
On Friday, CNN reported that WikiLeaks gave Donald Trump Jr., as well as Donald Trump himself and others in his inner circle, a decryption key that would enable them to access WikiLeaks’s database in September 2016, one month before the emails started to trickle out.

However, a subsequent report by the Washington Post, which obtained the September email, showed that the WikiLeaks documents had already been made public by the time the Trump team received the email on Sep. 14. Further, the writer "described himself as the president of an aviation management company," and, according to the Post, "may have simply been flagging information that was already widely available."

Trump Jr. started giddily tweeting about WikiLeaks and the stolen Clinton emails on Sep. 4, before receiving the reported email.

The following month, Trump Jr. had started coordinating with WikiLeaks by private message as it disseminated private emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign stolen by Russian hackers.


This article has been updated to reflect new reporting by the Washington Post.