Everyone in the Trump family is a manipulative snake, so you’d think they’d all be particularly adept at recognizing other manipulative snakes when they cross paths, and yet the past year or so has proven that to be demonstrably false. Case in point, a new report from The Atlantic has revealed that Julian Assange —or at least the official WikiLeaks Twitter account—made overt attempts last year to gain favor with Donald Trump Jr., all in an apparent attempt to manipulate the Trump campaign in ways that would benefit WikiLeaks and Assange.
It started with Wikileaks sending Trump Jr. some information in a Twitter direct message about an anti-Trump PAC last September, which he responded to by saying that he’d “ask around” about the group running the PAC. This kicked off a largely one-sided—but not entirely one-sided—conversation between WikiLeaks and Trump Jr., the records of which were turned over to congressional investigators and then obtained by The Atlantic.
After the PAC interaction, WikiLeaks sent frequent messages to Trump Jr. about the campaign that were mostly ignored, but “at no point” did he make a point to reject Assange and WikiLeaks’ advances. At one point, WikiLeaks asked him to push a story about Hillary Clinton making a disparaging comment about WikiLeaks, which he told them he had already done, adding that “it’s amazing what she can get away with” because he apparently has some familiarity with irony. Later, WikiLeaks told Trump Jr. to share a link to its site when talking about it on Twitter and asked him to promote the release of some new John Podesta emails, and though Trump Jr. didn’t respond, Donald Trump himself tweeted about WikiLeaks almost immediately after and Trump Jr. later shared the link he had been asked to share.