As we begin a week of pure GOP propaganda, it’s time to remind ourselves how we got here as well as remind ourselves that the GOP is still entangled with Russia as well as malign forces.
With less than 100 days before the presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials are warning that Russia and other adversaries are once again interfering in our democratic process. In 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his intelligence agencies to create chaos in our system using a combination of social media manipulation, propaganda, and other dirty tricks. President Trump's Justice Department currently has at least two open cases against Russian citizens for disrupting the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. As we first reported last November, 12 Russian military officers are still at large, charged with breaking into the Democratic Party's computers in 2016, stealing compromising information and selectively releasing it to undermine specific candidates. There's no evidence of similar operations against Republicans in 2016. With the 2020 elections just around the corner, a cautionary tale: "The Russian Hack."
www.cbsnews.com/...
This means the data operations of both the Trump campaign and Russia were potentially working off the same playbook.
Prior to Manafort’s meeting w/ the GRU (Kilimnik) on Aug 2nd he asked Gates to PRINT an EXCEL spreadsheet w/ internal polling data on 137 target markets in key states. Presumably if it was printed and given to Manafort... it was given to Kilimnik.
So what would this tell the Russians? Well they needed to tear Hillary down and push up her “negatives as much as possible.”
That’s something that the Russians were well equipped to help deliver.
This meeting also likely helped convince the Russians to keep interfering. Reports indicate the Kremlin was debating standing down after Trump’s fight w/ Khan at the Dem Convention... just days earlier. So Manafort was telling Kilimnik they c/d win and how Russia c/d help.
??? This seems like a really significant redaction.
