As one would expect, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team is investigating the digital side of President Trump's campaign operations.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team for the last several weeks has had a growing interest to better understand the relationship between the campaign, the Republican National Committee, and Cambridge Analytica, sources tell ABC News.
Sources tell ABC News several digital experts who worked in support of Trump’s bid in 2016 have met with Mueller's team for closed-door interviews. The staffers, most of whom were employed by the RNC, served as key members of the 2016 operation working closely with the campaign and the data firm, the sources said. The company worked closely with the Republican candidate’s political team.
This information emerges as whistleblower Christopher Wylie and a Channel 4 News four-month, undercover investigation reveal Cambridge Analytica used harvested Facebook data without authorization to generate targeted fake news and manipulate voter sentiment.
While the Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from Cambridge Analytica, claiming it relied primarily on the RNC for its general election data operations, the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica more than $5 million in September 2016 and Jared Kushner told Forbes the following in November 2016:
"We used some of our best practices and some of [the RNC's] 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."
In the third part of Channel 4 News' investigation, Cambridge Analytica's CEO Alexander Nix (whom the board suspended Tuesday), brags on hidden camera about the extensive work his firm conducted for the Trump campaign.
Mr Nix boasted about Cambridge Analytica’s work for Trump, saying: “We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy.”
A spokesperson for the Trump campaign told ABC News in a statement that they “used the RNC for its voter data and not Cambridge Analytica. Using the RNC data was one of the best choices the campaign made. Any claims that voter data were used from another source to support the victory in 2016 are false.”
A source with direct knowledge who has met with the special counsel's team tells ABC News investigators have asked former senior level campaign staff about the digital operations, specifically how data was collected and used and how assets were targeted specifically in the battleground states. Mueller's team has asked witnesses about the process of "micro targeting" which is the process of using data to identify specific groups of individuals and thereby influence their thoughts and potentially their actions.
(...)
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and [Brad] Parscale are among those who credited the use of targeted Facebook advertising – a strategy developed by Cambridge Analytica.
(...)
The Trump campaign paid the data firm more than $5.8 million for “data management” during the 2016 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records.
(...)
"I think Donald Trump won, but I think Facebook was the method–it was the highway in which his car drove on," Parscale told 60 Minutes last year.
(...)
The Trump campaign has said they never used data from Cambridge Analytica.
Related: Mueller team zeroing in on political consulting firm with Trump ties: Sources (ABC News video)
Special Counsel studies Trump campaign ties to Cambridge Analytics, sources say (ABC News)