If true, Paul Manafort sharing polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik is a big deal. A big question has always been how did the Russians know which areas of the country to focus their misinformation on? How did they know which districts were pro-Trump who could be brought in deeper into the Trump phenomenon and which districts were pro-Clinton who could be dissuaded by false news to flip them to Trump or Independent? After all, the entire plan was to help get Trump elected. Kilimnik is/was tied to Russian Intelligence and was still so in 2016 so him being given polling data is big in trying to understand how the Russians worked their pro-Trump efforts.
The two big questions from this are:
1) Did Candidate Trump or anyone else on the Campaign know about this? (Manafort's deputy Rick Gates seemingly did based on reporting)
2) What did Kilimnik do with the polling data? Did he pass it onto Russian Intelligence or to someone close to the Kremlin who could then pass it along or up the chain?
Anyway here is the New York Times' in-depth article about it - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/po...imnik.html
The two big questions from this are:
1) Did Candidate Trump or anyone else on the Campaign know about this? (Manafort's deputy Rick Gates seemingly did based on reporting)
2) What did Kilimnik do with the polling data? Did he pass it onto Russian Intelligence or to someone close to the Kremlin who could then pass it along or up the chain?
Anyway here is the New York Times' in-depth article about it - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/po...imnik.html