Buzzfeed: Two Democrats Accuse Cambridge Analytica CEO Of Misleading House Committee In Still-Secret Testimony
Two Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee have told BuzzFeed News that the head of the embattled political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica misled the committee last year when he denied that his company had obtained millions of personal records through Facebook.
Alexander Nix’s disputed testimony is likely to intensify pressure in Washington for more information on the role Cambridge Analytica played in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, including whether Trump’s digital operation gave data to Russians to help them target US voters through social media.
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“I don’t know if we can conclude that this shows the Trump campaign made use of Cambridge Analytica’s stolen data,” said Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group focused on election law. But the campaign may have benefited indirectly from the pirated Facebook records, Fischer added.
“One of the things they [Cambridge Analytica] used the stolen data for was to make more effective models, to identify the traits or characteristics that would allow certain messages to resonate more,” Fischer told BuzzFeed News. “If Cambridge Analytica used the stolen data to develop more effective modeling and then applied it to the RNC or Trump campaign data, that presents a way for the Trump campaign to have benefited from the stolen data.”