Ok, so what could be worse than at least three Trump advisors — George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Don Jr. — all being told that Russia had illegally obtained information about Hillary Clinton before that information was released by Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0 but not any of them bothering to inform the FBI about this felony?
Or the fact that Jeff Sessions — who testified he didn’t know “any Trump surrogates who were in contact with the Russians” — had ordered Papadopoulos to “find out everything he could” about the emails the Russians stole?
Perhaps the fact that multiple Russians and their associates attempted to set up an (illegal) personal meeting between Trump and Putin before the election through various members of the campaign staff including Papadopoulos (yes, him again via Sergei Millian after he was personally authorized to reach out to the Russians by Trump), Don Jr. (via Alexander Torshin), Rhona Graff and Steve Bannon (via Rob Goldstone and Emin Agalarov), Michael Cohen and Ivanka Trump (via Russian Olympic Weight-lifter Dmitry Kolkov)?
Nope. That’s not bad enough.
It seems that Trump voter targeting and data operation, which also happened to steal the personal data of 87 Million Americans in order to discover how to effectively suppress the [Black] vote in order to help Trump win — also happened to have had copies of Hillary’s stolen emails for a month before they were first released by Wikileaks.
Via the The Spectator.
Then there’s Cambridge Analytica. The (now shuttered) British company did the Trump campaign’s data. Its speciality was ‘microtargeting’: individual messages tailored to individual voters, delivered by email, Facebook and Twitter. The US intelligence agencies believe that Russian internet ‘troll factories’ were also pushing out pro-Trump propaganda on social media: sometimes fake news, sometimes real news, such as the hacked contents of Clinton’s emails. The question is whether this was done in coordination with the Trump campaign. An American lawyer I know told me that he was approached by a Cambridge Analytica employee after the election. They had had the Clinton emails more than a month before they were published by WikiLeaks: ‘What should I do?’ Take this to Mueller, the lawyer replied.
That particular story happens to point out that the British government hasn’t been cooperating with the Mueller investigation in order to appease Trump on trade relations, although in the end, it doesn’t seem to be working.
So how might Britain be sucking up to Trump? A Labour MP, Ben Bradshaw, thinks that the government has not always done all it can to assist the Mueller inquiry into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia. Bradshaw was the minister in charge of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, and has doggedly pursued allegations about Russian meddling in other people’s elections. ‘I’m told that Mueller’s team were over here late last year and they weren’t happy with the level of cooperation they were getting,’ he said. Another source, with links to the ‘intelligence community’, said this was continuing, even after the Skripal poisoning.
These claims — of a decision to go slow with Mueller, driven by expediency — have not been confirmed, but if true, the government may have miscalculated. Britain is trying to get a free-trade deal with the US as we leave the EU. And Theresa May was the first world leader through the door of the Oval Office to see the new president. But whatever promises she wrung from Trump will depend on a follow–through and focus he has not shown. This is a president who could not get his own healthcare bill past a Republican Congress.
‘Seen from the inside, the chaos is a hundred times worse than you can imagine,’ said one former senior White House official. There seems even less chance of a special deal for Britain after this month’s disastrous G7 meeting. ‘We’re like the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing,’ the President said. Britain will have to pay a 25 per cent steel tariff just like the rest of the EU and Canada.
Exactly how Cambridge obtained the emails isn’t described in this article, but it’s not completely shocking since Cambridge funder Rebeccah Mercer had offered to help Wikileaks organize their anti-Hillary data after it was released.
(CNN)Cambridge Analytica funder and Trump donor Rebekah Mercer received an email in August 2016 from someone she had recently met at a political event, suggesting that they create a searchable data base for Hillary Clinton emails in the public domain.
Mercer then forwarded the suggestion to several people, including Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, asking if this is something they could do.
That is what prompted Nix's email response that he had contacted Julian Assange two months earlier asking for Clinton's emails, according to a source familiar with the Mercer and Nix email chain.
The source would not disclose the name of the person who originally emailed Mercer but did say, according to the email, they met at a Ted Cruz related event. Before supporting Trump, the Mercer family backed the Texas Republican's presidential campaign.
Just for the sake of clarity two months before August 2016 is June and Wikileaks first release of the DNC emails was on July 22nd, one. month. previously. That means that when Nix asked for Clinton’s emails from Assange in June — he got them.
Prior to that on June 16th Russia Intelligence Military Asset Guccifer 2.0 had released some of the DNC emails which had Cyrillic characters in the metadata, just a few days after Assange had first hinted that he had Hillary Clinton emails on June 12th.
So it seems that Nix didn’t waste any time and that just like the Trumpsters, he didn’t reveal that he had copies of this stolen information either.