cheerleaders going into the election. it was his son mike flynn jr. who this guy led, pushed the pizzagate absolute lie on social media. so for mike flynn and his son surrounded by both journalists and protesters, it s quite rich to talk about the media manipulation. so let s bring bill kristol back. here at some point in watergate, it became important for republican legislators to realize this isn t about democratic politics. this is about something else and to break with the president. republicans in congress to break with the president because they
without somebody in america helping them do it most effectively. there have been serious questions raised as to whether somebody in the u.s. might have had to help them in terms of the groups of american voters to target, what messages were expected to work, how they might be able to dovetail their media manipulation with what the trump campaign was doing at that time to try to hurt hillary clinton on their own terms. there have been a lot of questions about that when we realized the scope of what russia did with its social media targeting, right? mcclatchy reports today that investigators in both the house intelligence committee and the senate intelligence committee as well as investigators at the department of justice, they re now looking at that. they re now looking specifically at whether or not the digital operation of the trump campaign itself might have been the entity that helped the russians in that part of their attack. the digital aspect of the trump campaign, whether it s p
donald trump hadn t fully embraced the russian mischief if you want to call it that. it s much more sophisticated than most people think. yeah, i think that s being lost in the hyper-partisan debate that s occurring here about what the russians did or didn t do, yes, no, they didn t in the 2016 campaign. sort of loses sights of the much broader context, as you say this is going on for years. much more in central and eastern europe. if you go back to 2009, eight years ago, a group of central and eastern european leaders wrote a letter to president obama in the white house and said that the russians are using political and economic pressure to try to dictate events in our region and that included media manipulation among other things. and this is going on for a while. there s even a name for it. the russians call it new generation warfare. it s designed to build influence and to disrupt the internal cohesion of the opponent.
makes when it comes to donald trump, the man, questioning his intelligence. he s a smart man, master of media manipulation. sometimes it is a distraction. sometimes there are attack-tics where he knows it will work well. what we saw here with mika brzezinski, i don t know how much of it is female. maybe that comes into how he comes back. on a personal level, the office has not imbued this man with a sense of being better than. if you come at him, he s coming back at you, no matter who that hurts, no matter how it hurts, man or woman. both of us have felt the bite of the president of the united states. how he responds to women i think does reveal something. fair point. but i m saying it doesn t mean that men are immune. he just comes at you differently. it s the roy cohn playbook. i think what the press are doing
he came up with the idea of it. that all matters. it s real. it s relevant. still has to be dealt with. still hasn t been satisfying to many of the people involved, true, fair. but when someone passes, you have to take the full measure of the man or woman. this is a man who has such importance, not just in the media world but in the political world. with the idea of messaging and how to protect through media, he was one of the founders of media manipulation. and i mean that for better and worse within politics. he was then introduced to the world at large through fox news. nobody thought that could work. and he did it. and on a personal note he gave me my start in the news business. alisyn camerota worked at fork news for a long time. roger ailes was very good to me. he has his criticisms, but his