Donald Trump Jr. released his conversation with WikiLeaks — but that doesn't mean he's in the clear

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November 14, 2017 2:02 PM

Donald Trump Jr. alleges that he only responded to WikiLeaks three times, as the agency repeatedly goaded him to push their hacked and leaked information.

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted an apparently incomplete record of his conversations with WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks, which experts suspect coordinates with Russia, suggested some destabilizing things to Trump Jr., but the president's son rarely replied.
Some circumstantial evidence suggests that the Trump campaign was following WikiLeaks' advice.

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Monday night what he claimed was the entirety of his communications to WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy website that published wave after wave of damning information on Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump Jr. alleges that he only responded to WikiLeaks three times, as the agency repeatedly goaded him to push their hacked and leaked information, and to challenge the results of the election if they lose.

Trump Jr.'s release of the "entire chain of messages" comes after The Atlantic obtained and published the messages.

Throughout the 2016 election, WikiLeaks consistently published leaked and hacked emails from the Clinton campaign, but spared the Trump campaign.

President Donald Trump said on the campaign trail that he loved WikiLeaks, and would often discuss the leaked information.

Special counsel Robert Mueller, the investigator tasked with looking into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — which is suspected to coordinate with WikiLeaks — has scrutinized Trump Jr.'s contact with Russian agents in the past.

Trump Jr. also failed to disclose all his meetings with Russian-linked figures, and has since defended his actions as opposition research.

In the released messages posted by Trump Jr., WikiLeaks appears to be pressing him for access into the campaign and to push its publications. Trump Jr. seems to show little interest and replies only three times.

But the correspondence is incomplete, and doesn't match the full depth of the messages as reported by the Atlantic — suggesting it's possible he could have responded other times on another platform, for example.

When WikiLeaks wrote Trump Jr. to "strongly suggest" the Trump campaign push a trove of leaked documents from the Clinton campaign, although Trump Jr. did not reply, Trump tweeted the link just 15 minutes later.