The Trump regime is turning over documents on Trump's Russian contacts and surprise! Turns out that the White House has been lying again about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, yet again. This time it's Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in the hot seat.
Associates of President Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.
In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence.
In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the Russian Senate, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light.
Cohen declined the invitation to the economic conference, citing the difficulty of attending so close to the GOP convention, according to people familiar with the matter. And Cohen rejected the Moscow building plan.
Nonetheless, the information about the interactions has been provided to congressional committees as well as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as they investigate whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election, according to people familiar with the inquiries who, like others cited in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the inquiry.
Details of the communications were turned over by the Trump Organization in recent days to the White House, defense lawyers and government investigators and described to The Washington Post.
Though there is no evidence that these Russia-related entreaties resulted in further action, the email communications about them show that Trump’s inner circle continued receiving requests from Russians deep into the presidential campaign.
In other words, the Trump organization had no problem with listening to "requests" from Putin's circle of Russian oligarchs for the purpose of putting a Trump Tower in Moscow. It really is all about greed with these guys, pure, unadulterated avarice.
Trump sold our country for a goddamn chunk of prime Moscow real estate, but hey, the Russians had some help, and that was from an all too eager Silicon Valley who wanted in on the presidential ad campaign millions. Turns out that Vlad and friends know a little something about catapulting the propaganda, and they were more than happy to use social media to do it.
Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election.
The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.
The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.
People caught up in this web of tracking and disinformation would have had no indication that they had been singled out or that the ads came from Russians.
One such ad featured photographs of an armed black woman “dry firing” a rifle — pulling the trigger of the weapon without a bullet in the chamber — the people familiar with the investigation said.
Investigators believe the advertisement may have been designed to encourage African American militancy and, at the same time, to stoke fears within white communities, the people said. But the precise purpose of the ad remains unclear to investigators, the people said.
Another showed an image of Democrat Hillary Clinton behind what appeared to be prison bars.
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on Russia’s exploitation of the Custom Audiences system. Facebook officials have previously said that they were caught off guard by the Russian propaganda campaign because the accounts, pages and ads appeared to be legitimate.
In addition to Custom Audiences, Russian operatives used other Facebook tools to target groups by demographics, geography, gender and interests, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The Custom Audiences tool differs because it allows advertisers to feed into Facebook’s systems a specific list of users they want to target.
You mean exploiting technology to micro-target your message directly to the people most susceptible to that message has a dark side? Gosh, who knew.
Ahh, but the Russians were more than eager to lead us down the path of destruction, after all were more than happy to follow the trail of blood where their propaganda led America.
And now we have Trump.