What's legally known as conspiracy? Campaign coordination with a foreign source is illegal at any rate.Tony Fabrizio was honored as Pollster of the Year for his work on Trump’s 2016 presidential election.
As chief pollster, he was hired to assist Trump’s team and the RNC on the modeling, polling and targeting of specific voter groups.
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“[His firm, Fabrizio, Lee & Associates] FLA was able to identify with precision the voters who wanted change but were not supporting Mr. Trump. Knowing their beliefs, what messages most strongly resonated with them, and their media consumption habits, FLA advised the leadership teams in each key state how best to reach this hugely important cohort of voters,” according to a campaign brief posted to its website.
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“We knew the 14 million people we needed to win 270. We targeted those in over 1,000 different universes with exactly the things that mattered to them."
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They also ran three parallel online voter suppression campaigns specifically targeting “idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans.”
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Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica developer, admitted to Congress that Steve Bannon had “directed the political data consultancy to conduct research on suppressing Black voters, among other groups.”
Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) appears to have run a similar operation. It was posting comparable divisive messaging on the same media platforms to the same Trump targets during similar time periods.
Medium
And, don't forget about our old friend Mitch McConnell.Paul Manafort worked for Trump’s campaign from March to August 2016. Before joining the campaign, he recruited Fabrizio. That spring, Manafort and Rick Gates, his business partner and Trump deputy campaign manager, are alleged to have shared the campaign’s polling data with Konstantin V. Kilimnik, Manafort’s protegé with ties to Russian intelligence.
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Fabrizio claims he had no knowledge of Trump polling data being given to the Russians. It’s not the first time he and Manafort have been associated with Russian officials and elections. Manafort previously employed Fabrizio for Viktor Yanukovych and Ukraine’s Party of Regions campaigns in 2012–2013.
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[Manafort] secretly issued orders to rewrite Wikipedia entries to smear any Yanukovych opponents. He ran multiple social media campaigns aimed at promoting Yanukovych to audiences in Europe and the US.
And he also helped set up the Brussels-based European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which contracted with U.S. lobbying firms Mercury Public Affairs and the Podesta Group to promote Yanukovych in D.C. while obscuring Manafort’s role. Fabrizio is also a senior counselor at Mercury Public Affairs [...] currently being investigated by federal prosecutors for the legal and lobbying work they did in 2012 and 2013 for Manafort and Yanukovych.
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Fabrizio was interviewed by Mueller’s team a year ago and reportedly asked about the polling work he’d done for Manafort in Ukraine. He was also questioned about how that polling data had been shared with Russians Konstantin Kilimnik, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov.
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His list of clients includes a number of politicians with ties to Russia. Before joining Trump, he was Rand Paul’s pollster on his 2016 presidential campaign. By that time, Paul was already a known friend to Russian officials.
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Fabrizio was also a pollster and senior advisor to Ron DeSantis on his 2015 Florida Senate campaign. He’d previously worked on former FL Gov. Rick Scott’s two successful governor races and for the GOP on former WI Gov. Scott Walker’s 2014 reelection campaign.
A Walker PAC received $1.1 million in funding from Russian oligarch Len Blavatnik during that campaign. Matt Oczkowski, who worked as Walker’s digital director at the time, later became head of product for Cambridge Analytica.
What a list.Fabrizio’s also done strategy and polling work for Rick Perry, Mitch McConnell, the NRA, the RNC, Amway (DeVos family), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and at least five different casino or gaming entities, including Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts.
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