When Trump adviser Jared Kushner bragged to Forbes about his role in steering the Trump campaign to victory, he emphasized the merits of its unique data operation. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica,” he said, referring to the Robert Mercer-backed analytics company. “We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months.” The relationship was lucrative for the firm, too: Between July 29 and December 12 of last year, the Trump campaign reportedly paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. But on Wednesday, after the Daily Beast reported that its C.E.O., Alexander Nix, had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with an offer to help release Hillary Clinton’s missing e-mails, Team Trump moved to distance itself from the company.

In a statement, Michael S. Glassner, the Trump campaign executive director, highlighted the operation's reliance on Republican National Committee data. “Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics,” he said. “Leading into the election, the R.N.C. had invested in the most sophisticated data-targeting program in modern American history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to have worked with the R.N.C. and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics.”

Although the Daily Beast’s sources said Assange rebuffed Nix’s offer—a claim that Assange later confirmed—Glassner was emphatic that Cambridge Analytica didn’t provide the campaign voter data. “Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false.”

Glassner’s statement would appear to significantly downplay the extent of Cambridge Analytica's involvement in the Trump campaign. After Kushner and Brad Parscale, the campaign’s digital director, hired the company in the summer of 2016, it dedicated a team of employees to enhance the Trump team’s outreach on Facebook. In interviews, Kushner has seemed eager to take credit for the strategy. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” he told Steven Bertoni of Forbes after the election last year. In turn, the firm has taken credit for giving Trump a boost. “Cambridge Analytica was instrumental in identifying supporters, persuading undecided voters, and driving turnout to the polls,” the company said in a press release after Trump's victory. (Parscale has said that the invoices showing the $5.9 million the Trump campaign paid to Cambridge Analytica were “mislabeled.”)

It's still unclear how Kushner first learned of the data-mining firm, but as Chris Smith reported for Vanity Fair last month, questions remain around the extent to which the Trump campaign, and by extension Cambridge Analytica, could have enhanced the Russians' abilities to micro-target voters on Facebook. “I think the Russians had help,” Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Smith. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” Congressional investigators have similar questions. “Obviously, we’re looking at any of the targeting of the ads, as well as any targeting of efforts to push out the fake or false news or negative accounts against Hillary Clinton to see whether they demonstrate a sophistication that would be incompatible with not having access to data analytics from the campaign,” Representative Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence committee’s top Democrat, told CNN. “At this point, we still don’t know.”