Rigged election: Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort “knew” which swing states Donald Trump would win
As the investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal continues to take new turns, some older pieces of the puzzle have now become crucial in the proper context. New attention is being focused on Cambridge Analytica, the voter data analysis arm of the Trump campaign, which has been caught admitting in an email that it was seeking to conspire with Russian-controlled cyberterrorist Julian Assange. Before Steve Bannon took over the Trump campaign, he had been the head of the company in question.
This casts a very old piece of information about Steve Bannon in a very new light. Just days after Donald Trump shockingly won the election, an entertainment outlet called The Hollywood Reporter revealed that one of its reporters had spoken with Steve Bannon several months before the election. At the time, Bannon asserted that Donald Trump was going to win the states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan (link). So is Bannon merely an uncanny guesser, or were these swing states rigged by Cambridge Analytica and Russia?
Steve Bannon did a terrible job of running the Donald Trump campaign when it came to these swing states. For instance he had Trump speaking in black churches in Michigan, which didn’t gain him a single new vote. Instead it seemed more like Bannon had sent Trump to Michigan near the end of the election simply for the sake of appearances, as if someone had told him Trump was going to magically win Michigan, and they should try to create a plausible explanation for it.
Furthermore, before the election, Paul Manafort also told Donald Trump to go to Michigan (see the 21st paragraph of this Bloomberg article). This was after Manafort had been forced to resign from the campaign due to his close financial ties to the Kremlin. Once again, it all raises the question of whether Trump’s dirtiest advisers were all psychics, or whether Russia rigged the vote totals in certain swing states such that that they knew for a fact which states he would win.
