contested areas at such a pace and in such a volume that it makes it appear as though Netanyahu is deliberately digging the Israeli-Palestinian peace process an early grave.220 There is confidence within the Netanyahu administration that a President Trump would take no such step, and yet no confidence at all that a President Clinton would do anything but quickly seek a UN resolution condemning new Israeli settlements. As the New Yorker will report in June 2018, prior to the 2016 presidential election Netanyahu was “confident that Trump would look out for his interests and share his opposition to Obama’s policies [in the Middle East]. Even before Trump entered the White House, Israeli officials talked about having more influence and a freer hand than ever before.”221 Netanyahu has already decided what he will do with this “freer hand,” too; during the Obama administration the Israeli prime minister has developed a “grand strategy for transforming the direction of Middle Eastern politics. His overarching ambition [is] … to form a coalition with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to combat Iran.”222 Netanyahu’s plan dovetails with the “grand bargain” imagined by Michael Flynn and Thomas Barrack, contemplated in great detail by the Red Sea conspirators, and hinted at in Trump’s public speeches.
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In midsummer 2016, per Bloomberg, Dustin Stockton, a writer for Breitbart, sponsors a “10-week [media] blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul [Trump], or simply sit out the election.”223 Steve Bannon’s level of involvement in the Breitbart writer’s campaign is unknown, but in May 2018 a former employee of Trump’s data firm—Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica—will tell a Senate committee “that Bannon tried to use [Cambridge Analytica] to suppress the black vote in key states.”224 The similarity between this Bannon-led effort and Stockton’s Breitbart-led effort will prompt Bloomberg to call Stockton “an employee at Bannon’s former news site [who] worked as an off-the-books political operative in the service of a similar goal” as the man who had been—until quite recently—his boss.225
At former Bannon employee Stockton’s direction, a man named Bruce Carter founds Trump for Urban Communities (TUC), an organization that, according to Bloomberg, “never disclose[s] its spending to the Federal Election Commission—a possible violation of election law.”226 Carter will say that in founding Trump for Urban Communities, “he believed he was working for the [Trump] campaign” and that the campaign was therefore reporting all spending by TUC in accordance with federal law.227
Lawrence Noble, former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for both Republican and Democratic administrations, will tell Bloomberg in 2018 that, legally speaking, there are “real problems” with TUC, if its operations were as described by Carter.228 As Bloomberg summarizes, “The operation suggest[s] possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and [Carter’s] nominally independent effort. If there was coordination, election law dictates that any contributions to groups such as [TUC] must fall within individual limits: no more than $2,700 for a candidate.”229 Bloomberg will note that one supporter of TUC alone “far exceeded that cap, giving about $100,000” to the organization.230 Noble, now director and general counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, says, “I would think this is more than enough evidence for the FEC to open an investigation.”231
Stockton will tell Bloomberg that “Trump performed particularly well in the areas [TUC] targeted,” noting that in Pennsylvania—one of the three states that determined the outcome of the 2016 election, with Trump beating Clinton by 44,000 votes out of 6.2 million cast (0.7 percent)—“Clinton won about 35,000 fewer votes [in Philadelphia] than Obama did in 2012, and that drop was primarily in majority-black wards.”232 “Those ballots alone,” Bloomberg notes, “could have cut Trump’s victory margin in Pennsylvania by more than half.”233 Stockton, who now admits his operation was “telling people not to vote,” says “Trump vastly outperformed the projection models [for African American voters] in the twelve areas Bruce [Carter] was targeting” in three battleground states: Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina, all of which are states Trump won on Election Day in 2016.234 For his part, Carter now says that Breitbart was “aggressive” in pursuing him, a “courtship” that consisted, in substantial part, of Breitbart staffer Stockton “mak[ing] him aware of some of the research that Breitbart was pushing at the time,” which in Stockton’s case largely comprised articles detailing WikiLeaks’ October 2016 data-dumps.235
Breitbart’s recruitment of Carter occurred while Bannon was an executive there, and once Bannon became the Trump campaign’s chief executive officer on August 17, 2016, it included promises that