The House Intel committee thinks that perhaps Trump Digital Diretor Brad Pascale has some ‘splaining to do.
The House Intelligence Committee wants to hear from Brad Parscale, who was the digital director for President Donald Trump’s campaign, as part of its ongoing investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, CNN reported Friday.
Parscale would be on the list of Trump associates that the committee wants to testify about any connections between the Republican nominee’s campaign and Russian operatives. CNN reported in May that the campaign’s data analytics operation—widely credited with securing Trump’s surprise victory—was being scrutinized by federal investigators. Agents want to know whether Russian intelligence operatives relied on Trump campaign staffers or their data to assist with Russia’s targeted use of social media bots and “fake news” sites to sway American voters, as CNN previously reported.
The role of Jared Kushner, Trump son-in-law and senior adviser, in overseeing that data operation also is under scrutiny in the federal probe.
Parscale told CNN he has not been contacted by either federal or congressional investigators.
It has been theorized, although it remains to be proven, that the online micro-targeting campaign spearheaded by Jared Kushner with the help of Pascale and Robert Mercer’s Cambridge Analytica bears more than a passing resemblance to the targeting of Kremlin sponsored fake news by bots and troll across twitter and facebook with may have help push voters on the edge of supporting Bernie Sanders away from Hillary Clinton and into Trump’s camp.
That is, as it turns out, essentially the blue print that was published by a Kremlin funded think tank in June of 2016.
A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.
...
The institute is run by retired senior Russian foreign intelligence officials appointed by Putin’s office.
The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals.
It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.
Their strategy had two basic prongs.
PRO-KREMLIN BLOGGERS
Russia Today and Sputnik published anti-Clinton stories while pro-Kremlin bloggers prepared a Twitter campaign calling into question the fairness of an anticipated Clinton victory, according to a report by U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian interference in the election made public in January. [bit.ly/2kMiKSA]
CYBER ATTACKS
Neither of the Russian institute documents mentioned the release of hacked Democratic Party emails to interfere with the U.S. election, according to four of the officials. The officials said the hacking was a covert intelligence operation run separately out of the Kremlin.
The overt propaganda and covert hacking efforts reinforced each other, according to the officials. Both Russia Today and Sputnik heavily promoted the release of the hacked Democratic Party emails, which often contained embarrassing details.
As Kremlin supported negative stories about Clinton or other Trump opponents or critical of Trump were published by RT and Sputnik U.S. allied media outlets such as Breitbart, Newsmax and Daily Caller would echo those stories and then faked twitter and facebook accounts which were setup to masquerade as Americans in specific key swings states and districts powered by bots would retweet and like those stories until they began to trend and then actually people would begin to see and read them.
House Intel would like to know these trolling bloggers and bots knew which specific states and districts to target, and whether any of that detailed voter information — particularly their party affiliation — came from the anyone in the Trump campaign electronically.
Senate investigators in particular have been interested in looking for a link between the prevalence of fake news that supported Trump and was pinpointed in key areas of Rust Belt states that ultimately flipped from blue to red -- and helped Trump secure the White House.
"There have been reports that their ability to target this information, some reports at least saying that in the last week of the campaign in certain precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania there was so much misinformation coming talking about Hillary Clinton's illnesses or Hillary Clinton stealing money from the State Department or other. It completely blanked out any of the back and forth that was actually going on in the campaign," Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said at a March 30 hearing.
Warner then added, "One of the things that seems curious is would the Russians on their own have that level of sophisticated knowledge about the American political system, if they didn't at least get some advice from someone in America?"
Pascale himself has downplayed the idea of bots.
But Parscale dismissed the idea that online bots, controlled by Russian operatives, would have been effective in swinging votes to Trump, noting that Twitter -- where those bots operate -- was not an effective tool for the campaign itself (albeit a highly effective tool for Trump.) Twitter, Parscale said, is designed for shouting a message to extremes on the left and the right, but Facebook is where influencers can be most effective in moving key swing votes.
"Twitter wasn't even something we focused on in the campaign, we didn't feel it mattered, Facebook is where 70% voters focused and was the 500-pound gorilla ... to win the election," Parscale said. "Twitter is not where Trump voters were. Over 95% (of the campaign's online budget) went to Facebook."
Problem is fake user accounts driving by bots exist on Facebook too, so that excuse really doesn't fly as far a rock laden swallow might.