NY Times: Trump Campaign Aid Rick Gates Requested Online Manipulation Plans From Israeli
COOPER: The top Trump campaign official reportedly was looking into getting help from an Israeli intelligence company to create fake online identities and social media manipulation and gather intelligence to help defeat opponents. This is new reporting are "New York Times" which reports that Rick Gates asked for proposal back in 2016 from in company. Mark Mazzetti is one of the reporters in byline of the story, he joins us now. So mark, can you just walk us through your reporting, exactly what Gates was trying to do here?</s>MARK MAZZETTI, WASHINGTON INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT, NEW YORK TIMES: Right. So this is the spring of 2016 right's Donald Trump was emerging out of the primary fight, and the big concern at the time was the convention, and this idea that there could be a revolt at the convention where delegates didn't actually go for Trump, they went it for Ted Cruz. So at this time Rick Gates who just join the campaign with Paul Manafort, he has a meeting in Washington with a guy named George Birnbaum, who presents this idea of, this Israeli company can do all sorts of social media manipulation in order to help the campaign. They can create fake identities Botts Avatars et cetera to influence the delegates, so they don't do this defection towards Cruz. Gates appears interested in the proposal, and he has Birnbaum tell the company to draw up multiple proposals, not only on the convention strategy, but also to gather intelligence about Hillary Clinton and her closest aides, because they were already worried at that time about the general election.</s>COOPER: So the campaign according to your reporting never accepted the firm's proposal, is there anything illegal about this?</s>MAZZETTI: Well, there was a legal review that was done by the company with Covington & Burling firm right here in Washington. It's -- in this sort of gray area of what exactly in an election is legal and illegal, we don't know the results of the legal review. Certainly we know that there is -- there are regulations about extensive foreign help to a campaign by foreign citizens. That would have been one of the things that Covington would have looked at about the legality. Certainly it seems in that area of question, which is, as we know, kind of at the heart of what Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is looking at, which is what did the Trump campaign know about what Russia was doing in a very similar effort? You know, I think stepping back for a second is really interesting to see that what this Israeli firm is proposing was similar to what the Russians ended up doing for the Trump campaign.</s>COOPER: But as far as we know there's no connection at least with this proposal to Russia?</s>MAZZETTI: Not that we know of.</s>COOPER: And I assume -- I mean, obviously Gates is cooperating with Mueller, so Robert Mueller has all this information and more?</s>MAZZETTI: Right. So we reported that Mueller has the proposals that we wrote about in the story, and has not only we presume questioned Gates about them, but is also his investigators in the FBI have gone to Israel and they've interviewed numerous employees with a firm called cy-group. The firm no longer exists. But this has been an information gathering effort by the Mueller team to get to the bottom of this and see where else it goes.</s>COOPER: Yes. Another hint of where the Mueller investigation may go. It's a fascinating reporting. Mark Mazzetti. Mark, thank you so much.</s>MAZZETTI: Thanks, Anderson.</s>COOPER: Coming up, we have new details about the horrific limousine crash that killed 20 people in Upstate New York this past weekend. New York's governor says the vehicle shouldn't have been on the road and the driver shouldn't have been driving it. The latest on that is next.