Another Cambridge Analytica Client To Join The Trump White House

The list of Cambridge Analytica clients and employees with ties to the Trump White House keeps growing.

In addition to President Donald Trump himself, whose campaign at the urging of Jared Kushner   hired the political data analysis firm in 2016, there’s Steve Bannon , a former vice president and board member of the company; Kellyanne Conway , who formerly consulted for the company; and now, John Bolton , whom Trump announced Thursday will replace H.R. McMaster as his new national security adviser.

FEC records show  that from 2014 through 2016, John Bolton’s super PAC paid Cambridge Analytica $1,152,299 for “research” and “survey research” work.

The company has found itself mired in scandal this week following allegations it illegally used data harvested from 50 million Facebook users to inform its voter targeting operations.

(At the same time, the firm’s CEO Alexander Nix also was caught on camera  touting the company’s use of sex workers to apparently entrap rival political candidates in elections around the globe, and using social media to slyly “infiltrate” online communities with political messaging including the phrase “crooked Hillary,” which the firm claims to have invented .)

That foisted data was absolutely used to produce reports for Bolton’s group, said Christopher Wylie, a founding team member of Cambridge Analytica.

“The data and modeling Bolton’s PAC received was derived from the Facebook data,” Wylie told the New York Times . “We definitely told them about how we were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings.”

Wylie added that Bolton’s PAC wanted to make people more “militaristic” in their worldview and was “obsessed” with the idea that America had become “spineless” on national security issues.

According to CNN , only four other Republican campaign committees paid Cambridge Analytica more than Bolton’s PAC during that time frame: Make America Number 1, a super PAC backed by Robert Mercer, a billionaire who founded Cambridge Analytica in 2014 ($1,476,484); Cruz For President ($5,805,552); and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. ($5,912,500).

Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, contributed around $3 million to John Bolton’s PAC during the 2016 election alone, in addition to around $22 million  in the same time frame to other Republican super PACs and the Trump campaign.