takes so long for interviews to happen, and this is a reason why. when i walk in as an investigator and talk to somebody, i want data on what happened with the data analytics company, and i want to see if there s e-mails or phone calls from the trump people, and then later into the investigation, i will talk to the trump people with all the data analyzed and say do you have contact with data analytics and did you know they discussed the hillary clinton e-mails with wikileaks, and i will want to box that interview to insure that whoever i am speaking to is speaking when i already have some of the answers. the answer is somebody spoke to them. this happened in the summer of 2016, around the same time there was the meeting at trump tower between trump campaign officials and russian operatives, whatever you want to call them.
trump criticized her for deleting thousands of e-mails on her private server. the campaign responded by distancing itself from the firm, and it said we as a campaign made the choice to rely on the voter data of the republican national committee to help elect president donald j. trump. you can see here in the statement, the campaign avoiding the core issue that a firm it hired reached out to wikileaks during the campaign. wolf? pamela, thank you very much. our justice correspondent. let s get more on all of this. a member of the armed services committee, thank you for coming into the situation room. what conclusions do you draw from this? very significant report
how does this new information we are now learning fit into the big picture? that meeting that donald trump jr. took with the imagine that it was to offer dirt on hillary clinton, and that s what the e-mail said. they were clearly in the business of a campaign of doing that, and lots of campaigns are in the business of finding dirt on the opponents, and you are right to note the timing because it s the same time when candidate trump invited russia to hack into hillary clinton s e-mails and start producing them in some way. so these this interaction between trump campaign associates and cambridge and wikileaks, as phil said, will be part of a picture. we have to remind people, the 3,000 e-mails, they never materialized as far as we know. on this e-mail produced here, it was not somebody at the trump campaign officially, but it was rebecca mercer, who you know is
founder during the campaign asking about hillary clinton s missing e-mails. now, julian asaupbsange acknowld that did happen and rejected the request, and he sent an e-mail to several people relying that he e-mailed assange, but sources say nobody from the actual campaign was on that e-mail change. for context, wikileaks was responsible for releasing hacked e-mails before the campaign, but not hillary clinton s e-mails, and we don t know if they obtained those e-mails, if those e-mails had been hacked at all. wikileaks has been called out by the nonhostile intelligent service working with the russians, and this establishes a known link between the trump campaign and wikileaks, and it was as on the campaign trail
would rather not say but you will be surprised. he would not give us that name. as for the president s claim that the dossier is fake, we should point out that portions of opposition research have been corroborated and during his back and forth with the reporters, the president took on policy questions about being open to changes to four o401(k) plans, many gop defections are on the way, and they are not fake and may be very real, wolf. thanks very much. also new details of trump campaign efforts to obtain thousands of hillary clinton s e-mails from the controversial private server she used while she was secretary of state. pamela, you are getting new information. that s right, wolf. the head of the data firm working for the trump campaign reached out to wikileak s