Enjoy These Trump Campaign Consultants Destroying Their Careers In Undercover Video Sting
Over the weekend, Cambridge Analytica—the political data firm hired by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—came under fire when its “data grab” of more than 50 million Facebook users’ profiles was exposed. Now, the firm has an entirely new scandal to deal with.
On Monday, a blockbuster report from the British news outlet Channel 4 included undercover video of the firm’s top executives suggesting that they could entrap political opponents by offering bribes or sending sex workers to their rooms.
In the video, a man identified as Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, appears to brag about tactics that sound a whole lot like entrapment and blackmail:
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’s undercover reporter posed as a fixer hired by a wealthy family to influence elections in Sri Lanka. The reporter met with representatives of Cambridge Analytica at London hotels between November 2017 and January 2018. According to Channel 4, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company have worked to influence “more than two hundred elections across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.”
In one notable phone conversation, Nix reassures the supposed Sri Lankan “fixer” with this extremely innocuous and not-at-all suspicious sentence (emphasis mine):
“We are not only the largest and most significant political consultancy in the world, but we have the most established track record. 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.”
Here’s Channel 4’s full video:
Earlier in the video, Mark Turnbull—the managing director of CA Political Global—voices his moral opposition to the very same dirty political tricks his boss, Nix, seems to explicitly outline in a future meeting.“We’re not in the business of fake news. We’re not in the business of lying, making stuff up. And we’re not in the business of entrapment,” Turnbull says. “So we wouldn’t send a pretty girl out to seduce a politician, and then film them in their bedroom, and then release the film. There are companies that do this, but to me that crosses a line.”
Shortly thereafter, Turnbull changes his tune.