but in addition to the friday night news dumps where they just hide stuff late on a friday thinking no one will notice it, the other thing that happens with the trump administration on friday and this has to be a coincidence, this is just god hates me, it s that news about them tends to break on friday night as well and that is the case tonight in the the washington post and the associated press. the washington post was first. they and all the pattern warnings he was given about his contact with russian government officials during the transition. so between the election and when president trump was actually sworn in. according to tonight s front page scoop in the the washington post, mike flynn was warned that his conversations with russian officials were quote, undoubtedly being monitored by the fbi and by the nsa. transition officials tell the washington post they also prepared a briefing document for flynn specifically a profile of the russian ambassador who he liked to talk
the blackout deadline arrives at midnight local time. just before that blackout deadline arrived, which shuts down all election related news and discussion in the french media. just before that midnight local time deadline tonight, macron campaign suffered a huge cyber attack. all of their internal stuff got posted online. their internal documents, internal e-mails. things like contracts, accounting documents, strategy documents, all apparently hacked off their campaign servers, all posted online at paste bin. it s apparently about nine gigabytes worth of data. it is legitimate material that is authentic that was definitely stolen off their servers. but they say, whoever posted it mixed in fake documentation as well as alongside the real stuff which is a hallmark of a well run weaponized hacng attack. now, in terms of who dun it? it doesn t seem like the people who did it tried very hard to cover up their tracks.
to influence french voters in their choice in that election. we ve seen russia cyber warfare playing out already in this election. there have been reports of hacking efforts. there s been a ton of russian generated and russian amplified fake news about macron in particular which marie le pen and her party and supporters have trud to spend themselves and capitalize on just like the trump campaign did when it came to russia generated fake news about hillary clinton. but that we ve been watching that unfold over the course of this french campaign, through the first primary and into this as we headed toward this runoff this weekend, i didn t have much of an intention of talking much about the french election tonight but then late this afternoon, our time, late, late tonight their time this story just took a very serious turn. it was just before the blackout deadline arrived.