After the Trump Jr. "bombshell" thoroughly runs it's course, which, based on what we know right now, seems inevitable given that the entire premise of the meeting looks increasingly like "inane nonsense" (see: How Hermitage Capital, Ziff Brothers And The Clinton Global Initiative Prompted The Trump Jr. Meeting), the mainstream media will need a new Trump-Russia narrative to fill their airtime. Barring any new revelations from anonymous sources, as McClatchy points out, that new narrative could very well be focused on Trump's "Jared Kushner-run digital operation."
According to the ever-impartial Representative Adam Schiff of California, the inquiry into Trump's digital operation is centered around whether his campaign ever coordinated with Russian entities to help plant fake news stories on U.S. social media sites. Per McClatchy:
Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told McClatchy he wants to know whether Russia’s “fake or damaging news stories” were “coordinated in any way in terms of targeting or in terms of timing or in terms of any other measure … with the (Trump) campaign.”
Schiff said he wants the House panel to determine whether Trump aides helped Russia time its cyberattacks or target certain voters and whether there was “any exchange of information, any financial support funneled to organizations that were doing this kind of work.”
As the liberal reasoning goes, the Russians simply could not have figured out on their own which states are considered 'swing states' and/or that minorities tend to vote Democrat by fairly high margins...they definitely needed some 'experts' on the inside to crack those codes.
“I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner told Pod Save America recently. “Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware (of) really raises some questions … How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”
The Russians targeted women and African-Americans in two of the three decisive states, Wisconsin and Michigan, “where the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play,” Warner said.
So, what kind of "fake news" stories has Schiff most worried? Apparently he's concerned about voters in Michigan having been bombarded with news that Hillary was 'allegedly' sick...
Twitter’s and Facebook’s search engines in those states were overwhelmed, he said, meaning they couldn’t discern fake news from real news.
“On your news feed, you suddenly got … ‘Hillary Clinton’s sick’ or ‘Hillary Clinton’s stealing money from the State Department,’” said Warner.
...which was clearly "fake news"...she seemed perfectly healthy throughout the campaign.
And, while it will never happen, we would love for Schiff to analyze the effectiveness of Russia's alleged social media campaigns to that of the 24/7 Hillary Clinton cheerleading sessions on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. in the months leading up to election day. Oh, and how about all those fake polls that were clearly designed to chill Republican turnout? We wonder whether Schiff has any concerns at all about those?
No, apparently none of that is concerning. But, what is very concerning is the fact that Jared Kushner hired a Texas-based, digital advertising expert in 2015 to help with his marketing efforts...
Kushner’s pivotal role in the Trump cyber effort was underscored by his hiring in 2015 of Brad Parscale, a Texas-based digital guru who previously had done work for the Trump Organization, said two GOP operatives familiar with the campaign.
Parscale’s company raked in about $90 million for work targeting many states with paid advertisements, social media messages and other cyber tools.
As the Trump campaign’s top digital director, Parscale ran much of the operation from his San Antonio offices. He is expected to appear before at least one of several congressional committees investigating aspects of Russia’s interference in the election.
We can't remember...did Hillary also have help with her digital marketing efforts? Oh yeah, that's right...she enlisted the full support of a small, obscure company called Google (see: Wikileaks Reveals Google's "Strategic Plan" To Help Democrats Win The Election, Track Voters).