Donald Trump’s Cambridge Analytica scandal just exploded
Last night’s bombshell revelation about Donald Trump’s tax returns was profoundly ugly for him. But as it turns out, it may just be the start of an avalanche of ugly scandalous stories coming his way. Today the British press is finally blowing open an old Trump scandal: Cambridge Analytica.
It’s long been generally known that data firm Cambridge Analytica, while acting as an arm of the Trump 2016 campaign, used stolen user data to identify and mislead targeted voters. But now thanks to a major data leak, the UK’s Channel 4 News has the details of what went down. It turns out the data firm had secret files on 200 million Americans, and it labeled 3.5 million Black Americans as “deterrence” – meaning they were specifically targeted with disinformation in an effort to trick them out of voting for Hillary Clinton.
This helps confirm what anyone who has been paying close attention has known all along: Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign committed criminal acts in the name of rigging the election. It’s worth pointing out that Cambridge Analytica has long been suspected of having ties to the Kremlin, and of course everything in Trump land ends up being traced back to Vladimir Putin.
It’s also worth pointing out that Brad Parscale, who ran the data analytics operation for the Trump 2016 campaign and worked alongside Cambridge Analytica, was arrested last night and placed on a psych hold after barricading himself in his home with a weapons cache. We’ll see if these things end up being related.
