February 27, 2018

The Guy Trump Just Named to Run His 2020 Campaign Has Been Interviewed by Congress on Russia

Former digital director Brad Parscale’s 2016 activities have reportedly been probed by Mueller’s investigators.

Albin Lohr-Jones/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Brad Parscale, the digital director of his 2016 campaign, will manage his 2020 presidential re-election bid. While Parscale has not been a central figure in inquiries into the 2016 Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, he hasn’t managed to wholly avoid the scandal.

Parscale, who helped run the campaign’s online advertising and social media targeting, has been questioned by members of at least four congressional committees, and the digital activities he oversaw have been probed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators. Parscale has, in various statements since the campaign, broadly denied knowledge of Russian interference in the 2016 election, but he has never specifically denied knowing about any Trump campaign contacts with foreign governments.

In a November 3, 2017 letter to top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, Parscale said, “I do not have any firsthand knowledge of foreign interference in the 2016 election.” Parscale’s response used nearly the same wording as responses provided by several other data firms employed by the Trump campaign. But Parscale’s response, unlike those from two other firms, did not explicitly deny contacts with foreign governments or foreign actors. 

In a December email exchange with Mother Jones, Parscale argued he had addressed the discrepency in previous public statements. “I have said it on Fox News, 60 Minutes, Twitter, etc.,” he wrote. “Not sure how many more times I can make it clear.”

But Parscale declined to specifically rule out knowing of foreign contact by anyone involved with the Trump campaign, despite repeated questions on the topic. One potential explanation: Parscale was among Trump campaign officials copied by Donald Trump Jr., on an email in which he mentioned that he had received a direct message from WikiLeaks.

Screenshots of internal Slack communications among Breibart News staffers surfaced on Tuesday showing employees effusively praising Trump’s pick, which they interpreted as a kind of slap in the face to mainstream media and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Zuckerberg and his company have come under fire for failing to stop the proliferation of Russian bots.)

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate