Channel 4 News conducted a four-month undercover investigation into Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign's data firm, and found the company's top executives selling potential clients on its use of "sex, secrets, and spies" to win campaigns.
In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.
In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”
Channel 4 News' undercover reporter pretended to be "a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka."
Mr Nix told our reporter: “…we’re used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows, and I look forward to building a very long-term and secretive relationship with you.”
Along with Mr Nix, the meetings also included Mark Turnbull, the managing director of CA Political Global, and the company’s chief data officer, Dr Alex Tayler.
Mr Turnbull described how, having obtained damaging material on opponents, Cambridge Analytica can discreetly push it onto social media and the internet.
He said: “… we just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda’, because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda’, the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?’.”
Mr Nix also said: “…Many of our clients don’t want to be seen to be working with a foreign company… so often we set up, if we are working then we can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists, there’s so many options we can look at. I have lots of experience in this.”
The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from Cambridge Analytica, but Jared Kushner spoke to Forbes in November 2016 and admitted to hiring the firm and keeping it on board through the general election.
“We found that Facebook and digital targeting were the most effective ways to reach the audiences. After the primary, we started ramping up because we knew that doing a national campaign is different than doing a primary campaign. That was when we formalized the system because we had to ramp up for digital fundraising. We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff."
(...)
"We spent a lot of time figuring out how to build a bridge between the Trump campaign and the RNC so that we could analyze the resources they had available. We found that they had a pretty good ground force that we could leverage. We used some of our best practices and some of their best practices. We kept both data operations going simultaneously—and a lot shared between them. And by doing that, we could scale to a pretty good operation."
Channel 4 News says Part Three of its series, which focuses on Cambridge Analytica's work in the U.S., will air Tuesday.
Part Three, on the company’s work in the United States, will be broadcast at 7pm tomorrow (Tuesday, 20 March 2018). You can watch Part One here.
Read more: Trump Team Downplays Data Firm
WATCH Part Two of the Channel 4 News report:
Revealed: Trump’s election consultants filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians (Channel 4 News)
Jared Kushner In His Own Words On The Trump Data Operation The FBI Is Reportedly Probing (Forbes)