New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica's Role in Brexit
Source: The New Yorker
By Jane Mayer
November 17, 2018 7:07 PM
For two years, observers have speculated that the June, 2016, Brexit campaign in the U.K. served as a petri dish for Donald Trumps Presidential campaign in the United States. Now there is new evidence that it did. Newly surfaced e-mails show that the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica, the Big Data company that he worked for at the time, were simultaneously incubating both nationalist political movements in 2015.
Emma Briant, an academic expert on disinformation at George Washington University, has unearthed new e-mails that appear to reveal the earliest documented role played by Bannon in Brexit. The e-mails, which date back to October of 2015, show that Bannon, who was then the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, an American firm largely owned by the U.S. hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, was in the loop on discussions taking place at the time between his company and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right nationalist organization. The following month, Leave.EU publicly launched a campaign aimed at convincing British voters to support a referendum in favor of exiting the European Union. The U.K. narrowly voted for the so-called Brexit in June, 2016. The tumultuous fallout has roiled the U.K. ever since, threatening the government of the Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May.
Bannon did not respond to requests for comment. But his name and private e-mail address appear on the chain of three e-mails in October, 2015, between Brittany Kaiser, the director of program development at Cambridge Analytica, and Arron Banks, who headed the Leave.EU campaign and referred to himself in the title of his memoir as one of The Bad Boys of Brexit. Banks could not be reached for comment regarding the e-mails, which were first published Saturday by the British Web site openDemocracy.
The precise role played by foreign entities in promoting and possibly funding Brexit has been clouded in mystery and controversy. British law forbids foreign contributions to its political campaignsjust as U.S. law bars foreign campaign contributions. The laws are designed to prevent international manipulation of domestic affairs. Executives working for Cambridge Analytica, which filed for bankruptcy this spring, have categorically denied that the firm was paid to do any work for the Leave.EU campaign. The new e-mails do not contradict that, but show that, even if the firm was not paid for its services, it laid some of the early groundwork for the Leave.EU campaign. The e-mails show that Banks and others in the Leave.EU leadership met with Cambridge Analytica executives in 2015, and discussed what Banks called a two-stage process that would get CACambridge Analyticaon the team.
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/new-evidence-emerges-of-steve-bannon-and-cambridge-analyticas-role-in-brexit
bronxiteforever
(9,287 posts)JDC
(10,127 posts)Mrs. Overall
(6,839 posts)I think much more will come to light.
Grasswire2
(13,569 posts)The corruption that's eventually revealed will be staggering.
luvtheGWN
(1,336 posts)Grasswire2
(13,569 posts)LiberalFighter
(50,928 posts)the work by Cambridge Analytica along with Bannon would be considered a foreign contribution.
SunSeeker
(51,554 posts)BigmanPigman
(51,591 posts)Didn't this come out before, especially when Cambridge Analytica was busted last year?
reACTIONary
(5,770 posts).... I think the only novelty here is some new emails that were uncovered .
backtoblue
(11,343 posts)mastermind
(229 posts)everyone knows he has been working for putin and anyone who gives him airtime is doing the same.
flibbitygiblets
(7,220 posts)and yeah, we already knew all this
FakeNoose
(32,639 posts)But I would like to know why Robert Mercer had a dog in that race.
Why were Mercer and Bannon in cahoots with Putin?
yardwork
(61,608 posts)It's very illuminating.
FakeNoose
(32,639 posts)yardwork
(61,608 posts)FakeNoose
(32,639 posts)Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean
Dark Money by Jane Mayer
They're both great reads and sort of along the same lines. I swear so many great books have come out in the last year, I can't even keep up!
yardwork
(61,608 posts)I haven't read Dark Money yet.
Tim Snyder is an expert on European history. His book tells us what Putin is doing and why. It dovetails with what McLean tells us about the U.S.
These two groups of people teamed up to essentially take over the world so that they can control all the money.
They're using everything - politics, religion, philosophy, social media, propaganda - to take over.
brush
(53,778 posts)"A former banker turned film producer and right-wing polemicist, Bannon has praised not only Russian President Vladimir Putin but also a brand of Russian mystical conservative nationalism known as Eurasianism, which is the closest the Kremlin has to a state ideology. Eurasianism proclaims that Russias destiny is to lead all Slavic and Turkic people in a grand empire to resist corrupt Western values. Its main proponent is Alexander Dugin, a Russian political scientist. Dugins philosophy glorifies the Russian empirewhile Bannon and the conservative website he formerly led, Breitbart News, revived the America First slogan, which Trump later adopted in his campaign."
https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-donald-trump-jared-kushner-vladimir-putin-russia-fbi-mafia-584962
FakeNoose
(32,639 posts)I wasn't aware that Robert Mercer is on board this train also.
Initech
(100,075 posts)Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Steve Bannon, everything is linked to everything, it is a very tangled web right now.
duforsure
(11,885 posts)The same guy trump sent to Austria to meet with the neo nazi's there. He's a antagonists promoting hate groups around the world to use them to divide people with for political reasons. Like they've done with Brexit for putin.
ewagner
(18,964 posts)Both need to be on trial!