Dear Editor,

Every day the question is asked, “What does Vladimir Putin have on Trump that makes him so servile and obsequious to the Russian plutocrat?”

Actually, the answer is there in plain sight. It is obvious now that Putin’s Russian hackers, information content creators, bots and trolls won the election for Trump. Absent their help, Clinton would unquestionably have won.

We now know that in addition to all the emails and other information that they stole from the DNC server, they also accessed and copied the Democratic “analytics” or game plan in the final weeks running up to the election. This information was then ported directly to Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign’s strategy analysis group for study and exploitation. Within a week of receiving this gold mine of information the Trump campaign canceled ad buys in several states and concentrated their efforts in several upper Midwest states including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

With a list of voters thought “flippable” (Facebook profiles) and information from Gussifer 2.0, they targeted likely voters with ads encouraging them to vote for Trump or, in the case of Democratic leaning voters, discouraging them from voting at all. So in the end a mere 73,000 voters in three states decided the election. That number is 0.7 percent of the votes cast in those states.

So Trump knows that the Russians handed him the election. And Trump knows that Mueller knows. So that is why he is so agitated and frantic as the day of reckoning approaches. And now we learn that Trump lied about knowing about the meeting in Trump Tower with the Russians. Don Jr. told him and he approved it. Practically everything he has said in the past year and a half has been a lie!

Jim Porter

Danville