Cambridge Analytica bosses were secretly filmed boasting about how they won Trump the US election

Reuters

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix is accosted by journalists on Tuesday.

• Cambridge Analytica bosses were secretly filmed claiming they helped win Donald Trump win the US election in 2016.
• CEO Alexander Nix and colleagues detailed the level of the work they undertook, as well as the shadowy online tools they weaponized against Hillary Clinton.
• They revealed how they used campaign groups outside of Trump's official Republican vehicle to seed attack ads, in revelations that may pique the interest of US authorities.
• Clinton questioned whether Cambridge Analytica was involved in Russia's alleged attempt to influence the election.

The bosses of Cambridge Analytica were secretly filmed boasting about how they claimed to use shadowy online propaganda tools to help Donald Trump win the US election in 2016.

The footage is the latest revelation from an explosive investigation by Britain's Channel 4 News, which sent an undercover reporter into meetings with CA over the course of four months. It comes just days after the embattled company was suspended from Facebook for harvesting the data of 50 million US voters.

CA Chief Executive Alexander Nix and his colleagues thought they were talking to a fixer for a wealthy client, hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka when they met the reporter at luxury hotels in London.

In one exchange, Nix told Channel 4 News's journalist that he had personally met Trump "many times" and spelt out what it said the firm undertook for the then-Republican candidate.

"We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy," he was filmed saying.

In another conversation, CA's Chief Data Scientist Alexander Tayler argued how CA's work helped Trump emerge victorious.

"When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes but won the Electoral College vote that's down to the data and the research," he said.

A CA spokesman told Channel 4 News: "CA has never claimed it won the election for President Trump. This is patently absurd."

'We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow'

Nix and his colleagues also told of how CA disseminated Trump's message online without leaving a trace.

Mark Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global, was filmed saying CA would use proxy organizations, such as charities or activist groups, to discreetly funnel negative material about opposition candidates onto social media.

Channel 4 News

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, right, with Mark Turnbull, another company executive.

"We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape," he said. "And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding - so it's unattributable, untrackable."

CA also used ProtonMail, Nix said, taking advantage of the encrypted email service's "self-destruct" service, meaning emails are deleted within two hours of being read.

"There's no evidence, there's no paper trail, there's nothing," Nix told Channel 4 News' reporter.

A CA spokesman said encrypted communication is commonplace.

"We take information security with the utmost seriousness, and for high profile clients using maintain stream email providers simply doesn't provide a suitable level of security," he said.

Cambridge used super PACs to seed attack ads

CA's bosses also explained how they used campaign groups outside of Trump's official Republican vehicle to seed attack ads, in revelations that may pique the interest of US authorities.

CA said it used "super PACs," independent campaigning committees not constrained by spending rules, to target defeated Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton.

YouTube

Defeated Crooked Hillary's YouTube channel.

"So the campaign will use their finite resources for things like persuasion and mobilization and then they leave the 'air war' they call it, like the negative attack ads to other affiliated groups," Tayler said.

Turnbull explained how CA created the "Defeat Crooked Hillary" brand of attack ads, which Channel 4 News said were funded by the Make America Number 1 super PAC and watched more than 30 million times during the campaign.

Coordination between an official election campaign and any outside groups is illegal under US election law. Cambridge Analytica insisted it has strict rules to separate out its activity and it was transparent about its work on political campaigns and PACs.

"We have strict firewall practices to ensure no coordination between regulated groups, including the teams working on non-coordinated campaigns being physically separated, using different servers and being banned from communicating with each other," a spokesman said.

Clinton: Did Cambridge Analytica coordinate with Russia?

Speaking to Channel 4 News while promoting her book last year, Clinton questioned whether CA was involved in Russia's alleged attempt to influence the election.

Lisa Lake/Getty Images for Geisinger Symposium

Hillary Clinton.

"So you've got CA, you've got the Republican National Committee which of course has always done data collection and analysis and you've got the Russians. And the real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania - that is really the nub of the question," she said in comments that have not been broadcast previously.

"So if they were getting advice from say Cambridge Analytica or someone else about, 'OK, here are the 12 voters in this town in Wisconsin - that's whose Facebook pages you need to be on to send these messages' that indeed would be very disturbing."

A CA spokesman denied any involvement in the alleged Russian attempts to intervene in US democracy, and said "such an allegation is entirely false."