Drudge Report banner blares: ‘Did Trump bribe Drudge poll?’ – Washington Examiner

The Drudge Report used the banner on its website on Thursday to react to a report on how a poll the website conducted was rigged to be more in favor of President Trump.

“Did Trump bribe Drudge poll?” read the top headline, linking to the original report of the poll-rigging.

The Wall Street Journal report published earlier in the morning said that Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen paid John Gauger, who owns a small tech company, to manipulate online polls in Trump’s favor before his presidential campaign.

Cohen confirmed the story in a tweet Thursday morning, adding that he regrets his “blind loyalty” to Trump.

“What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of Donald Trump. I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it,” Cohen posted to Twitter.

The article says that both Drudge Report, a popular conservative aggregation website, and CNBC polls were targeted by the RedFinch Solutions LLC efforts on behalf of Cohen and Trump.

The Drudge Report, run by the reclusive Matt Drudge, has not posted anything else as to whether it detected any sort of attempted influence on its poll and if the efforts were successful in influencing the outcome.

The CNBC online poll that was targeted by RedFinch and Cohen in January 2014 asked respondents to narrow down a list of 200 of the country’s top business leaders to 25. However, Trump did not even make the second round of polling, which narrowed the list down to 100 before naming the top 25 top business leaders in celebration of its 25th anniversary.

At the time, Trump expressed his dismay with the poll, claiming that he was actually taken off the list when the votes had him ranked as the ninth top business leader.

“The #CNBC 25 poll is a joke,” Trump tweeted back in 2014. “I was in 9th place and taken off. (Politics?) No wonder @CNBC ratings are going down the tubes.”