In or around the latter half of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through their ORGANIZATION-controlled personas, began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate.

Whenever these allegations surface about what the Russians did via social media to influence the election, it is helpful to go back to reporting by Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg from October 2016 on the social media strategy that was adopted by the Trump campaign. Keep in mind that it was all Jared Kushner’s baby.

Beginning last November, then ramping up in earnest when Trump became the Republican nominee, Kushner quietly built a sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign that’s become the locus of his father-in-law’s presidential bid… To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed. But after Trump locked down the GOP nomination by winning Indiana’s primary, Kushner tapped [Brad] Parscale, a political novice who built web pages for the Trump family’s business and charities, to begin an ambitious digital operation fashioned around a database they named Project Alamo.

So while Russian bots were urging Sanders supporters and African Americans to either vote for Jill Stein or stay home on election day, what was the Trump campaign’s strategy?

Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle…Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted. To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.

Could it be that both the Russian bots and the Trump campaign were independently attempting to suppress the votes of Sanders supporters and African Americans (while the campaign added young women to the mix)? In a universe where far-fetched things happen, I guess it’s possible. However, the much more likely explanation is that when two entities adopt the same strategy, they are probably coordinating their efforts in order to have maximum impact. That isn’t direct evidence of a conspiracy, but it certainly points in that direction.