Team Trump's 2020 strategy is Clinton Cash all over again
In his tweets, Giuliani went on to levy allegations against Biden, former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, and “notorious mobster Whitey Bulger’s nephew.”
To the layperson, Giuliani’s reference to the latter two figures is quite incoherent, even if clearly aimed at painting a picture of institutional corruption on the part of the Democratic Party. But Giuliani is actually reciting details from conservative activist Peter Schweizer’s 2018 book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, signaling that the Trump apparatus plans to put that book at the heart of its campaign strategy.
Schweizer is a Breitbart senior editor at large and president of the right-wing think tank Government Accountability Institute. Both organizations have been heavily funded by the pro-Trump billionaire Mercer family and were previously headed by former Trump campaign and White House official Steve Bannon. Schweizer’s shoddy but influential 2015 book, Clinton Cash, used distortions and fabrications to make the case in the lead-up to the 2016 election that Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and philanthropic dealings rendered her unfit for the presidency. Right-wing and mainstream news outlets widely cited the book, and Trump referenced its discredited allegations on the campaign trail.
In recent days, veterans of the 2016 Clinton campaign have said that the attacks on Biden appear eerily familiar. That’s because they come from the same source: Schweizer, who again has published a book in the lead-up to the presidential election with the hope of creating a fog of corruption around the Democrats.
The attack differs in one key detail: its distribution strategy. Clinton Cash’s release relied on Bannon’s strategy of trying to “weaponize” the story by filtering it directly through the pages of major mainstream outlets. Several outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, “made exclusive agreements” with Schweizer, receiving chapters of the book they could read and report out prior to its publication. Crucially, even when the resulting articles indicated that aspects of the story didn’t hold up, they still helped give the allegations oxygen.
For whatever reason, that strategy wasn’t used with Secret Empires, which landed with little fanfare even in right-wing circles upon publication. Instead, Giuliani is the key vector for its claims. In interviews, television appearances, and on Twitter, he is citing allegations from Schweizer’s book in order to try to push it into the mainstream.
https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuliani/team-trumps-2020-strategy-clinton-cash-all-over-again
This is an old article but I think it is still reflects what the Trump administration was trying to do today: