Special counsel Robert Mueller is taking a close look at Donald Trump’s campaign data consultant, which has to be making Republicans desperate to protect Trump very nervous. Cambridge Analytica—which was used by the Trump campaign starting in June 2016 to target advertising and social media—has a raft of dodgy associations: it’s owned by billionaire donor Robert Mercer and reached out to Julian Assange and Wikileaks during the campaign, for starters. And now we’re learning it’s been under the Mueller microscope for a while:
Mr. Mueller asked the firm in the fall to turn over the emails of any Cambridge Analytica employees who worked on the Trump campaign, in a sign that the special counsel is probing the Trump campaign’s data operation.
The special counsel's request, which the firm complied with, wasn’t previously known. The emails had earlier been turned over to the House Intelligence Committee, the people said, adding that both requests were voluntary. [...]
Mr. Mueller’s request for employee emails was made before media outlets reported in October that Mr. Nix had contacted WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange during the 2016 campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Sweden-based WikiLeaks last year published a trove of Hillary Clinton -related emails that U.S. intelligence agencies later determined had been stolen by Russian intelligence and given to the website.
The news about Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks broke in late October, so Mueller’s team has likely had those emails for a while.
Every time we get a piece of news like this, the shape of Mueller’s investigation becomes clearer—and Republicans have one more reason to fear Mueller as they work to discredit and undermine him, trying to set the stage for a special counsel to investigate Mueller himself or for his outright firing.