Donald Trump - Yes Puppet! Yes Puppet!

There's a handful of very interesting pieces that have been coming out from various sources regarding the ongoing attempts by as yet unnamed FBI agents to influence this election. If you didn't hear about it today, you may hear about it tomorrow. I'm going to give some background and provide some useful context — at least as I've managed to aggregate and process in my own mind.

I'm going to start at what might seem an unlikely place — the Ted Cruz campaign.

On April 3, 2015, a pro-Ted Cruz PAC called Keep The Promise I was formed. The PAC was formed by Jacquelyn James of the accounting firm Golub, LaCapra, Wilson & DeTiberiis. This was created as one of four Keep The Promise PACs supporting Ted Cruz. The other three were formed by Dathan Voelter, an attorney from Austin.

I'm about to do something you've never seen me do and probably never will see me do again and that's to cite The Conservative Tree House as a source. The following excerpts come from a piece posted on November 22, 2015:

Why Breitbart Website Is Fundraising For Ted Cruz…

The Breitbart Media Group is financially backed and funded by Hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer. Mercer was/is the originating financial backer for the Ted Cruz “Keep the Promise” (KtP 1, KtP2 and KtP3) Super-PACs. Mercer is also the financial backing behind Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica is the receiver of the contact information provided to Breitbart when you participate in their on-line Presidential Poll.

In essence, when you participate the Breitbart poll, you are sending your personal information into a data-base controlled by the proprietary interests of Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica. The Ted Cruz campaign then uses the data collected to fund-raise on behalf of the Campaign.

Perhaps I’m the last person to discover that Breitbart is essentially a political operation of the Cruz campaign – but this is akin to realizing the Clinton Global Initiative is the financial underwriter for the New York Times.

It would appear the entire reason for Breitbart.Com to put their Presidential Preference Poll together was to gather information on visitors for later distribution to the Ted Cruz campaign, with the expressed intention of micro-targeting those participating visitors…

Knowing all of this, it certainly makes sense now why so many people have noted that Breitbart goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid any critical mentions of their candidate, Ted Cruz.

After all, this unique and unconventional relationship means Breitbart Media has a vested financial interest in Ted Cruz’s candidacy, and a profound conflict of interest for any political editorial surrounding the ongoing 2016 Presidential Primary.

There's quite a bit to unpack there but here's the main points which I'll add to:

1. Robert Mercer, co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and who as it turns out, lives one of Trump's buildings in NYC (just a fun fact), is a principal investor in the Breitbart News Network and Bannon's GAI of which Mercer's daughter, Rebekah Mercer, is a board member.

2. Robert Mercer is the primary donor to KtP1. According to records at OpenSecrets.org, Robert Mercer has contributed $15.5 million of the PAC's $19,586,131 in total receipts. Importantly, the bulk of the rest (more than $4 million, coming from a handful of donors) wasn't received until recently. In fact, through 2015, $11 million of the $11,036,750 it received was donated by Mercer. Not mentioned above, Golub, LaCapra, Wilson & DeTiberiis is the accounting firm of the Mercer family charitable foundation.

3. It didn't escape the notice of even other far-right sources that Breitbart was acting hand in glove with the Ted Cruz campaign.

4. The PAC was paying large amounts of money ($126k in the month of January alone) to Cambridge Analytica. I don't know the total but if anyone wants to have a look at their FEC filings they're here. A quick bit about Cambridge Analytica:

Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a privately held company that combines data mining and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process. It was created in 2013 as an offshoot of its British parent company SCL Group to participate in American politics.[1] In 2014, CA was involved in 44 U.S. political races.[2] The company is heavily funded by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund billionaire.[1][3] In 2015 it became known as the data analysis company working initially for Ted Cruz's presidential campaign.[3] In 2016, after Cruz's campaign had faltered, Cambridge Analytica started to work for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.[4]

How they describe themselves on the front page of their website:

Big data revolutionized the way organizations identify and locate their best prospects. But data alone isn’t enough.

At Cambridge Analytica we use data modeling and psychographic profiling to grow audiences, identify key influencers, and connect with people in ways that move them to action. Our unique data sets and unparalleled modeling techniques help organizations across America build better relationships with their target audience across all media platforms.

In August of 2015, Kellyann Conway became the President of Keep the Promise I.

In April of 2016, it was reported by Politico that the Cruz PACs were among a coalition trying to desperately to thwart Trump by convincing unbound delegates to support Cruz and bound delegates to support Cruz after the first vote at the Republican National Convention.

