At least five people close to Trump engaged with Russian Twitter trolls from 2015 to 2017

On Wednesday, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, released a list of Twitter accounts identified as being linked to Russians seeking to meddle in the 2016 presidential campaign. A review of that list, which included more than 2,000 usernames, found that on at least 11 occasions, four people close to Donald Trump had retweeted or engaged with those usernames between September 2015 and February of this year. Four of those tweets were sent in the last week of the campaign.

Because Twitter usernames can change, we can’t say with certainty that all of the tweets we identified (using an index of tweets compiled by the Trump Twitter Archive) were engaging with Russian users at the time they were sent. Most of the tweets, though, were retweets of an account called TEN_GOP, an account that purportedly was associated with the Tennessee Republican Party but that was later revealed to be part of Russia’s efforts to sway the election. (Many of these tweets have been reported previously, including by Vanity Fair.)

This account has been flagged before. On Wednesday, the Daily Beast reported that Michael T. Flynn, while advising Trump’s campaign last year, had encouraged his followers — about 57,000 accounts at that point — to follow the account.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/02/at-least-five-people-close-to-trump-engaged-with-russian-twitter-trolls-from-2015-to-2017/?utm_term=.f9d3a1a65e20