Trump embraces WikiLeaks as ally

NEW YORK — In the final weeks of a dizzying presidential campaign, Mr Donald J. Trump is suddenly embracing an unlikely ally: The document-spilling group WikiLeaks, which Republicans denounced when it published classified State Department cables and Pentagon secrets about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Trump, his advisers, and many of his supporters are increasingly seizing on a trove of embarrassing emails from Mrs Hillary Clinton’s campaign that WikiLeaks has been publishing — and that American intelligence agencies said last Friday (Oct 7) came largely from Russian intelligence agencies, with the authorization of “Russia’s senior-most officials.”

The Trump campaign’s willingness to use WikiLeaks is an extraordinary turnabout after years of bipartisan criticism of the organization and its leader, Mr Julian Assange, for past disclosures of American national security intelligence and other confidential information.

The accusation that Russian agents are now playing an almost-daily role in helping fuel Mr Trump’s latest political attacks on Mrs Clinton raises far greater concerns, though, about foreign interference in a presidential election.

With the White House weighing its next move — from possible sanctions to covert, retaliatory cyberaction — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia insisted on Wednesday that his nation was being falsely accused. “The hysteria is merely caused by the fact that somebody needs to divert the attention of the American people from the essence of what was exposed by the hackers,” Mr Putin said.

He did acknowledge that the disclosures were the work of an illegal hack — which is further than Mr Trump went in Sunday’s debate. In one exchange with Mrs Clinton, the Republican candidate said: “Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia,” he said, as part of an effort to “tarnish me.”

Mr Trump has seized on more than 6,000 emails published so far this week, apparently from the personal Gmail account of Mrs Clinton’s campaign chairman, Mr John D. Podesta. Based on a few emails plucked from the account, Mr Trump and his team have accused Clinton aides of improperly receiving inside information from the Obama administration.

That stems from correspondence that shows that the campaign received an update from the Department of Justice about the timing of the release of Mrs Clinton’s State Department emails. On Wednesday, Trump advisers flagged others messages that they argued were critical of New Hampshire voters and of Catholics.

As Mr Trump struggles to rebound from revelations that he bragged in 2005 about his power to sexually assault women, Republican allies say he has come to believe that WikiLeaks could yield a critical mass of negative and destructive information — if not a smoking gun — that drives up Mrs Clinton’s already high unfavorable ratings with voters and perhaps even derails her candidacy.

Following Mr Trump’s wishes, his advisers have aggressively pushed the Clinton camp emails in news media briefings and cable news appearances, bringing up the hacked messages to battle back from the questions about Mr Trump’s comments about women. But as much as Mr Trump sees WikiLeaks coming to his rescue, strategists in his own party take a dim view of its ultimate impact.

The Clinton campaign is trying its own political jujitsu with the hacks, arguing that they are more evidence that Mr Trump is in the pocket of Mr Putin, whom the Republican candidate has declined to denounce for his annexation of Crimea, his intimidation of former Soviet states that are now part of NATO, or for its abandonment last week of a nuclear arrangement with the United States. Mr Podesta has gone even further, saying in a statement on Wednesday evening that there was “the possibility that Trump’s allies had advance knowledge of the release of these illegally obtained emails.”

Intelligence officials say that so far they have not concluded there was any such collusion, but the investigation into who got into Mr Podesta’s emails, and how they got into WikiLeaks’ hands, has just begun.

Those emails began to appear on Friday afternoon, just hours after the director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement attributing previous hacks to the Russian government. Officials on Wednesday said it may take weeks to establish whether Mr Podesta’s emails were also hacked by the Russians — though they said the attack on his Gmail account fits the pattern of previous Russian-sponsored email thefts.

Republicans have previously condemned WikiLeaks and similarly blasted the leaks by Mr Edward J. Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, and said they were evidence of carelessness by the Obama administration.

When Mr Snowden’s disclosures about the scope of the N.S.A. spying were brought to light, it touched off a feverish debate over government invading people’s privacy, and many Republicans denounced Mr Snowden as a traitor. The emails from Mr Podesta were also the result of an illegal hack — but of a private email account or campaign emails, not a government agency.

Mr Trump’s campaign manager, Ms Kellyanne Conway, insisted on Wednesday that the information that WikiLeaks and other outlets had made public from hacking collectives is “relevant”.

While some Republican strategists questioned the maneuver by Mr Trump, the Clinton campaign seemed uncertain about how to navigate the disclosures, particularly after calling attention to the unauthorized disclosures of pages of Mr Trump’s tax returns in The New York Times and an 11-year-old tape featuring the candidate bragging about forcing himself on women. For the most part, the Clinton team repeatedly criticized news organizations for using hacked materials. But privately, Democrats expressed deep concern about how much more widespread the breaches could be. THE NEW YORK TIMES