Michael Cohen, United States President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, said yesterday he paid a firm to manipulate online polling data “at the direction of and for the sole benefit of” Trump.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen had paid the data firm RedFinch Solutions to manipulate two public opinion polls in favour of Trump before the 2016 presidential campaign.
“As for the @WSJ article on poll rigging,” Cohen wrote on Twitter yesterday, “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 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. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently referred to his polling numbers to help fuel his candidacy.
Cohen was sentenced last month to three years in prison for his role in making illegal hush-money payments to women to help Trump’s campaign 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. The Journal 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 candidates. The move came as Trump was preparing to enter the 2016 presidential election race, the newspaper reported.
Trump ranked fifth in the Drudge Report poll, with about 24,000 votes, or 5 percent of the total, according to the Journal. 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.