So is it Putin or is it shadowy people like Cambridge Analytica? Or is Cambridge Analytica actually Putin? And who is Robert Mercer?
My own theory on what is happening in the US is that the so far very nebulous links between Trump and Russia are being used by everyone opposed to Trump in the same way that people throw mud - to see if it will stick. It is very clear from Friday's and Saturday's developments that the Russian Ambassador has a busy schedule and has had for years, meeting with just about everybody on Capitol Hill.
www.nationalreview.com/article/438739/trump-campaigns-data-firm-partner-cambridge-analytica-worked-cruz An article from August 5, 2016.
'Inside Trump Tower, the decision to work with the data-targeting firm was fraught with controversy, according to a Trump aide familiar with the campaign’s internal conversations. After the Trump team, under pressure from the Republican National Committee and others to ramp up its ground game and voter-targeting operation, met with Cambridge Analytica officials in late June, campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner were at loggerheads: While Kushner wanted to bring the company aboard, Manafort opposed the move.'
Manafort eventually left the campaign. He was allegedly Putin's man in the Trump camp.
www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/us/politics/paul-manafort-resigns-donald-trump.html?_r=0
August 19, 2016:
Weeks of sliding poll numbers and false starts had sapped Mr. Manafort’s credibility inside the campaign. A cooling relationship with Mr. Trump — who had taken to calling Mr. Manafort “low energy,” the epithet he once used to mock a former rival, Jeb Bush — turned hot last weekend when the candidate erupted, blaming Mr. Manafort for a damaging newspaper article detailing the campaign’s internal travails, according to three people briefed on the episode.
Then a wave of reports about Mr. Manafort’s own business dealings with Russia-aligned leaders in Ukraine, involving allegations of millions of dollars in cash payments and secret lobbying efforts in the United States, threw a spotlight on a glaring vulnerability for Mr. Trump: his admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
By Friday morning, Mr. Manafort’s predictions to confidants that he might not be able to survive in his post had come true.
Being tripped up by allegations of links to Russia seems to be a common occurrence. I think this article illustrates the mud flinging element of the Russia business very well.
www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage
Paul Mercer - a deep agent for Russia? Or can we at this point safely assume that people who are actually American or British are perfectly capable of not buying into the concept of democracy at all, and thanks to their enormous wealth find themselves able to pull strings and exert an influence they absolutely should not be allowed to exert.
...since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.
Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.
It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.
Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”. France and Germany are next.
But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)
Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.
Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.
On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.