Ex-Trump lawyer acknowledges rigging polls before 2016 US elections
US President Donald Trump’s estranged former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has acknowledged that he paid a technology company to manipulate online polling data in favor of Trump before the 2016 presidential campaign.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Cohen had paid the data firm RedFinch Solutions to manipulate two public opinion polls “at the direction of and for the sole benefit of” Trump.
Cohen verified the Wall Street Journal report in a tweet after the article was published.
“As for the @WSJ article on poll rigging,” Cohen wrote on Twitter. “What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of @realDonaldTrump @POTUS. I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it.”
The newspaper said Cohen commissioned John Gauger, who runs RedFinch Solutions, to write a computer script to repeatedly vote for Trump in a February 2015 Drudge Report poll on potential Republican presidential candidates.
Cohen also commissioned Gauger to do the same for a 2014 CNBC online poll identifying the country’s top business leaders, although Trump was unable to break into the top 100 candidates, the Journal reported.
During his election campaign, Trump frequently referred to his polling numbers to help fuel his candidacy. The attempts to influence the polls ultimately proved largely unsuccessful but shed a light on the tactics of the Trump campaign and Cohen’s role within it.
Last month, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in making illegal hush-money payments to Trump’s former lovers to help him in the election race and for lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Tower project in Russia.
Cohen has said Trump had directed him to commit the campaign-finance violations, which Trump has denied.
Cohen worked for Trump from 2006 until May 2018 as his self-proclaimed fixer, and once said he would take a bullet for Trump.
But the relationship has since publicly soured. Trump has called Cohen a “rat,” while Cohen has cooperated with US Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia during the election campaign.
Both Trump and Moscow have denied any collusion.
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