Internal Trump campaign polling data from the 2016 election was sent to a person close to Russia’s leader, according to recently unsealed statements by a prosecutor from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office.
So, we now know that in addition to being a rank criminal, Manafort was a traitor. Thanks, TFG!
Didn’t we kinda always know that? The ostrich jacket was the tell.
And this all got swept under the rug as irrelevant or unproveable?
Is it any wonder the good guys always lose in these cases? Manafort and company knew exactly what they were doing in such an untraceable process that they couldn’t be caught and prosecuted.
The question now is, what happens next with this?
More correctly, the Truer Tell was his close association of many years with Traitors to Decency and the Constitution named Roger Stone and Lee Atwater.
Seems like a lot of wrangling between Mueller’s team, Manafort’s lawer, and Judge Berman about whether or not the polling data was really all that useful to Russians.
I hardly see that as important. If someone is working for the US Prez campaign and is shopping around different gifts or bribes to give to Russians in return for their help…how the F*&^ does it matter what gifts/info they are proferring? And they get into quibbling about whether non-english speakers could make much use of it…like whether a bribe is in Rubles or Dollars or Francs really makes any difference…you get it exchanged or transcribed. Duh!
If the data was “useless” to the Russians (lawyer Westling’s POV), then why the secret handoff to a known spy? It’s not like he gave Kilimnik something useless like an ostrich jacket.
Especially if you are asking for their help in winning an election…then polling data and internals about what states/regions need targeting is the most helpful information you could possibly have.
You can’t even begin to dump money or deploy ratfucking tactics until you know where it needs to be targeted.
It seems that Eastern Ukraine was what Putin wanted and Trump was willing to give it to him for a bit of help. Trump then tried to put the squeeze on the new President of Ukraine to deny him the military assets he needed to fend off Putin. As Speaker Pelosi said, all roads lead to Putin.
“Sure,” said Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, “Sure we gave the Russians detailed plans for building an atomic bomb. But the plans were very complex, all in specialized equations, and language meaningful only to trained physicists, probably unreadable for ordinary people. We don’t think the Russians could understand them.”
Even if you take Chump being Putins groomed poodle out of the equation, or anything to do with winning an election…if Putin cares about running psy-ops and mucking up the American system…this kind of data would be useful to him and the kind of thing he wouldn’t be able to find on his own. At least nothing so sharp and current as what Manafort had.
So even without Chump and an election, Putin would probably find this stuff useful. I really don’t understand how this was lost on the judge and the Mueller folks seemed to be losing this argument…that the data was a thing of value. Manafort would not have been offering it if it wasn’t.
We also know both why Manafort didn’t talk, and why Trump pardoned him: because both are trying to avoid a face-full of Novichok or a fall out a hotel room window.
This sort of makes the Cockholster campaign seem like a massive criminal conspiracy.
The redacted name is obviously Oleg Deripaska, with whom we already know (from Rick Gates) Manafort intended Kilimnik to share the polling data.
ETA: That’s also part of Manafort’s effort to get back into Deripaska’s good graces after ripping off a bunch of his money that Manafort was supposed to have somehow invested in Ukraine. You may recall that Deripaska was suing Manafort over that in, IIRC, the Cayman Islands. Deripaska was also the guy who Manafort obliquely referred to in an email to either Gates or Kilimnik (I forget which) who should be told that Manafort can offer him briefings and intel from inside the Trump campaign, shorty after he got brought inside the campaign by offering to work for free.
Reporting on the treasonous activity by TFG and his deceitful cohorts is incomplete without an examination of the election of 2016. Was TFG duly elected? The other area of the election that has not been fully investigated is known computer hacking into states voting systems. Reality Winner went to prison for exposing the hacking.
Yes, we need justice for the treason committed but also for the voters whose votes were possibly stolen and for Hillary Clinton, possibly the rightful winner. The injustice of the real election tampering is far reaching for our country.
Remember when Stephanopoulos asked Trump if he would accept dirt on an opponent from another country? He should then have asked Trump if he would instigate an attack on his opponent by colluding with a foreign power. I wonder if the former guy would have said “yes” to that question as well.
And this would confirm that this revelation is nice to have, but is not actionable. So they get away with something again.
Richard Westling, an attorney for Manafort, replied that the data was “only really significant if you do what it is that people like Mr. Manafort and others who run political campaigns do.”
“Yes your honor, I bribed that cop, but I did it in two-dollar bills, and nobody cashes those things anymore.”
Thank you!
Uh, doesn’t it seem obvious that the Russians must have had someone helping them with the polling data to interpret it? I mean, there are plenty of people who speak English in Russia, and apparently plenty of Republican political operatives who are willing to work with a brutal dictator to overthrow an American election.
I can understand if they couldn’t connect the dots between the information getting to Russia and how it was used, that would be internal to Russia and require some intelligence work beyond Mueller’s investigation. The way Russia knew how to influence the election implies they had some kind of information to point their way, but maybe that’s not enough under the law. You would think that delivering that kind of information, and the level of collaboration required, would be well past what’s allowed, but I don’t know the law well enough to say if it’s prosecutable. It damn well should have been in the final report though.