Now we know why Donald Trump and Julian Assange were so desperate last week to distract from Trump-Russia
Late one night last week, WikiLeaks founder and cyberterrorist fugitive Julian Assange began rather desperately trying to invent a Russia scandal about Hillary Clinton. The next morning, Donald Trump joined him by tweeting the exact same nonsense. I wrote at the time that it was clear they were trying to distract from a major Trump-Russia story involving both of them that was about to land (link). Sure enough, today it landed – and it’s a bombshell.
Cambridge Analytica, which was running digital voter targeting operations for the Donald Trump campaign, now admits that it reached out to Assange during the election about teaming up to steal emails from Hillary Clinton, according to a stunning new Daily Beast expose (link). The story – for now – is that Assange refused, and it didn’t go anywhere. But the attempt alone confirms that the Trump campaign itself was in fact trying to collude with WikiLeaks during the election. More centrally, it demonstrates that Cambridge Analytica was indeed willing to conspire with Russian-controlled foreign enemies and thieves in the name of achieving its goals.
The official story on Cambridge Analytica is that its computer algorithms were so magically amazing that it knew precisely which voters to micro-target in any given state, city, county, or dead end cul de sac. That’s never made sense on its face. It’s long been widely suspected – though never proven – that Cambridge Analytica was working with voter data stolen by Russian hackers.
This latest revelation still doesn’t prove that Cambridge Analytica had that data. But it does prove that it was eager to work with a criminal Russian puppet to get its hands on stolen data (in this instance Hillary’s emails). There is now every reason to suspect that the company was trying to get its hands on voter data stolen by the Russians. Now all that’s left is for investors to find proof. As of today, they know what they’re looking for.
