Recent reports that Cambridge Analytica, the data firm behind Trump's 2016 campaign, stole personal information from 50 million Facebook users was apparently just the tip of the international crime syndicate.
London's Channel 4 News aired a special report this evening exposing Cambridge Analytica's international shadow campaigns that have literally gotten people killed from one side of the world to the other from Kenya to the United States.
Channel 4's report includes Cambridge CEO and "advertising rockstar" Alexander Nix boasting on camera that his campaign hires sex workers and actors to entrap politicians.
Near the end of the report, you can see Nix not only say they will use women and fake financial deals to entrap politicians, he also boasts that they have "experience" doing this and that they use third parties to carry it out. He says this with a level of specificity that strongly implies they've done this many times before.
The obvious question is where have they done this? I expect governments and intelligence agencies across the world are going to have questions for Cambridge and their CEO who may have confessed to crimes on camera.
Here's Channel 4's written report:
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.”
Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.
To say that I'm blown away by this story would be an understatement. This isn't some low level staffer or henchmen. There's no plausible deniability here. That's the CEO himself talking about framing politicians.