WASHINGTON: Sitting in a hotel bar,
Alexander Nix, who runs the political data firm
Cambridge Analytica, had a few ideas for a prospective client looking for help in a foreign election. The firm could send an attractive woman to seduce a rival candidate and secretly videotape the encounter, Nix said, or send someone posing as a wealthy land developer to pass a bribe.“We have a long history of working behind the scenes,” Nix said.
The prospective client, though, was actually a reporter from Channel 4 News in
Britain, and the encounter was secretly filmed as part of a monthslong investigation into Cambridge Analytica, the data firm with ties to President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The reporter posed as a “fixer” for a wealthy Srilankan family that wanted to help politicians they favoured. In a series of meetings at London hotels between November and January, Nix and other executives boasted that Cambridge Analytica employs front companies and former spies on behalf of political clients.
The executives claimed to have worked in more 200 elections across the world, including in Argentina, the Czech Republic, India, Kenya and Nigeria. Cambridge Analytica, in a statement, said the report was “edited and scripted to grossly misrepresent the nature of those conversations and how the company conducts its business.” Nix, too, in a statement said that he deeply regrets his role in the meeting and has apologised to staff. “I must emphatically state that Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called ‘honeytraps’, and nor does it use untrue material for any purposed,” he said.
