Washington: US Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe investigators have been looking into why a top Trump campaign official requested proposals from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, use social media manipulation and gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton.
According to interviews and copies of the proposals, Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw the promise of a disruption effort to swing voters in Trump’s favour.
The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by The New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents.
A third proposal by the company, Psy-Group, which is staffed by former Israeli intelligence operatives, sketched out a months-long plan to help Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions. The proposals, part of what Psy-Group called “Project Rome”, used code names to identify the players — Trump was “Lion” and Clinton was “Forest”. Cruz, who Trump campaign officials feared might lead a revolt over the Republican presidential nomination, was “Bear”.
Read the article by Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, David D Kirkpatrick & Maggie Haberman in The Sydney Morning Herald (from The New York Times).