activity by russian trolls and bots at the internet research agency. nbc s national security correspondent ken delaney joins us now with this. ken? reporter: ali, it s long been a matter of debate, whether the russian influence of campaign moved voters. obviously trump and his voters scoff at the idea, and at the other end, you had jimmy carter say last week that the russians got trump elected. up until now, there really hasn t been any evidence of that. this is the first bit of concrete, measurable evidence we ve seen. what these researchers did is they measured a strong correlation between tweets and activity between the troll farm and increases in donald trump s popularity and opinion polls in 2016. and this is not this is a complicated statistical analysis, ali, using terms like vector auto regression. but importantly, ali, they controlled for some variables including donald trump s own tweets. so what they found is that this
he was very closely aligned with putin. right now, the american government, secretary mnuchin and the treasury department, is easing sanctions on him. it all worked. they won. they got putin putin got trump elected president. putin s allies are now thriving because of this. it s just we act like this story they all got caught. maybe they got caught, but they still won. not just trump, not just putin, but even these allies, these oligarch allies of trump s campaign chairman. the vice chairman of the intelligence committee, he says the data provided, the as soon assive sensitive internal data would have been useful for russia s intelligence operation. is he correct?
absolutely. the difference is he s lying. no, no, obviously, these are progressive and populist troupes that we ve heard for a long time. she s not taking a page out of donald trump s book and he s hurt the very people he s talking about. these are the themes that got trump elected. and hillary clinton didn t say them as forcibly as she could have, and now elizabeth warren is competing on that territory. right. and as the congresswoman said, it is authentic to who she is and what she s been talking about for years and years and years. i think, you know, what hillary clinton and, i don t want to relitigate 2016. i really don t. but hillary had an authenticity problem, right? the clip that you just showed shows that elizabeth warren right now does not. i take umbrage to that. you see her drinking a beer in her kitchen. that got widely panned on authenticity. but listen, i d love to see elizabeth warren as the
that got trump elected, this is over the line. and abc decided to act. dana: it was almost universal condemnation against the tweet. almost. there are some people that thought oh, wow, the snowflakes are being so upset. but there are just limits to what people are willing to stomach. this was not just anti-p.c. rhetoric. this was pretty aggressive. i think you are right about abc taking action pretty quickly. they didn t have to have a board meeting, right? they didn t have to have a meeting with her agent or anything. they just said we will not stomach this. i imagine that the employees of abc if not the board was pretty happy with the decision. dana: the swiftness of it suggests there wasn t even a debate. i think that there will be a lot of fallout to this and there will be analysis of how it was done. for the most part, abc news moved abc moved in an abhorrent tweet and moved quickly. dana: this is
political payback. china knows who got trump elected. so the people who did vote for trump, they are worried there is going to be a backlash, and there already is a backlash against people like soybean farmers and so forth. it s the people who are going to try to make aluminum who aren t seeing jobs, and they ll say to the president, what about me? that s the political danger. japan s prime minister has followed the trump playbook to a t. but is it working? the media has not covered the tpp correctly. i don t want to go back into tpp, but if they offered us a deal