Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower reveals that Stephen Bannon was testing phrases like "drain the swamp" and pushing a pro-Putin narrative years before he joined the Trump campaign.

Chris Wylie

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters, a former employee of the data-science firm said Tuesday. 

The 2014 effort was part of a high-tech form of voter persuasion touted by the company, which under Bannon identified and tested the power of anti-establishment messages that later would emerge as central themes in President Trump’s campaign speeches, according to Chris Wylie, who left the company at the end of that year. 

Among the messages tested were “drain the swamp” and “deep state,” he said.

According to Wylie, Bannon was the big boss and everything had to go through him.

And get this: 

The data and analyses that Cambridge Analytica generated in this time provided discoveries that would later form the emotionally charged core of Trump’s presidential platform, said Wylie, whose disclosures in news reports over the past several days have rocked both his onetime employer and Facebook. 

“Trump wasn’t in our consciousness at that moment; this was well before he became a thing,” Wylie said. “He wasn’t a client or anything.” 

The year before Trump announced his presidential bid, the data firm already had found a high level of alienation among young, white Americans with a conservative bent. 

In focus groups arranged to test messages for the 2014 midterms, these voters responded to calls for building a new wall to block the entry of illegal immigrants, to reforms intended to “drain the swamp” of Washington’s entrenched political community and to thinly veiled forms of racism toward African Americans called “race realism,” he recounted.

Besides the Trump catchphrases that Bannon was testing out in 2014, there was also this startling revelation: 

“The only foreign thing we tested was Putin,” he said. “It turns out, there’s a lot of Americans who really like this idea of a really strong authoritarian leader and people were quite defensive in focus groups of Putin’s invasion of Crimea.”

Now look I am really fighting the urge to put on my conspiracy theory tinfoil hat here, but there is no way to categorize this as a string of coincidences. 

It really sounds like there was an anti-immigrant, racist, pro-Putin platform all ready to go and all they needed was a figurehead to be the face of the campaign.

Cue Donald J. Trump.

Or, and this is only a little less conspiratorial, since Bannon met Trump way back in 2010, perhaps all of this was tested with him in mind, and he has literally been planning his campaign since at least 2014 or 2013.

Whatever the truth behind this is, what cannot be refuted is that people essentially voted for a Steven Bannon in Trump clothing.

Facebook reveals that as many as 87 million people may have had their data stolen by Cambridge Analytica.

Seriously, what in the hell would make you trust me?

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

Facebook on Wednesday said that the data of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with a political consulting firm connected to President Trump during the 2016 election — a figure far higher than the estimate of 50 million that had been widely cited since the leak was reported last month.

Facebook had not previously disclosed how many accounts had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica, the firm connected to the Trump campaign. It has also been reluctant to disclose how it was used by Russian-backed actors to influence the 2016 presidential election. 

Among Facebook’s acknowledgments on Wednesday was the disclosure of a vulnerability in its search and account recovery functions that it said could have exposed “most” of its 2 billion users to having their public profile information harvested.

So to be clear this 87 million number STILL may not prove accurate, as essentially every Facebook user's information could have been "harvested," which sounds like a fancy word for "stolen."

So now Zuckerberg is claiming that Facebook will now provide the tools for users to better control who accesses their information, but keep in mind that they have known about this for years and only started to give a shit when journalists reported on the multiple breaches.

At least least Tom Anderson of MySpace pretended to be our friend.

Facebook stocks plunge as the FTC launches investigation into data sharing practices. Update!

Courtesy of NBC News: 

Shares of Facebook cratered as much as 6 percent Monday after the Federal Trade Commission announced it is investigating the company's data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica leak of 50 million users' information. 

"The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices," the agency said in a statement. 

The FTC declined to confirm last week that it was investigating Facebook, including whether it violated a consent decree the tech company signed with the agency in 2011. 

The decree required that Facebook notify users and receive explicit permission before sharing personal data beyond their specified privacy settings. 

A violation of the consent decree could carry a penalty of $40,000 per violation.

Well we all know that they certainly violated that consent decree, and at $40,000 a pop that might well bankrupt Facebook.

