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Top executives at Cambridge Analytica, the political data company used by the Trump campaign in 2016, were secretly filmed suggesting entrapping politicians with bribes and sex workers in video broadcast by the U.K.’s Channel 4 News on Monday.
Channel 4 reporters posed as prospective clients who wished to sway the Sri Lankan election, and a hidden camera showed Cambridge Analytica Chief Executive Alexander Nix offering ideas on how to entrap opposition candidates.
“It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be believed.”
Nix told the reporters the company could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house,” adding that Ukranian sex workers “are very beautiful, I find that works very well.”
He also suggested bribery — “a deal that’s too good to be true.”
“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 on cameras, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the internet,” Nix said.
Offering bribes to politicians is illegal in the U.S. and U.K.
Cambridge Analytica offers its services to political campaigns around the world. The company has received significant funding from Republican donor Robert Mercer. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Brad Pardscale, the digital director of the Trump campaign, were the primary figures involved with hiring Cambridge Analytica for the 2016 campaign, NBC News reported.
The company is accused of scraping the personal data of 50 million Facebook users in the U.S. without their permission in an effort to help Trump’s presidential campaign. On Friday, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform. Facebook FB, -6.77% shares plunged nearly 7% Monday in the wake of the breach.
Read: Facebook security chief to exit: report
“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,” Nix said in the video.
The meetings captured on film also included Mark Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global, who was recorded bragging about ties with former British and Israeli intelligence agents now working as private contractors who could be used to gather potentially incriminating evidence.
Turnbull also described how misinformation spreads.
“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda’, because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda,’ the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?’...So we have to be very subtle.”
Turnbull said the company’s job was to prey on voters’ deepest fears. “Our job is to...understand what are those really deep-seated, underlying fears...You didn’t know that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction from you. And our job is to...drop the bucket further down the well than anyone else to understand...deep-seated, underlying fears.”
In a statement, Cambridge Analytica denied using dirty tricks. “We entirely refute any allegation that Cambridge Analytica or any of its affiliates use entrapment, bribes, or so-called ‘honey-traps’ for any purpose whatsoever… We routinely undertake conversations with prospective clients to try to tease out any unethical or illegal intentions,” they said. “Cambridge Analytica does not use untrue material for any purpose.”
In a separate development Monday, Facebook said Cambridge Analytica has agreed to an audit of its servers to prove the Facebook users’ data has been erased from its systems. Cambridge Analytica was supposed to delete the data in 2015, but reportedly failed to do so.
“If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook’s policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made,” Facebook said in a blog post.
Late Monday, Britain’s information commissioner announced plans to seek a warrant to access Cambridge Analytica’s servers.