a variety of services,” reports the Times, including “designing target audiences for digital ads and fund-raising appeals, modeling voter turnout, buying $5 million in television ads, and determining where Mr. Trump should travel to best drum up support.”318 In a U.S. presidential election Trump wins in the nation’s Electoral College by only 80,000 popular votes, there is no way to know whether his presumptively illegal use of foreign nationals in his campaign data operation is what puts his campaign over the top; what is known is that Trump’s digital director and liaison to Cambridge Analytica in 2016, Brad Parscale, is now the campaign manager for Trump’s 2020 reelection effort.319
As for how effective Cambridge Analytica was in assisting the Trump effort in 2016, Nix has declared, as the Times summarizes, that its work “helped shape Mr. Trump’s strategy.”320 While others have disputed Nix’s account, suggesting that Facebook had plugged any holes in its data leakage by the end of the summer of 2016 and that the Trump campaign ultimately used “legacy data” from Ted Cruz’s primary effort, neither circumstance renders Cambridge Analytica’s data any more legally obtained than it was when harvested for Republican usage in late 2015.321
In June 2018, investigative reporters Carole Cadwalladr and Stephanie Kirchgaessner, writing for the Guardian, will reveal that immediately after Trump’s inauguration, Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy in London to discuss the election. The two reporters also discover that Kaiser had previously claimed to friends that she “channeled cryptocurrency payments and donations to WikiLeaks.”322 Coupled with the additional revelation that Nix’s July 2016 outreach to Assange included, too, an offer to “index and disseminate” WikiLeaks’ stolen Democratic materials, news of Kaiser’s WikiLeaks payments startles on both sides of the Atlantic.323 In March 2019, Cambridge Analytica will stand accused in a British court of “trying to liquidate the company before a full investigation into the company [can] be held” and of having compiled “up to 87 million clandestinely harvested Facebook profiles to create a state of the art voter database that helped Trump win election in 2016.”324 The company itself has claimed to have “4,000 data points on some 230 million Americans.”325
In December 2018, the Daily Beast will report that “a trove of digital artifacts from Trump’s [2016] social-media campaign … provides the first hard evidence that Team Trump made continuous use of audience lists created by Cambridge Analytica to target a portion of its ‘dark ads’ on Facebook. The ads were deployed from July 2016 through the end of the election—and beyond, to the inauguration in January 2017.”326 By the end of 2018, Channel 4 in the United Kingdom will have run an undercover sting operation on Alexander Nix that reveals him “boasting about his company’s work for Trump and effectively claiming credit for the Apprentice star’s election victory. Cambridge Analytica, Nix says, ‘did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy’ for Trump’s presidential campaign.”327 Nix adds that he met Trump personally “many times.”328 Nix’s claims are bolstered by statements made by Trump’s 2016 digital director, Parscale, immediately after the election, when he tells associates, according to CNN, that “Cambridge [Analytica] provided a much-needed infusion of data staff for a bare-bones campaign.”329 Parscale tells one questioner during a 2016 Google forum that “Cambridge [Analytica] actually provided a full-time employee that could sit next to me all day” to help process data.330 While the Trump campaign also uses RNC data during the campaign to target voters, Parscale has conceded that there were some purposes—for instance, the development of supplemental data to daily tracking polls—for which Cambridge Analytica’s work was essential to the campaign.331 The contradictions between Nix’s and Parscale’s claims about the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 election have never been resolved.
News of Nix’s boasts, his discussion with Channel 4 of clandestine and illicit methods for assisting Cambridge Analytica clients, and the Cambridge Analytica–fueled “dark ads” used by the Trump campaign sits uneasily beside the declaration by a “senior Trump official” in October 2016 that the campaign was then secretly running “three voter suppression efforts” through its digital operation—efforts targeting liberals, young women, and black voters. These efforts reportedly occurred at a time when “as much as 45 percent of Trump’s campaign budget in a given month” was being devoted to “digital outreach and research,” according to Fortune.332 A 2018 Bloomberg article on this chilling claim