When, in fact: "Paul Manafort Shared Polling Data with Russia!"
Last Tuesday, news broke that Paul Manafort shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian business associate with ties to Russian intelligence.
So Trump - deflecting - headed to the border. The government shutdown is Trump's attempt at distracting the free press and the American people!
The line between the campaign and the Kremlin began to look incontrovertible.
The revelation came in
an inadvertently unredacted court document, which was filed by Manafort’s lawyers in response to charges made by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, that Manafort had lied to investigators.
Manafort joined the campaign, in March, 2016. Five months later, he "resigned" when it was revealed that he had worked as a foreign agent on behalf of pro-Russia political forces in Ukraine.
In June, Trump told reporters, “You know, Paul Manafort worked for me for a very short period of time.”
But F.B.I. wiretaps show that Manafort continued his association with Trump long after he "resigned."
It just might be Russia would want the Trump campaign’s polling data because
it offered demographic targets for Russia’s bots and propaganda.
The University of Wisconsin professor Young Mie Kim discovered that “the most highly targeted states—especially Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—generally overlap with the battleground states with razor thin margins.”
Ads were placed by two hundred and twenty-eight groups, many of which were later linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency.
Kim also found that these efforts were calibrated to appeal to certain demographics.
Low-income (uneducated) white voters, for example, were targeted with ads focussing on immigration and race.
An even more comprehensive analysis, by Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project, shows just how pervasive Russia’s inflammatory targeting was.
“On Facebook, the five most shared and the five most liked posts focused on divisive issues, with pro-gun ownership content, anti-immigration content pitting immigrants against veterans, content decrying police violence against African Americans, and content that was anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-Obama, and pro-Trump,” the researchers wrote.
The posts developed by the Russian Internet Research Agency “tended to mimic views against gun control and for increased regulation of immigrants.
In some cases, terms such as ‘parasites’ were used to reference immigrants and others expressed extremist views.”
These posts increased almost seven-fold when Manafort joined Trump’s team—and 2016, when he was guiding the campaign.
Not long after the election, this data analysis showed how crucial Russia's misinformation campaign was to Trump’s victory.
When Kost Bondarenko, Manafort’s longtime Ukrainian associate, told the Daily Beast, in May, 2017, that “Trump won because of Manafort,” this (Russian intervention) is what he may have meant.
Besides, this is long in the making -
since 1987.
Mr. "stable genius"...
Mr. "In it for himself..."
Mr. Trump Tampa Bay Tower...
Mr. Con-man to the neo-cons...
Mr. "Deeper in debt..."
Mr. private loans from Russians...
maybe...
But "Mr. President?"
No way.
No friggin way.
Not today.
