The laws behind the Brexit referendum set strict spending limits for parties wishing to participate in it. The Leave campaign had four distinct supporting groups: Leave, BeLeave (a youth movement), Veterans for Britain, and the Irish gang, the political party that props up Theresa May's Tory government, the DUP.
Each of those four had a spending cap. However the law stipulated that if any of those groups co-ordinated, those parties would be bound by a single spending allotment.
Chris Wylie claims that the evidence admits of one conclusion, all four organizations co-ordinated, using AggregateIQ as a vessel to launder money.
All four groups had employed the services of Aggregate IQ (AIQ), a Canadian company that Wylie said was “set up and worked within the auspices of Cambridge Analytica [and] inherited the company culture of total disregard for the law”. But at the point they employed the services of AIQ, he said, it had effectively no public presence.
“All of these companies somehow, for some reason, all decided to use Aggregate IQ as their primary service provider, when Aggregate IQ did not have any public presence, no media, no website. The only way that you could find them on the internet is if you went to [Cambridge Analytica minority owner] SCL’s website and called up SCL Canada. So, first question that I have is why. Why is it that all of a sudden this company, that has never worked on anything but Cambridge Analytica projects, that had no public presence, somehow became the primary service provider to all of these supposedly independent and different campaign groups,” he told the MPs.
“When you look at the cumulation of evidence I think it would be completely unreasonable to come to any other conclusion: this must be co-ordination, this must be a common purpose plan.”
“I went and actually spoke with Aggregate, who were very, very pleased with themselves with how that project went – understandably, they won – and said, can you show me what it was you were doing, how can you untease it, what did you do,” Wylie said. “They conceded to me – and this is a verbatim quote, and I stand by it, I remember Jeff Sylvester [the chief operating officer of Aggregate IQ] telling me this: it was, quote, ‘totally illegal’.
“AggregateIQ was just used as a proxy money-laundering vehicle,” Wylie told the hearing. “What [Vote Leave mastermind] Dom Cummings did is he just went round and found places he could launder money through to give it to AIQ so they could overspend. And that is my genuinely held belief.
“For me it makes me so angry, because a lot of people supported leave because they believe in the application of British law and British sovereignty. And to irrevocably alter the constitutional settlement of this country on fraud is a mutilation of the constitutional settlement of this country. You cannot call yourself a leaver, you cannot call yourself someone who believes in British law, and win by breaking British law in order to achieve that goal.”
Oh dear.
7 comments:
.. they better pray Robert Mueller
is not sinking his teeth into it
This story has all the signs
of sinking many many ships
Oh deary me..
Money Laundering ?
Electoral Fraud ?
Conspiracy ?
Sal, it is truly a struggle to try to stay current with this scandal. It's so multi-faceted. It connects to Britain, Canada, the United States, even Russia with a cast of shady characters from Lewandowski to Bolton, Ted Cruz, Mercer, Bannon and Trump to Nigel Farage and a Ukrainian oligarch and reaching into the election of the president of the United States and Brexit.
It's a bit like shooting a squirrel with a .308 - nothing but bloody pulp everywhere.
Mueller's investigators have asked former campaign officials about the Trump campaign's data operations, particularly about how it collected and utilised voter data in battleground states, according to a person with direct knowledge of the line of inquiry but not authorised to discuss it publicly.
The investigators have also asked some of Trump's data team, which included analysts at the Republican National Committee, about its relationship with Cambridge Analytica, according to two former campaign officials. The campaign paid the firm just under $6 million for its work in 2016, according to federal records.
Authorities in Britain and the United States are investigating whether Cambridge Analytica may have used data improperly obtained from Facebook to try to influence elections, including the 2016 White House race.
https://www.firstpost.com/world/robert-mueller-examining-ties-between-cambridge-analytica-and-donald-trumps-campaign-after-alleged-data-breach-4402057.html
I really wish this would all slow down enough so I can pop out to the stationary store for more pins and postit's, and the craft store for more yarn. I'm all out of red yarn because of all the dead Russians.
Gonna have to build a new wall soon.
Jay, you're a lucky man. I don't have that kind of wall space.
So, if this is all true, what’s to be done? Does England go ahead and Brexit anyway? Are Americans bound by laws passed by an illegitimate government?
Wylie addressed your point, BP, at least in terms of Brexit. He said the Leave campaign (which, had he been a Brit he said he would have supported) cheated. He asked what is done if you catch a university student cheating on an exam? It's a fail. It doesn't matter if the cheater is an ordinary student or a great student. The penalty is the same. Then he used the example of an Olympic athlete caught doping. The penalty is forfeiture of the medal. There's no debate about whether the athlete probably would have won had he not taken a banned substance or the whether there's a lot or a modest amount of the drug. The medal is stripped. Then he hammered home the point that Brexit, at its heart, is a matter of the "constitutional settlement" of the United Kingdom, not an exam, not a sports medal. Those are pretty awesome arguments.
As for the United States I doubt we will see hearings similar to those held by the UK Parliament. Congress, Republican-controlled, has no stomach for it. Perhaps something may come of the Mueller investigations but I think that's a longshot when it comes to Cambridge meddling. Auckerberg is being recalled to testify before Congress but the American government is remarkably corrupt.
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