Campaign Action
Buried deep in a New York Times piece that mainly focuses on the attempts of Donald Trump's new national security adviser to turn the world into a cauldron of war is a potentially significant line referencing a meeting between John Bolton's Super PAC and Cambridge Analytica:
The agenda also included a line, in boldfaced text, that said SCL wanted to use voter contact lists available to Bolton’s campaign to direct people “toward the FB app.”
SCL is the firm that Cambridge Analytica grew out of ...
...the London-based SCL Group, was founded in 2014 with a $15 million investment from Mr. Mercer, whose daughter Rebekah sits on the firm’s board of directors. Stephen K. Bannon was also a co-founder.
Cambridge is the British data firm that was recently revealed by the Times to have effectively hacked into the data of 50 million Facebook users without their permission. The way Cambridge did that was by getting Facebook users to download an app that enabled the firm access to their private information. And the line highlighted above suggests that Bolton’s PAC may have helped drive traffic to that app.
Facebook initially downplayed the breach, but finally owned up to the scope of it last week.
“This was a scam — and a fraud,” Paul Grewal, a vice president and deputy general counsel at the social network, said in a statement to The Times earlier on Friday. He added that the company was suspending Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Wylie and the researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic, from Facebook.
Dr. Kogan, a psychology professor at Cambridge University, built the app that users downloaded and Cambridge Analytica eventually used to mine their data.
He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague.
So back to Bolton and The John Bolton Super PAC, which hired Cambridge Analytica in August 2014 and was an early adopter of the firm’s techniques. According to the Times reporting, Bolton's PAC was fully aware of the methodology Cambridge was using to harvest user data.
“The data and modeling Bolton’s PAC received was derived from the Facebook data,” said Christopher Wylie, a data expert who was part of the team that founded Cambridge Analytica. “We definitely told them about how we were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings.”
But it's one thing to be the knowing beneficiary of the hacked data and another thing to have been complicit in helping to obtain that data, which was clearly a "boldfaced" agenda item in one of the many meetings between the two outfits. If Bolton's Super PAC was not only aware of how Cambridge was obtaining user data but, in fact, also supplied voter contact lists to help direct those voters "toward the FB app," then it was complicit in defrauding those users.
It's a scam that sweeps up the reclusive billionaire Mercers, Steve Bannon, the firm they powered (Cambridge Analytica), and Trump's new national security adviser, John Bolton.
Months later, the relationship between Cambridge and the Bolton PAC had grown so close that the firm was writing up talking points for Mr. Bolton. In an email dated Oct. 1, 2014, Cambridge staff outlined a few sentences that Mr. Bolton could use to describe the work the new firm was doing for his super PAC.
“It’s not just about how much you spend. It’s also about how smart you spend,” the email advised Mr. Bolton to say.
“One way we’re doing that is by enlisting an outside firm” — Cambridge Analytica — “to provide deepdive research into who makes up our audience of target voters,” it continued. “We are producing ads specifically designed for voters of a certain personality and demographic profile. So if you’re a young woman in New Hampshire with a specific kind of personality and a particular set of issues that you care about, our research allows us to connect with that voter in a way that truly resonates with her.”
The subject line of the email: “Did Bannon come back to you on this?”
The tentacles of corruption in Trump’s White House just never seem to end.