Here’s a peek at how Paul Manafort cheated on Donald Trump’s behalf during the election

| 9:40 pm EDT April 5, 2018
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Over the past month we’ve learned that the Donald Trump campaign’s data firm Cambridge Analytica was cheating during the election by working with user data that it stole from fifty million Facebook users. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is also in the process of exposing how the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to cheat in the election. If you want a peek at what that looked like, here it is.

Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign manager for a few months, and he was also Trump’s campaign chairman for a much longer period of time. Of course before that, Manafort was working for Viktor Yanukovych, a fellow Kremlin puppet, in Ukraine. Not shockingly, Manafort was cheating on Yanukovych’s behalf. The Guardian has exposed some of the specific ways in which Manafort was cheating and playing dirty in Ukraine.

For instance, Manafort sought to stuff the Wikipedia pages of Yanukovych’s opponents with damaging false claims. He also set up a fake think tank for the purpose of spreading positive claims about Yanukovych. Here’s the most interesting one: “Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton when she was US secretary of state.” Since Manafort was willing to use these tactics in Ukraine politics, it’s a safe bet that he ended up using the same or similar tactics while running the Donald Trump campaign.

So now we have a taste of how Paul Manafort cheated on Donald Trump’s behalf during the election: fake information, fake entities, and partnering with propaganda sites to disseminate fake news. It also stands out as remarkable that Manafort was launching dishonest attacks on Hillary Clinton as part of his strategy to help a Kremlin puppet in Ukraine. That’s how far and wide Vladimir Putin’s smear tactics against Hillary Clinton stretch.