At the time, as you may recall, the Trump campaign was very unhappy with Lyin' Ted and his supporting PACs. From USA Today:

Barry Bennett, Trump’s senior adviser, called the super PACs' growing involvement in delegate fights “a perversion of the process.”

“For them to spend millions of soft dollars to try to affect the outcome is exactly the shenanigans voters don’t want to see,” Bennett told USA TODAY.

“Seventy-five to 80% of the Republican electorate is not with the establishment. They really risk angering the vast majority of the party. We are not going to be quiet about it.

At the beginning of May, Ted Cruz officially suspended his campaign.

Then in June of 2016, Keep the Promise I ammended its name and purpose and became Make America Number 1, a pro-Trump PAC. At this time, Breitbart not only started putting out pro-Trump propaganda, they started reposting stories from the "evil liberal MSM" (side note: How many of you know that Andrew Breitbart assisted Arianna Huffington in starting The Huffington Post?). Here's a couple of examples:

Former Ted Cruz Super PAC ‘Refurbished,’ Becomes ‘Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC’ (June 22, 2016 reposted from Bloomberg)< br />

For all his prowess at appealing to Republican voters, Donald Trump has struggled mightily to win over rich Republican donors. After savaging major party funders as corrupt insiders during the primaries, Trump is finding them reluctant to open their wallets. With Trump’s campaign reeling and nearly broke — new filings show it has less than $1.3 million cash on hand— outside allies are stepping in.

Robert Mercer, the GOP mega-donor and co-founder of Renaissance Technologies hedge fund who once backed Texas Senator Ted Cruz, is launching a super-PAC with a novel twist to get establishment-minded donors off the sidelines. The new project will informally be dubbed the “Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC” and, despite its Trumpian name, will focus solely on attacking Clinton, not boosting Trump. The idea is that conservative donors reluctant to support Trump can still donate in good conscience to a super-PAC that only attacks Clinton. “It’s a way to participate without [directly] supporting Trump,” says a source involved in the super-PAC’s creation.

The very next month:

Under the Bus (July 24, 2016 reposted from New York Times)

In an extraordinary public rebuke, two influential donors who were among the biggest supporters of Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign excoriated Mr. Cruz on Saturday for his decision not to endorse Donald J. Trump at the Republican National Convention.

The remarks from Robert Mercer of Long Island and his daughter Rebekah Mercer suggest widening fallout over Mr. Cruz’s convention speech, in which he did not endorse his former rival and, instead, suggested that Republicans should “vote your conscience” for candidates “up and down the ticket.”

“Last summer and again this year, Senator Ted Cruz pledged to support the candidacy of the nominee of the Republican Party, whomever that nominee might be,” the Mercers, who rarely comment in the news media, said in the statement to The New York Times. “We are profoundly disappointed that on Wednesday night he chose to disregard this pledge.”

As you can see, the money man had already bailed on Cruz and publically castigated Cruz for not supporting his new candidate. Something else happened in July. Kellyanne Conway was hired as a "Senior Advisor" to the campaign which at that point was still being run by Paul Manafort.

Kellyanne Conway is the founder of a polling company called The Polling Company. When I searched FEC records, I found that her company had been paid in total, $952,014.14 by two orgs. The first $441,881.34 was paid by Keep The Promise I / Make America Number 1 and the remaining half million by Donald J Trump for President, Inc.

Something else happened in July when Kellyanne Conway joined the Trump campaign, David Bossie, took over the helm of Make America Number 1. Only a few days prior to that announcement, this appeared in Politico (6/28):

In fact, the Trump campaign last year rejected a pitch from Cambridge Analytica because it believed that the company charges too much for what it provides, according to two operatives who worked with the campaign.

Yet the firm’s services, which are based on nontraditional “psychographic” voter analyses, remained intriguing to the Trump campaign’s newly named digital director Brad Parscale, campaign sources said.

Parscale’s Web design firm, Giles-Parscale, is based in San Antonio, and he spearheaded last week’s meeting in the city, which was also attended by the campaign’s lead data engineer, Witold Chrabaszcz, as well as RNC data director Jesse Kamzol and Cambridge Analytica executive Matt Oczkowski, according to operatives familiar with it.

Parscale — who has worked for years with the Trumps building websites for their real estate enterprises and is close to the family — wanted to sign a deal with Cambridge, but campaign chairman Paul Manafort did not, according to a strategist who is close to the campaign.

“Brad was cheerleading for Cambridge Analytica,” said the strategist. “But Manafort was totally unimpressed and was opposed to it.”

Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica, which is connected to a British firm called SCL Group, comes with its own political clout on the American right. It is owned at least in part by the wealthy hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who has been courted by Trump’s team and who previously donated $13 million to a super PAC supporting the campaign of Trump’s ousted rival Ted Cruz. According to FEC filings, the PAC supporting Cruz had paid Cambridge Analytica $1.2 million for various services before last week, when Mercer’s allies reconfigured it to oppose Clinton. They filed paperwork with the FEC to change its name to Make America Number 1, though it’s colloquially known as the “Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC.”

Veteran conservative operative David Bossie, the longtime Clinton antagonist who is running Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC, called the Mercer family “big financial supporters,” but said the group hadn't decided whether to use Cambridge Analytica.

A Mercer spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

In GOP finance circles, hiring Cambridge Analytica is widely seen as a way to increase the likelihood of winning support from the Mercers.

As the country became reacquainted with Paul Manafort, his decade of work for the deposed pro-Putin Ukrainian despot, Viktor Yanukovych combined with the questions swirling around Carter Page forced Roger Stone Jr's long term pal and partner to exit the campaign.

With Conway in place and Manafort out of the way and Lewandowski having been demoted not long after an incident involving a Breitbart reporter (conveniently? I don't know. I'm putting a lot of this together on the fly but it's interesting) — the doors were wide open to Mercer.

It was then, in the middle of August, that Robert Mercer installed his second operative, Stephen Bannon. According to a piece in The Intercept:

Mercer is also a top investor in the Breitbart News Network. According to the Post, Mercer’s daughter Rebekah nudged Trump to bring in Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s executive chairman, to run his campaign.

Two weeks later, David Bossie — the country's foremost dark money advocate — took leave from Citizen's United and left Make America Number 1 to become deputy campaign manager of the Trump campaign. At the time, Trump referred to Bossie as, "A friend of mine for many years."

Three weeks after that, the following appeared in The Times (UK):

Data scientists target 20 million new voters for Trump (8/22)

Donald Trump plans to use a British company that was part of the Brexit campaign topinpoint 20 million “persuadable” voters in key battleground states and bombard them with psychologically targeted messages.

The tycoon has presented himself as a presidential candidate who goes on his gut, with little time for expensive experts. However, it has emerged that his campaign paid $250,000 to Cambridge Analytica as the race for the White House tightened last month.

Campaign takeover, complete.

I'd like to point out something else that I stumbled upon while doing research that will give you a rare glimpse inside campaign operations. The following are minutes from a meeting of the Tim Clark controlled "Latinos with Trump" that were cached by Google (Scribd here and here):

Members in attendance:
-Tim Clark
-Marco

– The campaign is taking a new approach and reconfiguring DT persona.

– Tim is planning an event for Latinos for trump, the target date it’s September 20th followed by a charity event on September 21th, the plan is to be televised and show the Latino support in national media, we would need at least 1000 people to make this happen, and in order to Donald Trump to actually attend.

– Tim requested a few Spanish speakers that will be trained to appear in Univision and Telemundo to be advocates for the Latinos message, the volunteers were: Irma, Regina, Maddie and Myself.

– Tim is working to find a wording we all can use to pass our message and that will be approved by the campaign.

Tim Clark is the California director of the Trump campaign. Marco is Marco "taco trucks on every corner" Gutierrez. These are from the first half of August. As you can see, the shift was in motion:

"The campaign is taking a new approach and reconfiguring DT persona"

I'm going to go ahead and post this now and then start with the second thread where I address how this relates to what's going on at the FBI in NYC.

Summerize a tad?

a reply to: cavtrooper7

I'm trying but I'm putting a lot of this together from notes from weeks ago and some from today and then other things that are occuring to me a I'm writing it up. I'll see what I can do.

- Robert Mercer is the largest investor in Breitbart News. He's also a major source of funding for Bannon's Government Accountability Institute.

**Quick side note: I read tonight that Andrew Breitbart died 4 days after putting together the funding to expand Breitbart. (that seems suspicious to me in retrospect and I know it's long seemed strange to others)

- Robert Mercer was a Cruz supporter. Make America Number 1 was a PAC he started as Keep The Promise I (one of 4 pro-Cruz "Keep the Promise" PACs) and wholly funded until just recently. The President of that PAC was Kellyann Conway. They tried to stop Trump by targetting delegates. That failed. While Mercer was supporting Cruz, Breitbart was fundraising for Cruz and was seen as heavily biased in favor of Cruz.

- Cruz suspended his campaign, Kellyanne Conway left the PAC (which had paid her company half a mil) and joined the Trump campaign (which has also paid her company half a mil) as an advisor. The PAC was renamed and repurposed to support Trump (technically, their stated purpose at the time was to be "anti-Hillary). David Bossie took over the PAC when Conway left.

