Narratology: What Polling Data?

The Grand Havana Room, New York City.

Remember how we've learned that Paul Manafort passed a lot of confidential Trump polling information ("'topline' data, which included the results of internal polling including state, dates, generic, decided GOP, and other such numbers") to his Ukrainian confederate Konstantin Kilimnik, culminating on 2 August 2016, when Kilimnik flew in to New York in the early evening and met with Gates and Manafort (fresh from a 5:00 meeting with Trump and Giuliani at Trump Tower) at the Grand Havana Room at 666 Fifth Avenue (yes, Jared's white elephant building), where Manafort explained, at considerable length, his plan for achieving a Trump victory?

Kilimnik told Patten that at the New York cigar bar meeting, Manafort stated that they have a plan to beat Hillary Clinton which included Manafort bringing discipline and an organized strategy to the campaign. Moreover, because Clinton's negatives were so low [sic]-if they could focus on her negatives they could win the election. Manafort discussed the Fabrizio internal Trump polling data with Kilimnik, and explained that Fabrizio 's polling numbers showed that the Clinton negatives, referred to as a 'therm poll, ' were high. Thus, based on this polling there was a chance Trump could win. (Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Election Interference, vol. 5)

And how Kilimnik relayed the stuff to various persons including their Russian patron Oleg Deripaska and some Ukrainian oligarchs, to the displeasure of Rick Gates, who didn't trust Kilimnik and didn't see the point?

I've struggled with wondering what exactly Russian intelligence might have been able to do with this information and what they wanted it for and found myself too ill-informed to think of anything that made any sense—it was all mixed up in my mind with the Facebook operation. So a few days ago I ran into something that's simple enough to be true, in a kind of summary by Rob Waldeck of material from his October book The Black Ledger: How Trump Brought Putin's Disinformation War to America—that it was simply a presentation of polling data

For the Record: The Rice and Fall

Updated

John Podesta's creamy risotto as reconstructed by Julian Assange and Food & Wine. No, Assange had nothing to do with the culinary part. To paraphrase Count Dracula, "I never cook... food." Photos by Tara Fisher and David Becker/Getty Images.

LEAKED: Wikileaks hack reveals John Podesta's secret to creamy Risotto pic.twitter.com/A5dW4mG9c6

— Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) October 11, 2016

Sour, sour day. I see Podesta doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's", but I can assure you he's right about the risotto. I find it's also necessary to add grated cheese, even if it means contradicting the laws of Italian cooking by combining cheese with mushrooms or seafood, to endow the creaminess with body.

Democrat logic right now:

1) Hillary Clinton deletes thousands of emails from a private server.
- Dems: “Nothing to see here!”

2) AG Barr releases an entire 488-page Special Counsel report with only light redactions.
- Dems: “It’s a cover up!”

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) May 5, 2019

link for FBI judgment on email deletions: https://t.co/ocfK5penRs
link for FBI judgment on Trump obstruction: https://t.co/3sUTI2AmY8 pic.twitter.com/7QM9COhENn

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) May 5, 2019

Correspondence: About those emails

Martyr Procopius, Sinai, 12th century, via IconReader.

Procopius wrote, re yesterday's post:

"Those would be the 20,000 emails from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's personal Gmail account, which was hacked in March 2016." Wait a minute -- where did this interpretation come from? I thought they were supposed to be part of the 30,000 emails Hillary supposedly deleted? Why would anybody get excited about Podesta's emails which were already open to the public? I thought the reason to be angry about the proposal was because it showed that the FSA, the Russian intelligence agency, had been spying on Hillary's emails and stole them before she deleted them so able to expose her illegal behavior.

Also, "... (though they knew that the meeting itself, entertaining an offer of campaign assistance from a foreign governments, was unlawful) ." Wow. You're able to read minds! That must be fun. I think most people knew that campaign contributions in the form of money was illegal, but I don't think that many people realized that providing opposition research was also illegal. Has that actually been tested in court?

I spent so much time answering that I might as well just post it here: