about, the campaign official, does that tell you anything? at first glance you are thinking that s not a high-level person because they are not in new york but you know the president had a big stronghold down in florida. does that give you any clue at all who we are talking about? i haven t read the whole document yet so i don t want to speculate for people, it s too important to be speculating upon but what i will tell you from what i have read is that the special counsel says there is evidence that this decision by the russians to interfere in the u.s. election dates back to mid 2014. they had a two-year advance where they were planning to interfere in the u.s. election and it says in the indictment that the intent was to help the candidacy of donald trump and disparage hillary clinton. that is not an entirely new idea because that was the assessment of the u.s. intelligence community but again, you ve got an indictment which says the special counsel believes they have sufficient e
i haven t heard of cases like this, particularly social media in a campaign posing as somebody else, using identity theft or money flowing in. it really is pretty fascinating. melissa: there is a big difference between creating an identity online and trying to get something trending or trying to influence thought. and buying ads, that s a much more powerful weapon and we certainly heard a lot about that with regards to facebook and other entities during the election. you often see that people will actually go out and buy followers so they seem to be more influential and they get more attention online. maybe that s why this was going as well, i don t know yet. melissa: we want to bring in warren davidson of ohio as we wait for this. i don t know how much of this you ve been able to hear but this idea that rod rosenstein is about to announce indictments against russian individuals for
campaign at the time or that they kind of fell victim to this russian conspiracy end of the idea that they were dealing with a u.s. person when in fact it was a russian national attempting effectively to obscure their identity. bottom line is that we ve got the indictment from the special counsel of these 13 russian individuals, three entities, it says there is sufficient evidence to bring a case in a criminal court, that is a high legal standard for interference in the u.s. election and based on the documents we ve read so far, it does document communication between these individuals and members of the trump campaign. based on my reading so far it does not present evidence that members of the trump campaign knew they were dealing with russian individuals at the time. so i have not finished on the paperwork quite yet. i think we are getting close to the two-minute warning, i will throw it back to you. melissa: can i ask you a quick question. the fact that that person was in florida t
having just lost over the indictment, it was trying to so discord, the indictment it looks like a pretty sophisticated operation. it looks like the bank and wire fraud had a more to do with identity theft and setting up fake paypal accounts to evade paypal s security measures. again, these groups functioned trying to present themselves as americans. they had enough clout online to try to get in touch on a couple of occasions with members of the trump campaign. and help organize various kinds of rallies. it looks like they weren t against trump according to deputy rosenstein. melissa: he went out of his way to point out there was a rally on the same day, 14 and one against. the idea was to so discord that
we want to talk about this other breaking news story right now. jason chaffetz is standing by we want to ask you about this press conference that s coming up in a few minutes, we are going to hear these indictments from rod rosenstein having to do with at least 13 russian individuals that were connected with some sort of interference in the election. what is your take on that? look, i am glad it s happening. this is very encouraging. i think a lot of people were very concerned even at a small level that this was happening. devin nunes been talking about this for a couple of years. president obama kind of pooh-poohed the idea that anybody could interfere but i think clearly there the more we ve learned after the election, yes. there were people improperly trying to manipulate the election, even if they weren t successful. i don t think there s been any indication that it would ve changed the outcome of the