But before you feel too bad for this multi billion dollar company, perhaps you ought to read this article from a guy who found out that Facebook had collected every phone number in his contact list:

This is not the most startling example of Facebook's data collection. At least one user has reported that all of his text messages from an Android phone have somehow ended up being stored by Mark Zuckerberg's company. 

Even if Facebook users agree to share this data, their friends whose numbers or text messages are being collected almost certainly have not. And even if those people have never joined Facebook - or have decided to delete their accounts - it looks as though some of their data will stay with the social network as long as the people who provided it remain.

And if you are now wondering how that kind of data could be misused, well this next article gives a pretty good example.

Courtesy of Fortune: 

Cambridge Analytica isn’t the only entity using Facebook data for its own ends. 

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has relied on Facebook data to find and track immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, according to a new report by The Intercept. 

The report tells of one instance in which ICE used backend Facebook data to determine when the account of the person in question was accessed, as well as the IP addresses corresponding to each login. The agents reportedly combined this data with other routinely used records, such as phone records, to pinpoint his location.

This is all perfectly legal, and of course most of us are probably okay with law enforcement using these techniques to catch the bad guys, but under the Trump Administration the label "bad guys" could now pertain to people who just a year ago were considered upstanding members of the community.

Update: Zuckerberg has now agreed to testify before Congress.

I hope they hold his damn feet to the fire.

It turns out that Cambridge Analytica sent foreigners to help Republicans win elections. Hey, isn't that illegal?

Christopher Wylie.

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of a scandal about misused Facebook information, sent dozens of foreign nationals to work on U.S. elections in 2014, The Washington Post reported on Sunday. 

Three of the firm’s former employees, including whistleblower Christopher Wylie, said the company was mostly staffed with non-U.S. citizens as it worked across several states to help elect Republicans. The campaign ― dubbed “Project Ripon” ― continued even after an attorney warned the firm to obey U.S. election laws, which mandate foreigners cannot “directly or indirectly participate in the decision-making process” in a political campaign. 

Despite the warning, at least 20 non-Americans were sent to advise congressional and legislative campaigns in 2014, and helped to decide who to target with political messages, the Post reported. Such voters were dubbed “hidden Republicans.”

“Its dirty little secret was that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election,” Wylie told the Post.

Well now, why am I not more surprised? 

Cambridge Analytica is under siege. And that's good news.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

British investigators on Friday night searched the London offices of Cambridge Analytica, the data-analytics company that harvested data from 50 million Facebook users to develop psychological profiles on behalf of political campaigns, including that of President Trump. 

About 20 investigators from Britain’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, descended on the company’s offices on New Oxford Street after obtaining a search warrant from the High Court. 

“We are pleased with the decision of the judge, and the warrant is now being executed,” the office of the information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, said in a statement. “This is just one part of a larger investigation into the use of personal data and analytics for political purposes. As you will expect, we will now need to collect, assess and consider the evidence before coming to any conclusions.” 

Last Saturday, the same day The New York Times and The Observer of London published a detailed look at the company’s use of Facebook data, Ms. Denham’s office announced an investigation into “the circumstances in which Facebook data may have been illegally acquired and used.”

What is that passage in the Bible about reaping what you sow again?

If that were not enough bad news for Cambridge Analytica, they are also on Robert Mueller's radar.

Courtesy of the AP:

Special counsel Robert Mueller is scrutinizing the connections between President Donald Trump’s campaign and the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which has come under fierce criticism over reports that it swiped the data of more than 50 million Facebook users to sway elections. 

Mueller’s investigators have asked former campaign officials about the Trump campaign’s data operations, particularly about how it collected and utilized voter data in battleground states, according to a person with direct knowledge of the line of inquiry but not authorized 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.

And there is plenty to go after here, as this company had connections not just to the Trump campaign, but also past and current members of the Trump Administration.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

In an interview with the New York Times, Wylie says that Bolton’s PAC was alarmed by polling trends showing that more and more Americans viewed war unfavorably — and it wanted to construct an advertising campaign aimed at reversing those views. 

“The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues,” said Wylie, a data expert who was a key figure in the founding of Cambridge Analytica. “That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview. That’s what they said they wanted, anyway.” 

Bolton’s PAC hired Cambridge Analytica months after it was founded in 2014, and the firm’s work with Bolton’s group became an example that it used to pitch potential clients about the value of its data harvesting model. 

