Abbas’s place to facilitate a new round of peace talks with Netanyahu’s government.294 MBZ is said to be the plan’s chief architect.295
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Erik Prince eventually becomes more than just an adviser to the Trump campaign: Prince gives Trump’s campaign at least $100,000 through a political action committee run by billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who is also the primary funder for both Steve Bannon’s longtime media outlet Breitbart and Trump’s general-election data firm, Cambridge Analytica.296 Prince later becomes connected to Mercer’s post–Cambridge Analytica data company, Emerdata, when the deputy chairman of Prince’s Frontier Services Group, Johnson Chun Shun Ko, is named to its board.297 Other Emerdata board members include Mercer’s daughters Rebekah and Jennifer (the former a Trump transition team official), while Emerdata directors include Julian Wheatland (chairman of Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm SCL Group), Alexander Tayler (Cambridge Analytica’s chief data officer), the aforementioned Ko, and Cambridge Analytica’s former CEO, Alexander Nix—who in 2018 is suspended from his job “following revelations that it [Cambridge Analytica] misused millions of Facebook users’ information, plus incriminating undercover recordings which show the executives boasting of their ability to manipulate elections and even blackmail political opponents.”298
All told, Prince gives Trump a quarter of a million dollars in the less than 120 days between the Republican National Convention and Election Day, spreading his giving across direct donations to Trump’s campaign, the national Republican Party, and Mercer’s super PAC.299 More broadly, the Washington Post reports that “Prince and his family were major GOP donors in 2016. The Center for Responsive Politics reported that the family gave more than $10 million to GOP candidates and super PACs, including about $2.7 million from his [Prince’s] sister, [Trump secretary of education Betsy] DeVos, and her husband.”300
The direct and indirect involvement of Prince, Bannon, Mercer, Kushner, and other top Trump aides, allies, and family members with the British company SCL Group—and, more important, its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica—is deeply troubling, given what is now known about Cambridge Analytica as reported in American and British media from 2017 and 2018. According to the New York Times, in 2015 and 2016 Cambridge Analytica, incorporated in 2013 by GOP mega-donor Mercer and future Trump campaign CEO Bannon, “harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission … one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate.”301 Christopher Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica co-founder and subsequently its chief whistleblower, will eventually tell the Times that for Cambridge Analytica, “Rules don’t matter.… For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair. They want to fight a culture war in America.… Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”302 Indeed, there is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica has divested itself of the “psychographic” voter data it improperly compiled in 2015 and 2016, with the Times reporting that as of March 2018 the company “still possesses most or all of the trove” of data it took from Facebook prior to the 2016 presidential election.303
The data that Cambridge Analytica took from American voters in 2015 and 2016 was in the first instance “harvested” by an “outside researcher,” who purportedly was collecting it for “academic purposes.”304 Facebook has called the actions of this researcher, a Russian American named Aleksandr Kogan, a “scam” and a “fraud”; as of 2018, however, it could not conclusively confirm for its users that either Kogan or Cambridge Analytica had deleted the data in their possession.305 Inquiries in 2017 and 2018 will reveal that Nix, who was the CEO of Cambridge Analytica during its tenure as the Trump campaign’s data firm, not only lied repeatedly about having or using any data from Facebook—including offering false testimony at a British parliamentary hearing on the subject in early 2018—but lied about ordering the data deleted once Cambridge Analytica finally acknowledged possessing it.306 England’s information commissioner is now investigating whether Cambridge Analytica “illegally acquired and used” the information it was employing for modeling purposes during the 2016 election.307
The scope of Cambridge Analytica’s work for the Trump campaign is still being investigated—as is its connection to the Russian Federation. According to the Times, many “Cambridge Analytica employees … worked for the Trump team”; the company’s “British affiliate [SCL Group] claims to have worked in Russia”; shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Flynn took on an advisory role with SCL Group, a fact he