GP SCALED ITS ENTERPRISE ALONG WITH PROJECT ALAMO

In September 2016, The Guardian, along with other articles cited herein, reported that GP started its Trump operation with 60 employees, but was trying to grow to 100 to finish the race.

Businessweek noted:

After Trump won the Indiana primary, vanquishing his remaining rivals, Parscale had to integrate his do-it-yourself operation with two established players who would jostle for primacy as supplier of Trump’s data. The first was Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. Among its investors is the hedge fund titan Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who were about to become some of the largest donors to the Trump cause. Locations for the candidate’s rallies, long the centerpiece of his media-centric candidacy, are guided by a Cambridge Analytica ranking of the places in a state with the largest clusters of persuadable voters.

Mr. Parscale told the Washington Post in October that he hired Cambridge Analytica after they cold-called him (Do we believe that?).

Vanity Fair reported in October that

Parscale’s 100-person crack team reportedly spends $70 million a month to take people who are leaning toward Trump and turn them into the candidate’s most ardent fans.

$70M a month? Have a look at this spreadsheet I made for campaign expenditures to Giles Parscale in 2016 (I’ve also included total expenditures for 2016 (and monthly) so that the relative size of payments to GP can be considered):

Note 11: I’ve placed direct links to Trump campaign payment invoices for both GP and Cambridge Analytica here.

The spreadsheet shows total monthly campaign expenditures only exceeding $70M twice: September and the period called “November Post-General.” In said periods, GP received payments from the campaign totaling $20.6M and $28.8M, respectively. The sheet also shows that payments to GP ranged from 21% to 46% of the Trump campaign’s monthly expenditures for June through November 2016. Even if the payments made to Cambridge Analytics are added to the amounts received by GP, which includes a hefty $5M payment on September 1, 2016, the campaign’s easily-identifiable GP-related expenditures do not come close to $70M in any one month. If Parscale’s team was spending $70M a month on its operations for the campaign while never coming close to receiving that amount from the campaign, then GP lost money unless….err… perhaps we will discover a new meaning for “in the red.”

UPDATE: @RVAwonk has a good explanation. It might also be something like GP had its own vendors/bills to pay (good way to create some document gaps between parties). Payments to GP were also irregular in frequency and amount.

Strategic Burger Diplomacy (SBD)

You must be wondering if anyone in the campaign noticed that the cheap website guy from Texas who charged $1,500 for a campaign website was routinely charging over $10 million a month during peak campaign season. I am wondering that too. :)

Trump campaign officials must have really liked the burger strategy:

The Russian Embassy in D.C., along with its stakeholders, most certainly appreciated the burger strategy — they appear to have embraced burger diplomacy:

Several interesting pictures in this gallery

Note 12(c): UPDATE — An article by Bill Littlefield featuring Trumpsters referencing burgers HERE.

“A bolt of lightning literally hit a house, and the rains came down, and we raced in our carts back to the clubhouse,” Dodson says. “And, truthfully, I thought, ‘I’m going to be able to clear out of here now. This will be great.’ And I’m loading my clubs in the back of my car, thinking I can get an early start back to Southern Pines for our trip to Latrobe. And this kid comes running out: ‘Mr. Dodson! Mr. Trump really wants you to come in and have a cheeseburger.’ And I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ And that kid pointed out they were ‘really, really awesome cheeseburgers.’

Note 12(e): Continuing on with Burger Boats… I just discovered that a prominent “liker” on the Burger Boats Facebook page is a gentleman named John Peddie (tragic last name) from Boca Raton, FL. Mr. Peddie — a commodities supplier, cigar aficionado, and plane watcher — loves his Burger yacht.

Mr. Peddie also loves Trump (he was invited to the inauguration) and has taken advantage recently of getting an expedited passport for a trip to Trinidad & Tobago.

You should see who he follows on Twitter. He followed Felix Sater before it was cool.

Followed Felix even before the Trumpster and Co.

Mr. Peddie is married to Olga. Olga is a Sr. VP at Cendyn.

You’ll recall from other Supplements, as well as the research of others, that Cendyn has an odd-link to the Trump campaign. In particular, and as noted by The Washington Post back in November 2016:

The trump-email.com domain that Alfa was connecting to was hosted by a company called Cendyn. Cendyn runs marketing systems for the hospitality industry, meaning that it offers an out-of-the-box solution for a company that owns a bunch of hotels to push out sales pitch emails to its customers. In other words, trump-email.com isn’t the email server Trump used to send emails from his closet. It was a domain name that linked back to a Cendyn server

See also…

Must be an omen…

A blimp dressed as one of GRU’s minions.

Parscale may just have the Midas Touch when it comes to communicating in a way the Russians understand. After all, he’s a farm kid from beef country.

Note 15a: Speaking of Montana — I’m reminded of our newly appointed Dept of Interior Secretary as well as this online publication, ZeroHedge, and its ownership:

Note 15b: A, B, C (and speaking of trains — C1, C2)

Note 15c — Article in The Guardian dated 28–4–2017: “GOP candidate has financial ties to US-sanctioned Russian companies” (from MT, of course).

Greg Gianforte, who is the GOP standard bearer in the upcoming special election in Montana, owns just under $250,000 in shares in two index funds that are invested in the Russian economy to match its overall performance. According to a financial disclosure filed with the clerk of the House of Representatives, the Montana tech mogul owns almost $150,000 worth of shares in VanEck Vectors Russia ETF and $92,400 in the IShares MSCF Russia ETF fund.Both are indexed to the Russian equities market and have significant holdings in companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft that came under US sanctions in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of the Crimea.

Note 16: I know, you think I’m nutty. I’ve been following this trail for a while. I wrote this back in December 2015, it might give you a better idea of the white rabbit I’ve been chasing:

Finally, it seems that both GP and the Russian Embassy in D.C. have related work experience: both love helping to sell Crimean real estate

See here:

and here: