By Phillip Rucker and David
...Counselling Trump (click here) in the effort will be Stephen Bannon, the White House chief strategist whose influence inside the administration is expanding far beyond politics. In an executive order, Trump reorganised the National Security Council to, along with other changes, give Bannon a regular seat on the principals committee - the meetings of the most senior national security officials, including the secretaries of defence and state....
Bannon has had security clearance at the highest levels of the USA government. Not only that, but, he came to any political campaigns with a full set of tools, including Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart. Bannon is a problem for democracy.
November 17, 2018
By Jane Mayer
For two years, (click here) observers have speculated that the June, 2016, Brexit campaign in the U.K. served as a petri dish for Donald Trump’s 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 open Democracy....
April 25, 2018
By Kelly Cohen
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie (click here) told Democrats on the House Judiciary and House Oversight and Government Reform committees that Steve Bannon directed staff to test messaging in 2014 about Russian president Vladmir Putin and Russian expansion in Eastern Europe.
Wylie said it was unusual because it was the only foreign leader they tested.
“I can’t explain why it was that they picked Vladmir Putin to talk about in focus groups or to do message testing or to do models on, and why that would be useful to Steve Bannon,” he told Democrats in interviews on Capitol Hill this week. “But what I can say is that they were also testing images of Vladimir Putin and asking questions about Russian expansion in Eastern Europe.”
Cambridge Analytica worked for President Trump’s 2016 campaign, and Bannon was vice president of the board of the data analytics firm beginning in 2014. Bannon joined Trump’s campaign team in August 2016.
Wylie — who left Cambridge Analytica in 2014 — revealed to the Observer last month how Cambridge Analytica improperly took and used the personal information of more than 50 million Facebook users ahead of the 2016 presidential election.....
