Democrats fume over Pascale's limited answers on Russian digital meddling
Donald Trump’s digital guru has stonewalled questions about Kremlin election interference, Democrats say, even as he launches Trump’s reelection campaign.
By JOSH MEYER 03/19/2018 05:02 AM EDT
Even as digital media guru Brad Parscale takes over President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, federal investigators have mounting questions about the high-tech “secret weapon” Parscale says was instrumental to Trump’s 2016 victory — including whether it might have played a role in Russian election meddling. But Pascale isn’t talking.
That’s despite the fact that Democrats on at least three different congressional committees say they want to hear more from Parscale about potential data sharing between the campaign and Russian entities. Democrats say evidence of such collaboration — or even Russian manipulation of Trump campaign software that may have been unknown to Trump aides — would be highly explosive given its potentially direct impact on the election’s outcome and legitimacy.
While Republicans seem content with Parscale’s insistence he knows nothing about the Russian scheme, more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and staffers interviewed by POLITICO say that no investigation into Moscow’s election interference can be complete without a full accounting from Trump’s 2016 digital campaign director — especially given that special counsel Robert Mueller has recently focused on Kremlin-linked efforts to manipulate election-related social media.
Over the weekend, several Democrats said they were extremely concerned about recent media reports that Cambridge Analytica, the conservative data analytics firm Parscale hired for the campaign, had improperly collected information on more than 50 million Facebook users and likely used it in the voter-targeting operation. The new reporting, in The New York Times and the Observer of London, also suggested that Cambridge Analytica has previously undisclosed connections to Russia.
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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/19/trump-russian-digital-parscale-470263
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