Emails viewed by the Times suggest that former Trump political strategist Steve Bannon had some role in setting up contacts between Bolton and Cambridge Analytica, as an email from a Cambridge Analytica employee sent to Bolton specifically mentioned Bannon in its subject header.

 I am guessing that Cambridge is out of the data analysis business for the time being at least.

And this is a warning shot to any others who may want to adopt their business model. 

H.R. McMaster out as Trump's National Security Adviser, will be replaced by John "bomb the hell out out everybody" Bolton.

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Courtesy of the New York Times:

Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the battle-tested Army officer tapped as President Trump’s national security adviser last year to stabilize a turbulent foreign policy operation, will resign and be replaced by John R. Bolton, a hard-line former United States ambassador to the United Nations, White House officials said Thursday. 

General McMaster will retire from the military, the officials said. He has been discussing his departure with President Trump for several weeks, they said, but decided to speed up his departure, in part because questions about his status were casting a shadow over his conversations with foreign officials. 

The officials also said that Mr. Trump wanted to fill out his national security team before his meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. He replaced Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson with the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, last week. 

Officials emphasized that General McMaster’s departure was a mutual decision and amicable, with none of the recrimination that marked Mr. Tillerson’s exit. They said it was not related to a leak on Tuesday of briefing materials for Mr. Trump’s phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

"They said it was not related to a leak on Tuesday of briefing materials for Mr. Trump’s phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia." In other words that is EXACTLY what it is about.

(I just assume now that the truth is always the opposite of whatever the Trump White House says that it is. Real time saver. )

So now another grown up is out the door, leaving Trump surrounded by sycophants and conspiracy theorists.

And this new addition is DEFINITELY going to make things even more inane inside this White House.

John Bolton worked for the Bush Administration and was well known for wanting to bomb just about everybody, and who as Ambassador to the UN spent all of his time undermining it and shitting on its agenda.

After the Russians hacked the DNC, Bolton put forward the theory that it was a false flag operation orchestrated by President Obama.

You know, because THAT makes sense. 

Bolton also has ties to Cambridge Analytica, and once appeared in an advertisement for a pro-gun Russian group with ties to the NRA.

Fox News contributor, with ties to Cambridge Analytica, the NRA, and Russia.

Oh yeah, he is going to fit into this clown car just fine.

Cambridge Analytica boss caught on camera offering to hire sex workers and offer bribes to compromise politicians.

Courtesy of Buzzfeed: 

The boss of Cambridge Analytica, the analytics firm at the centre of an international storm over the misuse of Facebook user data, has been caught on camera bragging about how the company could blackmail political candidates with sex workers, and telling a prospective client that it has been secretly operating around the world to campaign in elections. 

In an undercover operation by Britain's Channel 4 News, CEO Alexander Nix and two other high-ranking Cambridge Analytica staff took meetings with a reporter posing as a fixer who wanted the data firm's help getting candidates elected in Sri Lanka. 

On Monday evening, Channel 4 broadcast undercover footage from four meetings across three months, with Nix telling the reporter that one of the services of Cambridge Analytica could be to “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”. 

Nix also told the undercover reporter: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance. We’ll have the whole thing recorded. We’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the internet.”

Representatives of the company also offered to spread fake news about political opponents in order to help sway the elections.

Well gee, no wonder the Trump campaign wanted to work with these guys, they were singing the same tune.

This is what the whistle blower who outed the company's Facebook data mining operation said about this video:   

Wiley couldn’t speak as to how this relates to the firm’s work for the Trump campaign, but he went on to say “there is a perverse company culture inside of Cambridge Analytica, and as the undercover shows, they’re willing to go to extreme lengths to service their clients, and they’ll do anything that helps, whether it’s legal or not.”

Do we really believe that the Trump campaign did not utilize that skills set?

We also learned yesterday that before they started using their possibly illegal tactics to help Donald Trump, that Cambridge Analytica worked for Ted Cruz.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Before they ran shady data operations for Donald Trump’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) during his presidential bid. Now, the Texas Republican is under fire for hiring the group amid reports that they improperly used Facebook data. 

