Sam Nunberg told Gabriel Sherman for a New York Magazine on the Trump operation that he “listened to 1000s of hours of talk radio” in 2014 when he and Michael Cohen and Roger Stone were preparing for Trump’s run for president and that “Trump was getting reports from” him.
From Operation Trump, by Gabriel Sherman April 3, 2016:
Throughout 2014, the three, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Sam Nunberg fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence. “I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core.
If you’re going to piggyback talk radio to beat the Republican establishment candidates in the primaries, and you were going to use Russian troll farms to work the social media angle, wouldn’t you supply the Russians with talk radio memes so they didn’t waste time with irrelevant material? That would be a lot more efficient than getting a bunch of Russian hipsters to make things up.
In a Washington Post piece a Russian talked about working for a trolling operation in late 2014.
You got a list of topics to write about.
If the Russians wanted to use social media to help Trump, wouldn’t they want to coordinate with Trump’s team?
Roger Stone goes way back with Paul Manafort. And according to Jeffrey Toobin in a 6/2/2008 New Yorker piece on Roger Stone, “The Dirty Trickster”, Stone was using talk radio in 2000.
According to Stone, James A. Baker III, the former Secretary of State, who was leading the Bush forces, told his aide Margaret Tutwiler to recruit Stone.
snip
Stone decided to concentrate at first on “the atmospherics,” as he put it, which in Miami means radio. Several Spanish-language stations in the city devoted themselves entirely to talk about politics; no print or television outlets could match their influence. The most powerful of these was Radio Mambi, a fifty-thousand-watt station, whose principal owner and on-air voice was Armando Perez-Roura, a Cuban exile who was known as the Cuban-American community’s Rush Limbaugh.
snip
“The idea we were putting out there was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba. We were very explicitly drawing that analogy.”
He knew the value of talk radio.
Sam Nunberg was ordered to listen to “1000’s of hours” of it.
Nunberg says:
“and he (Trump) was getting reports from me”
That suggests Nunberg may have thought he was analyzing talk radio for Trump but wasn’t giving it directly to him, probably to Stone. That wasn’t Cohen’s kind of work. Was that to insulate Trump? Who asked Nunberg to listen to talk radio? Did cheapskate Trump actually pay him to listen to the radio? Did they pay him with campaign funds?
Which talk show hosts did he listen to?
If these city boys wanted to connect with the base why not just use Fox, the cartoon Cliff Notes for talk radio? Or Limbaugh’s sanitized transcriptions, which are provided as a guide for the rest of the Republican talkers, Fox blowhards, and the Republican politicians they enable? That would be a lot cheaper.
The best reason for “listening to 1000s of hours of talk radio” would probably be revealed if Sam Nunberg was asked which talk radio hosts he listened to. What states were they in?
One of the major advantages talk radio offers over Fox is the ability to coordinate by station, by county, by state.
Were any of the talkers Nunberg was asked to listen to in states that were strongly targeted by Russian trolling or were visited by the Russians that Mueller indicted?
Why not go all out and pay the talk radio gods too? Limbaugh is 100% Trump along with Hannity. And Hannity was involved with Cohen and some real estate deals. Limbaugh led the swiftboating of Christine Blasey Ford by calling her a liar for 3 weeks straight on 600 of the loudest radio stations in the country. Was he just doing that because he remembered the pleasure of doing it to Anita Hill 30 years ago?
The possibility of Putin using talk radio, the only unique Republican advantage, goes back at least to 2008 when Manafort was McCain campaign cochair. Limbaugh wouldn’t support McCain, a total disaster for the GOP convention, until McCain chose Palin (who was being courted by Russians re oil and gas) minutes before the start of the Limbaugh show on the Friday before the GOP convention.
It’s a real tragedy that Americans are going to leave this up to Mueller too.
Sam Nunberg has been a semi-regular guest on MSNBC but probably never been asked anything about talk radio.
Why not ask him about talk radio……
Cohen's crew studied talk radio in 2014. Coordinating with Kremlin?
How long's Putin been using talk radio? Trump 2014, debt default in 2011, 'Climategate' '09?