Whistleblower: Cambridge Analytica met with Lewandowski before Trump campaign launch
Source: The Hill
BY BRETT SAMUELS - 03/19/18 10:19 AM EDT
A former Cambridge Analytica employee said Monday that the data firm met with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in 2015, before President Trump declared his candidacy.
Christopher Wylie, a self-described whistleblower on the companys data harvesting practices, told NBCs Today show that he left Cambridge Analytica before it formally teamed up with the Trump campaign.
However, he said the company had been in talks with the campaign before Trump announced his candidacy, including a 2015 meeting with Lewandowski.
Cambridge Analytica was suspended from Facebook on Friday after reports it had not fully deleted data it obtained from Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan.
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/379090-whistleblower-cambridge-analytica-met-with-lewandowski-before-trump
Video of interview at link in second paragraph of the OP or, at the link to the story at The Hill
Achilleaze
(15,543 posts)Lock up republican traitors, starting with Dirty Donny*
* aka republican Draft-Dodger-in-Chief
dalton99a
(81,451 posts)Cracklin Charlie
(12,904 posts)Scum.
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)rockfordfile
(8,702 posts)CousinIT
(9,239 posts)MelissaB
(16,420 posts)Sophia4
(3,515 posts)Peter Pomerantsev about crazy propaganda and mind manipulation in Russia (I think that was what it was supposed to be about. It made me slightly ill, and I could not finish it . . . . ) seems relevant here.
Just in case anyone is interested. Might want to see whether you can borrow the book from the library.
Bernardo de La Paz
(48,992 posts)backtoblue
(11,343 posts)Welcome to U.S., Inc.
neohippie
(1,142 posts)There's a lot of information about CA in this thread I posted in February 2017
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10028716802
And more from this threads from this past weekend
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142016046
and of course these ties from Silicon Valley to Russian Mafia
There's a lot of interesting Russian ties to Silcon Valley, Facebook, Digital Skies, Zynga -facebook games, Air BNB, Spotify, Slack, and so much more
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=DA0D674CBF7C2F13611890CAB2434CCE&gwt=pay
https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/3286-facebook-are-you-interfacing-with-the-russian-mafia--kgb
Andrey Ternovskiy, one of Russia's wunderkind Internet entrepreneurs, is being courted by venture capitalists the world over. To get access to cash he needn't leave Moscow, but he doesn't want to do business with the billionaire oligarchs tied to the Russian Mafia and Putin's KGB-FSB machine in the Kremlin.
So, earlier this year the 18-year-old founder of Chatroullet, a webcam-based conversation website, came to the United States to meet with investors. Ternovskiy didn't tell anyone his itinerary. Nevertheless, when he arrived in New York, there was a chauffer-driven limo waiting for him, courtesy of Yuri Milner and Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's hottest investment company.
Ternovskiy reportedly has rebuffed DST's efforts, describing them as "harassing and hounding."
Ryan Tate at gawker.com appropriately describes the DST limo episode as "creepy." However, the experience goes beyond "creepy," illustrating the nexus between Russia's "business" community and it's intelligence structures. How did DST know Ternovskiy's flight schedule? There are a number of ways that DST could have gotten that information, nearly all of which would be illegal in any country where the "rule of law" is more than merely an empty slogan. But considering DST's high-level ties to Vladimir Putin's KGB-FSB police-state apparatus, obtaining Ternovskiy's airline itinerary must have been child's play.
The Russian teenager is demonstrating better business sense and greater ethical judgment than American corporations, such as social network behemoth Facebook and Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. Over the past year, DST has made several large investments in Facebook, and now holds a ten percent share in the company, which boasts more than 500 million users worldwide and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.
DST, which has also invested heavily in Zynga, the online social network game developer (FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars [above], etc.), and Groupon, a deal-of-the-day website, has a billion dollars to invest in Internet companies and, reportedly, is also looking at buying into Twitter.
https://www.wired.com/2011/10/mf_milner/
Ties to Kushner
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/russia-funded-facebook-twitter-investments-kushner-investor
he investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trumps son-in-law and senior White House adviser.
The discovery is likely to stir concerns over Russian influence in US politics and the role played by social media in last years presidential election. It may also raise new questions for the social media companies and for Kushner.
Alexander Vershbow, who was a US ambassador to Russia under George W Bush and to Nato under Bill Clinton, said the Russian state institutions were frequently used as tools for Putins pet political projects.
Vershbow said the findings were concerning in light of efforts by Moscow to disrupt US democracy and public debate. There clearly was a wider plan, despite Putins protestations to the contrary, he said.
The investments are detailed in the Paradise Papers, a trove of millions of leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other partners, along with other previously unreported filings.
Facebook and Twitter were not made aware that funding for the investments came from the state-controlled VTB Bank and a financial arm of the state oil and gas firm Gazprom, according to Milner.
The files show that in 2011, VTB funded a $191m investment in Twitter. About the same time, Gazprom Investholding financed an opaque offshore company, which in turn funded a vehicle that held $1bn-worth of Facebook shares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Milner
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-poligarchs-oligarchs-and-stooges-of-the-paradise-papers
T
he Paradise Papers have uncovered some of the stooges and their connections to oligarchs. One example is Yuri Milner, a Wharton-educated Russian businessman who once worked for the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who rejected the mafia-state bargain and lost his fortune, spent ten years in prison, and now lives in exile. Milner started making money through Russian tech investments in the aughts, and by 2009 he was investing in American high-tech companies. He has since become a Silicon Valley fixture and a bit of a science-and-technology celebrity (he founded the Breakthrough Prizes, which offer the biggest cash payout of any science prize in the world). The Paradise Papers expose Milner as a stooge of Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch who has enjoyed most-favored status under Putin. Some of the money for Milners investments in Facebook came from Gazprom Investholding, which is the finance arm of the Russian state gas monopoly, Gazprom; at the time, Usmanov ran Gazprom Investholding.
Sophia4
(3,515 posts)From the beginning, it was obvious to me that oil and gas -- fossil fuels -- had a lot to do with this. That is the very core of Russia's hope for wealth. And Russia might think it could join the winners if we have global warming.
KY_EnviroGuy
(14,490 posts)Have you seen The Guardian's series called The Cambridge Analytica Files? It's excellent and lots to digest.
See: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files
What never ceases to amaze me is the complex, invisible webs of control and corruption the wealthy around the world can weave.