First, Politico is considered a legitimate source of political news, having been run by people drafted from the Washington Post like John Harris and Mike Allen.
Second, “catfishing” was originally applied to people who created fake ids to lure people online into romantic relationships in order to gain personal information to out them. The term is often used somewhat more broadly nowadays.
That brings us to the following story in Politico:
Anti-Trump operatives targeted in online ‘catfishing’ scheme
This goes back to during the Republican primary season, and was clearly intended to undermine the never Trump folks.
But it is a complicated story.
Allow me to offer the introductory paragraphs, then offer a few observations, and then leave it up to you to go read the entire piece and draw your own conclusions.
Steven Wessel is a convicted con man with a Big Apple flair, feigning connections to Ronald Reagan and pretending to be an Oxford man while bilking rich Manhattanites of $750,000. But his last scam before heading to prison this spring targeted a very different kind of mark: Republican operatives opposed to Donald Trump.
And now those operatives are wondering who put Wessel up to it.
Assuming a variety of fake online identities, including that of a female solicitor in England, Wessel gushed in emails, phone calls and Twitter messages about (made-up) extramarital affairs with the likes of the late Lee Atwater, showered marks with gift cards to the swanky Mandarin Oriental, and invited them to go pheasant-hunting in Scotland — all in an apparent attempt to glean more about the operatives and their intentions regarding Trump. That was until federal prosecutors learned of the activity and a judge revoked Wessel’s bail in April, sending him to prison to begin serving a 55-month sentence ahead of schedule.
There are layers upon layers of this story.
One layer involves a now defunct pro-Trump super pac based in Colorado titled Make America Great Again. The person running it had a long time connection to Corey Lewandowski, who at first denied even knowing him.
Another layer involves Paul Manafort, with apparent efforts by conservative operatives who did not like him to gain access to his personal information.
Most notably is a woman named Cheri Jacobus, who after the Washington Post had run a story on the connection between the super pac in Colorado and the Trump campaign began tweeting about her having been told by Corey Lewandowski while she was in discussions about a possible campaign role about a Trump super pac. Shortly thereafter she was contacted by a twitter account purportedly of an American living in Britain, with pretty strong indications that this was Mr. Wessel. The account purported to be a woman, offered to help Jacobus get a job with the Fiorina campaign, inserted itself into other online Republican discussions, etc. THe account also claimed to have had an affair with Lee Atwater.
If that is not weird enough for you, consider this. The same account also got involved with Liz Mair and Rick Wilson, two noted never Trumpers, offering large amounts of money but wanting to know what they had on Trump.
If still not weird enough, then consider this:
Late last week — after POLITICO began informing people about the impending publication of this article — Jacobus said thousands of emails disappeared from her personal account and that her Internet provider, AOL, told her the account had been hacked. Jacobus said the hack targeted only emails she has received, not those she has sent, and she believes it was an attempt to prevent her from tracing the origins of more emails sent to her as part of the scheme. Over the weekend, a friend of Jacobus’ reported the hack to the FBI’s Cyber Division on her behalf.
Now, I have no idea what to make of this story. Rick Wilson has tweeted about it. Anyone who works in politics knows that you have to be careful of spies and operatives intended to disrupt what you are doing. When I was volunteering on the Webb for Senate campaign in 2006 we caught a couple of girls from a local catholic school who were trying to sabotage what we were sending out in a mailing. Don’t want to go into the details, but because they were new and didn;’t seem to know much about Webb or express that much interest and claimed they were there just for the credit for community service, we decided to check on them. They did not get community service, and we notified their teacher that had they been adults they would have been criminally charged.
Dirty tricks are very old. You can go back to Dick Tuck sabotaging Richard Nixon’s campaign for California governor. Or you can consider Nixon’s revenge in the form of Donald Segretti and the “ratfucking” of the Democratic efforts in the ‘72 campaign.
No one should be surprised that it happens.
And there is no doubt that Mr. Wessel is both a con man and has a somewhat disturbing personality.
The question is what if any connections are there between any of this and people close to Trump, starting with the aforementioned Mr. Lewandowski.
It is an article worth reading, and keeping in mind as we go forward.