The Washington Post reports:

A new report this morning makes one thing abundantly clear about Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign: Trump was right that many things were “rigged” . . . in ways that benefited him or his associates. And in some cases, Trump’s campaign was the one doing the rigging.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In January 2014, Mr. Cohen asked Mr. Gauger to help Mr. Trump score well in a CNBC online poll to identify the country’s top business leaders by writing a computer script to repeatedly vote for him. Mr. Gauger was unable to get Mr. Trump into the top 100 candidates. In February 2015, as Mr. Trump prepared to enter the presidential race, Mr. Cohen asked him to do the same for a Drudge Report poll of potential Republican candidates, Mr. Gauger said. Mr. Trump ranked fifth, with about 24,000 votes, or 5% of the total.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump regularly touted polls that showed him leading while dismissing polling that showed him trailing. Part of this strategy relied on pointing to unscientific online click-in polls, the sort that his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen tried to rig in at least two instances. (Cohen later tweeted he attempted to rig these surveys at the direction of Trump.)

“Drudge does a big poll, hundreds of thousands of people vote after the debates,” Trump said in November 2015. “It’s an online poll, which I think are actually better in many respects than when they interview 300 people and they say, ‘You’re winning.’ I don’t understand 300 people.” [Continue reading…]

Matt Drudge has some questions pic.twitter.com/9BVFziEOtc

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) January 17, 2019