Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who is providing the world a look inside the data mining firm which used Facebook user profiling to help the Trump campaign, joined Don Lemon last night (above) to talk about his revelations.
Wylie said that Cambridge Analytica was testing Trump slogans, phrases, and imagery like “drain the swamp” and “deep state” and “build that wall” in 2014, well before Trump announced his run.
“A lot of these narratives which at the time would have seemed crazy for a mainstream candidate to run on, those are the things that we were finding that there were pockets of Americans who this really appealed to. And Steve Bannon knew that, because we were doing the research on it. And I was surprised when I saw the Trump campaign talking about ‘building the walls’ and ‘draining the swamp’. …You’d have to ask the company and Steve Bannon where they got these narratives, but these were the things we were testing well before Trump announced.”
Wylie also discussed a meeting between Cambridge Analytica and former Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski in 2015, when the firm had already been hired by Ted Cruz.
Earlier today, Channel 4 previewed an exposé on the firm where they showed CEO Alexander Nix and other senior executives bragging about using sex workers and other salacious methods to “entrap politicians in compromising situations.” The firm refuted the video in a statement insisting that Channel 4’s piece is a deceptively-edited look at their process for weeding out “any unethical or illegal intentions” from potential clients.
Wiley was asked about this during his interview tonight with CNN’s Don Lemon, and he responded: “I’m probably the only gay guy in London that had a membership card to a strip club with women.” When Lemon asked him to elaborate, Wiley explained that he often visited strip clubs because the conversations on the tape showed “a common technique” the firm uses.
“One of the things that this company does is it will do whatever it takes to get a contract,” Wiley said, “and if that means entertaining a client at a strip club with women stripping, they will do that.”
Here’s the full expose:
