Head of Trump-linked data firm appears to talk about election bribes on video
The Washington Post
A British television station broadcast video Monday apparently showing the head of the data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, talking about using bribes, traps involving sex workers and other unethical tactics to swing elections around the world.
The broadcast by Channel 4 News offered no evidence that such methods were used during Cambridge Analytica’s work for the Trump campaign, which paid the firm at least $6 million. But the broadcast sparked a fresh round of questions about a company already embroiled in controversy about its use of personal information from more than 50 million Facebooks users — the vast majority of whom had no idea their names, likes and work histories had been collected for political purposes. The firm offered tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior.
Monday’s report, which The Washington Post has not independently confirmed, relied on surreptitious video recordings of Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, claiming to have used “a web of shadowy front companies” in pursuit of winning elections.
The company on Monday disputed the report and others published over the weekend about the company’s use of massive troves of Facebook data. “Cambridge Analytica strongly denies the claims recently made by the New York Times, the Guardian and Channel 4 News,” the company said on Twitter.
Cambridge Analytica elaborated in a statement, saying that it had posed a series of “ludicrous hypothetical scenarios” to determine whether the client was someone they should engage with.
“Iam aware how this looks, but it is simply not the case,” Mr. Nix said in the statement. “I must emphatically state that Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or socalled ‘honeytraps’, and nor does it use untrue material for any purpose. I deeply regret my role in the meeting and I have already apologi[z]ed to staff. I should have recogni[z]ed where the prospective client was taking our conversations and ended the relationshipsooner.”
At the same time Monday, Facebook said it will audit Cambridge Analytica to determine whether the company had deleted the data it took inappropriately.
Congressional calls for Facebook officials to testify on Capitol Hill grew louder and more bipartisan Monday as lawmakers demanded that the tech giant explain how Cambridge Analytica obtained its data. The increasingly sharp and personal tenor of the requests, many of which sought an appearance by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, raised the odds of a fresh round of potentially contentious hearings — after Facebook defended itself in fall hearings about Russian manipulation of its site connected to the 2016 election.
“While Facebook has pledged to enforce its policies to protect people’s information, questions remain as to whether those policies are sufficient and whether Congress should take action to protect people’s private information,” Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Neely Kennedy, R-La., wrote in a joint letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
For Cambridge Analytica, the Channel 4 News expose is only the latest headache for a firm once championed by conservatives — and boosted by $15 million in funding from Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer, and his daughter, Rebekah. It has ties to Steve Bannon, the former campaign adviser to Mr. Trump, whose campaign spent at least $6 million on the firm’s services during the 2016 presidential race. Cambridge Analytica previously aided Republican Sen. Ted Cruz during the 2016 presidential primary.
At least two American state prosecutors have said they are looking into the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica.
According to the video posted by Channel 4 News, Mr. Nix appears to suggest the company could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house.” He later added that he favored Ukrainian women in particular: “They are very beautiful, I find that works very well.”
The surreptitiously recorded video also appears to depict conversations involving Mr. Nix, Mark Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global, and Alex Tayler, the chief data officer. The Channel 4 News team reportedly told the company officials they were meeting with a “fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.”
The executives repeatedly appear to brag about their behind-the-scenes efforts to influence political outcomes in Mexico, Australia and Kenya, at one point teasing that they’re beginning to work in China, too.
In a number of the exchanges, Mr. Turnbull stresses the ability of Cambridge Analytica to play on people’s “hopes and fears.”
“You didn’t know that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction from you,” Mr. Turnbull appeared to say, “and our job is to get, is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else, to understand what are those really, deep-seated underlying fears, concerns.”