in October 2017 that the Kremlin’s illicit maneuvers in these two states “appeared [to be] highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal.”100 The IRA will also be found to have launched “a series of pro-Trump rallies across both Florida and Pennsylvania in the months leading up the election,” thereby reaching one of the other two states that Manafort had previously indicated to Russian intelligence would be a key election battleground.101 Manafort will subsequently lie to the special counsel’s office about whether he discussed “battleground states” with Kremlin agents in August 2016 or at any other time.102
Because Tony Fabrizio, upon his hire by the Trump campaign in May 2016, becomes Trump’s chief pollster, “it [is] his job to share polling information with Trump’s campaign manager,” Manafort.103 The polling firm Fabrizio most closely liaises with during his work on Trump’s campaign, National Research, is responsible during the 2016 campaign for putting polls in the field in—among several other battlegrounds—Michigan and Wisconsin, two of the three states “where both the Trump campaign and Russia’s Internet Research Agency focused their efforts.”104 The New Yorker will note that one reason Russia would have wanted Fabrizio’s polling data from Manafort is that the data “potentially offered demographic targets for Russia’s [pre-election] bots and propaganda.”105
The Fabrizio polling data Manafort and Gates—both of whom will later be indicted by Robert Mueller—transmit to the Kremlin is seventy-five pages of “relevant,” “very detailed,” “very complex” information that is the “most recent” available internally within the Trump campaign.106 Indeed, it is so advanced that Manafort’s lawyer will, after Manafort is indicted, tell a federal court that he cannot himself understand it.107 For Kilimnik’s part, he will send at least six emails (believed to be to Manafort and Gates, though the emails are redacted in court filings) regarding the data.108 Additional court filings suggest that the data Manafort and Gates give Kilimnik may have come from the very end of the Republican primary season, a fact that leaves open the possibility that some of the polling data Manafort has Gates transmit in the final months of the 2016 campaign is from Cambridge Analytica; according to the BBC, in working with the Trump campaign during the general election, Cambridge Analytica largely used “legacy data models” and primary-campaign hard data—that is, information it had gathered while working on behalf of Texas senator Ted Cruz.109 Adam Geller, the founder and CEO of National Research, which collected Fabrizio’s data for not just Michigan and Wisconsin but also battleground states Missouri and Iowa, now says that “I honestly have no idea what was … shared with the Russians.”110 Broadly, however, it is known that Fabrizio’s internal polling data, by Fabrizio’s admission after the election, micro-targeted and micro-analyzed American voters not just by state but by race, income level, voting habits, and their opinion of America’s sociocultural trajectory. Fabrizio also assessed voters’ susceptibility to the sort of racialized appeals on immigration and other hot-button issues that both the Trump campaign and the Internet Research Agency would later exploit in seeking election-clinching victories for Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.111
Fabrizio is not a solo operator upon his hire by his longtime associates Manafort and Gates in May 2016. In fact, he works for Arthur J. Finkelstein and Associates, a consultancy run by controversial right-wing political consultants Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum.112 Apart from having advised both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Finkelstein is famous for having been the “secret campaign manager” behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s historically narrow election as prime minister of Israel in 1996, a campaign that made Finkelstein a “star,” according to BuzzFeed News.113 Two years later, Finkelstein hired Birnbaum to work with him for Netanyahu’s Likud party, and ten years after that, in 2008, Finkelstein and Birnbaum were loaned by their client Netanyahu to an aspiring Hungarian politician, Viktor Orban—a man who, after becoming Hungary’s prime minister in 2010, will in July 2016 breach diplomatic convention by endorsing Donald Trump for president.114 As of 2018, one of Orban’s top political advisers is another Trump ally: Steve Bannon, CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign.115
By 2016, Finkelstein and Birnbaum are famous for their years of work for Orban, whose 2010 election as Hungarian prime minister—his second stint in the role—was considered an “electoral masterpiece … with implications around the world.”116 One implication of Finkelstein and Birnbaum’s actions is Orban’s construction of an anti-Semitic alternate reality inside Hungary’s cloistered political sphere, one in which George Soros—a wealthy Hungarian-born