operation in the 2016 campaign? how did they know to go after disaffected democratic voters, bernie sanders voters, african americans were targeted by much of the russian propaganda. was this evidence that we re now seeing indications of, of actual coordination and sharing of information that enabled the trump campaign to target the same people as the russian influence? we don t know the answer to that yet. i d be curious to know what is the nature of the polling information that was shared with russians or potentially shared with russians, and again, there s also the real question we have to ask, paul manafort obviously has been convicted and it was a deeply compromised figure. what we don t yet know is the extent to which he was trying to privatize trump campaign information in order to help his own business interests or
what he said. senator, you said this is one of the most significant activities of the whole investigation. do you believe this is collusion? i believe that clearly paul manafort, trump s campaign chairman, shared confidential polling information with a known russian agent. and what we don t know is what did the russians do with this information? was this used by the russian services as they used their voter suppression activities over the internet? with the so-called internet research agency? was it directed at some of the efforts to suppress african-american votes? we don t have those answers, but we know that sharing confidential polling data with a russian, known russian spy, and someone connected to the spell jensen agencies, i don t know whether you call that collusion or what, but to me, that is
about it. i think any statement makes him public. i don t think he would ever feel like he was held to those statements. there is another very important witness in this that is still cooperating who would have known a lot about this polling information, and that s rick gates who was your former client and paul manafort s right-hand man. this is someone cooperating with mueller r. so, you know, president trump can obviously deny it publicly, but if there was any kind of document trail, and if we knew about this during the campaign, you can bet that the report, let s call it the mueller report. it should be public. in the past it has been public. and members of congress have had access to underlying findings that didn t even make the report. the president asked if it should
american public, to the public constitutes an obstruction of justice? i think there are certain statements that he has made that goes to perhaps indicating to witnesses how they should testify. the president lies every single day but there are those lies that go to probably a cumulative argument that he has engaged in obstruction of justice and that is fair game for robert mueller s investigation. let me give your thoughts on the exclusive report. last year he met with tony fabrizio that manafort shared internal confidential polling information with a russian asset. what s your reaction to this new report? once again it raises the real specter of what kind of discussions were going on with the people who are heading up the trump campaign and his sons,
even the president standing at press conference saying russia, you will be rewarded if you further hack hillary clinton. they took meetings, also natalia, we learned she was a russian spy that president s son met with while russia was attacking us. they never said no to the russians because they welcomed their help. what would the it russians want to know about our poll data that the campaigns hold? what would they want that for? i believe to weaponize that information. so as they do their social media attacks on twitter and facebook and youtube, they would know where it the better targets are. so they would go after the african-american vote and say we can turn them off to hillary? anything else they can read in the new york times. why would they need internal polling information? i saw cucanlutiollusion from th beginning when they were so