THE TIES THAT BIND:

If there was a Deep Throat in the Trump-Russia scandal, this is what he'd be telling today's Woodwards and Bernsteins:

Follow the data.

With all the drama over this week's bombshell disclosures of Donald Trump Jr.'s emails and a previously unknown Trump Tower meeting between top campaign officials and a woman who'd been pitched to them as "a Russian government lawyer," there was another investigative report that arguably could have equal or greater significance in the ongoing probes of wrongdoing in the 2016 campaign. It said probers are now taking a much closer look at possible cooperation between Russia -- which had an operation to churn out "fake news" about Hillary Clinton during the fall campaign  -- and the Trump campaign's data operation.

The campaign's data effort was overseen by President Trump's son-in-law and arguably his closest adviser, Jared Kushner. Here's what the McClatchy News Service reported Wednesday:

Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign's digital operation - overseen by Jared Kushner - helped guide Russia's sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Congressional and Justice Department investigators are focusing on whether Trump's campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states - areas where Trump's digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton, according to several people familiar with the parallel inquiries.

The Washington Post also took a deep dive into the important of the "fake news" blitz in helping bring out Trump's surprise victory in November.

In October of last year, Bloomberg News reported that the campaign's digital arm, run by Brad Parscale, would target possible Hillary Clinton voters for an inverse pitch. The Trump campaign would not show them ads making the case for voting for Trump; instead, they showed videos that they hoped would dampen enthusiasm for Clinton -- and get the voters to stay home.

[A] young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he'd created of Clinton delivering the "super predator" line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: "Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators." The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook "dark posts" -- nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, "only the people we want to see it, see it."

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia back in May questioned how the Russian fake-news-spreaders knew which voters to contact. He said: "When you see some of the explanation and some of the fact that it appears that, for example, women and African Americans were targeted in places like Wisconsin and Michigan, where the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play ... It was interesting that those states seem to be targeted where the bots -- where they could could create a lot of these fake Twitter and Facebook accounts, could in fact overwhelm the targeted search engines that would end up saying on your news feed, you suddenly got stuff that "Hillary Clinton's sick" or "Hillary Clinton's stealing money from the State Department."

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