Trump campaign ties probed
Special counsel in Russia investigation scrutinizes connections with company Cambridge Analytica
WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Mueller is scrutinizing the connections between U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign and the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which has come under fierce criticism over reports that it swiped the data of more than 50 million Facebook users to sway elections.
Mueller’s investigators have asked former campaign officials about the Trump campaign’s data operations, particularly about how it collected and utilized voter data in battleground states, according to a person with direct knowledge of the line of inquiry but not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The investigators have also asked some of Trump’s data team, which included analysts at the Republican National Committee, about its relationship with Cambridge Analytica, according to two former campaign officials. The campaign paid the firm just under $6 million US for its work in 2016, according to federal records.
Authorities in Britain and the United States are investigating whether Cambridge Analytica might have used data improperly obtained from Facebook to try to influence elections, including the 2016 White House race.
Mueller is leading a criminal probe into whether Trump’s Republican presidential campaign had ties to Russia and whether he may have obstructed justice.
The Trump campaign has distanced itself from the data-mining firm, which had been financed by major Republican donors and, for a time, employed Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur who later became Trump’s campaign chief executive.
Trump turned to Twitter on Thursday to boast about his campaign’s social-media efforts compared with those of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, but it was not clear what prompted the declaration.
“Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary’s large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!” Trump wrote.
Staffers at Cambridge Analytica made several overtures to the Trump campaign before being retained. They requested a meeting in spring 2015, before Trump announced his candidacy, according to four former campaign officials.
Alexander Nix, the Cambridge Analytica CEO captured on a sting video released this week, met with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to make a pitch for the data-mining company’s voter target products, including its so-called psychographic method.
Lewandowski passed, in part because the staff believed Trump would not be willing to make a sizable financial investment in an analytics firm, according to two of the campaign officials.
Cambridge then went to work for the campaign of Trump’s Republican rivals Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. But after Trump became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, the data firm reached out again, this time to Paul Manafort, who had replaced Lewandowski as campaign chairman.
Manafort was also skeptical about the effectiveness of the firm’s methods, but Cambridge was hired, in part as a friendly gesture to the Mercer family, heavyweight Republican donors who helped fund the company’s launch a few years earlier, according to one of the former campaign officials.
Bannon attempted to draw a line between the campaign and Cambridge while appearing at a Financial Times panel in New York on Thursday. Bannon said he had no knowledge of the datamining operation and instead put the blame on Facebook, saying the social network cared more about profits than privacy and “takes your data for free and creates huge margins.”
Victoria native Chris Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, told the Washington Post that Cambridge had begun testing phrases like “drain the swamp” and “deep state” well before Trump launched his campaign. The president began incorporating those concepts into his stump speech in the campaign soon after Bannon came on board.
Wylie has said he fears the data was turned over to Russians who aimed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election.