- Manafort was against using Mercer's Cambridge Analytica which is a big data micro-targeting electioneering platform.

- Then Manafort leaves (Lewandowski had already been effectively neutered after the Michelle Fields incident — not saying it was a setup by Mercer + Bannon but I'm not saying it wasn't either) and *boom* Mercer's boy Bannon is in. I didn't mention it above because it's part of the next thread but not only does Mercer bank GAI — which is a project of Bannon and Breitbart editor-at-large Peter Schweizer + I imagine a small staff — he was the source of funding for the movie based on Schweizer's book, Clinton Cash!. I digress, I'm getting ahead of myself.

- So with Manafort out of the way, Bannon is in and he brings on David Bossie who had been running the Mercer PAC after Conway left. At this point, three folks strongly connected to Mercer were in place. It was then that the campaign went forward with Cambridge Analytica and at the same time, set about "reconfiguring" Donald Trump's persona.

I think that's most of the highlights thus far.

originally posted by: cavtrooper7
Summerize a tad?

I can help.

Summary: Trump is a bad man...vote for Hillary.

I think he's going into detail as to what exactly he thinks is pushing the FBI reopening the investigation.

So is thread to show how inept and amateurish Trump is compared to Hillary when it comes to media manipulation?

Small bikkies in your 3 post OP compared to whats coming out about Clinton, check out your candidate of choice sometime to see what your voting for instead of worrying so much about what your voting against

a reply to: theantediluvian

Ah so it is no longer simply the Russians that are trying to "influence" our elections... Now it is our very own intelligence agencies!

Damn may as well bust out some tinfoil here and go a little further...

You know what I bet that the FBI and the Russians are actually working together to stand against Hillary because they have a mutual secret interest in standing against women, muslims, African Americans, Latino Americans, and hell why not even Native Americans.

Bunch of white Christian men are behind this joint Russian/FBI attack on American liberty.

Next up we will include the NRO,DIA,CIA, DOS, NSA, NGIA, DOJ, they are all in on it, all to elect TRUMP!

So after a brief read over you are in short saying Donald Trump actually played politics good? I didn't see anything illegal mentioned, in everyday terms unethical at the bare minimum, but in politics it's how the game works.

You for some reason mentioned this

At the beginning of May, Ted Cruz officially suspended his campaign.

But forgot to leave out the detail that suspending is not even remotely close to the same thing as ending. It was later that month Trump sealed the nomination.
source

a reply to: JinMI

No. As far as I know, the Weiner/Abedin laptop doesn't have anything to do with anything. I have read a number of sources who are claiming that the reason for Comey's announcement regarding the emails from that device stemmed from a concern that it was going to be leaked anyway. Take from that what you will.

So I guess it's related in that regard but what I'm specifically going to address is the "indictment is pending" "avalanche of evidence" etc "leaks" from NY FBI agents to Fox News.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Ah, Ok.

originally posted by: Metallicus

originally posted by: cavtrooper7
Summerize a tad?

I can help.

Summary: Trump is a bad man...vote for Hillary.

Yep , the usual. But I must say , this member has upgraded the quality of material . Very slightly

So , what I see are things that are supposed to happen pt1.

Who you guys think are on the win win then?

a reply to: theantediluvian

Rachel Maddow covered this tonight.


www.msnbc.com...



On a side note: That portion of the debate where Trump was saying "no puppet... no puppet..you're the puppet", in response to Hillary calling him Putin's puppet sent my husband into hysterical laughter. Tears and everything. It just hit his funny bone.

Since the debate, whenever we spat (and were married 35 years so spatting is on the menu daily.) I look at him and whisper. "You the puppet" or "no puppet np puppet " and the spats over while he doubles over again mumbling no puppet no puppet...

a reply to: JinMI

Trumps connection to Russia and Russia's interest in the election.

They want their puppet in place. They've been grooming forever.

a reply to: Sillyolme

Since the debate, whenever we spat (and were married 35 years so spatting is on the menu daily.) I look at him and whisper. "You the puppet" or "no puppet np puppet " and the spats over while he doubles over again mumbling no puppet no puppet...

...and long winter nights just fly...

a reply to: Sillyolme

Lies

Pretty sure the FBI re-opened their Hillary Clinton investigation because of whatever was found on the Weiner/Abedin computers. I don't think the FBI would be investigating Hillary Clinton's crimes if it had anything to do with... Ted Cruz? What really surprises me is how RICO laws aren't being used against the Clintons, it reaches a point of absurdity when a person is so clearly guilty, but the 'affluenza' excuse still seems to apply.