Russia narrative, the Washington Post, revealed that the DNC and the Clinton campaign had paid the firm Fusion GPS for the “scurrilous” Trump dossier on which most of the “Russiagate” allegations were based. The accusations, it seems, have rebounded on the accusers.