Courtesy of Pam Martens
For over a year, Carole Cadwalladr has been reporting in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper about the bizarre overlap between the people and companies involved in Donald Trump’s rise to the Presidency in the U.S. and the June 23, 2016 Brexit vote in the U.K. where citizens voted in a referendum to take the U.K. out of the European Union.
Now, one of those companies, Cambridge Analytica, is the subject of intense focus on both sides of the pond. Last evening in the U.S., cable news aired video of Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, speaking with undercover reporters about a political dirty tricks campaign the company could run. Nix cited an example of setting up hidden cameras to catch a politician saying he would accept a bribe or the company could send in girls to seduce the politician. Nix said:
“We could bring some Ukrainians in on holiday with us, you know, you know what I’m saying. They are very beautiful. I find that works very well.”
Those bombshell reports came on the heels of weekend reporting that Cambridge Analytica had digitally mined private information on more than 50 million Facebook users which it then used to target voters for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in the spring of 2016 and “paid it more than $6.2 million,” according to a Reuters report.
But Trump’s campaign wasn’t the only organization paying Cambridge Analytica. According to election complaints filed in 2016 by the Campaign Legal Center, a SuperPac, Make America Number 1, with ties to both Steve Bannon and billionaire hedge fund manager, Robert Mercer, paid $4.6 million to Cambridge Analytica. The complaint notes:
“Specifically, CLC’s complaint alleged that Make America Number 1 appeared to have paid compensation to Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon (now White House chief strategist) via payments to the firms Glittering Steel LLC and Cambridge Analytica, which are incorporated at the same address as Bannon’s consulting firm and closely associated with him. These payments constitute in-kind contributions to Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. from Make America Number 1 in the form of compensation for personal services rendered to the campaign. U.S.C. § 30101(8)(A)(ii)…
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