The Dallas Morning News reported Monday that the Cruz campaign kept Cambridge Analytica on retainer six months after initial reports of the firm using illicitly-sourced Facebook data surfaced in 2015 — a fact the Texas Democratic Party touted in a news release published on Monday. 

“Ted Cruz will stop at nothing to weasel his way into power, even if it means weaponizing stolen information to manipulate people to like him,” Manny Garcia, the deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a press release. “Cruz’s campaign exploited personal information to create psychological profiles on millions of Americans. All to keep lining the pockets of Cruz’s billionaire super PAC donors — like Robert Mercer, who funded this propaganda machine.”

Color me unsurprised that Cruz would resort to tactics like this, nice to see that it might end up biting him in the ass and costing him this election.

Oh, one more thing.

I appears that Cambridge Anaylytica currently has a contract with our State Department: 

Strategic Communications Laboratories, best known for its work with its offshoot and collaborator Cambridge Analytica, appears to have an open contract with the State Department. DefenseOne first noted the contract on a government contracts database, where it is listed as still open.

Well, I ma going to have to take a really hot shower after this post to get the sleaze off. 

Cambridge Analytica, who stands accused of stealing data from over 50 million Facebook users, is working overtime to stop media outlets from issuing reports revealing their tactics.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Cambridge Analytica is trying to prevent an undercover report by London’s Channel 4 News that shows the firm’s CEO Alexander Nix speaking candidly about the firm’s practices from airing, according to the Financial Times. 

Reporters for Channel 4 posed as prospective clients and secretly filmed a number of meetings with the firm. 

The Financial Times's report did not make clear how the data firm was working to stop the report from airing. 

Cambridge Analytica also threatened to sue the Guardian to stop this story about the guy who blew the whistle on their Facebook data theft from being published: 

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process. 

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup. 

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says. 

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

Clearly that didn't work.

In another piece by the Guardian that I am sure Cambridge Analytica would like to make go away, we learn that the guy who orchestrated the data mining on Facebook has ties to Russia: 

Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties to a Russian university, including a teaching position and grants for research into the social media network, the Observer has discovered. Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with – which funded the project to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon – also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin. 

Energy firm Lukoil, which is now on the US sanctions list and has been used as a vehicle of government influence, saw a presentation on the firm’s work in 2014. It began with a focus on voter suppression in Nigeria, and Cambridge Analytica also discussed “micro-targeting” individuals on social media during elections. 

The revelations come at a time of intense US scrutiny of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, with 13 Russians criminally charged last month with interfering to help Donald Trump.

Man no matter what the story, it always links back to Russia in some way or another. 

By the way Robert Mueller has requested all emails between the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica, so this party is far from over.

Interesting that not only is the Trump White House all super double secret about what they are up to, but so is just about everybody who helped them to get there in the first place.

Natasha Bertrand ties it all together.

.@NATASHABERTRAND on the reported ties between Russia and #CambridgeAnalytica that she believes could "add an entirely new dimension to #Mueller's investigation" #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/clVKhyn2Eu

— AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) March 18, 2018

This my friends, is evidence of collusion.

I think that Mueller probably has all that he needs to make Donald Trump eat these words. 

The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018

Data analysis group associated with Trump campaign harvested information from millions of Facebook accounts in order to target them more effectively.

Courtesy of The Guardian:  

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. 

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. 

Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” 

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals. 

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

Couple of things to note here.

First off Jared Kushner took credit for bringing Cambridge Analytica into the Trump campaign:  

“I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Secondly if this breach happened way back in 2014, it might indicate that Trump was already getting his ducks in a row to run way back then, despite his claims that he did not decide until 2015. 

Thirdly using Facebook data was also how the Russians targeted users for their propaganda campaign, which could link their efforts directly to Kushner and the Trump campaign, something I am certain Robert Mueller is already looking into.

Have you noticed that the more we learn, the more it seems to indicate that the Russians and the Trump campaign worked hand in hand to win that 2016 election?

P.S. The Massachusetts Attorney General is now launching in investigation into Cambridge Analytica. 

Cambridge Analytica reached out to Wikileaks for those Clinton emails only after they started working for the Trump campaign.

Alexander Nix

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:  

The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica contacted the founder of WikiLeaks to ask him to share Hillary Clinton -related emails at the same time that people familiar with the matter say the British data-analytics firm had begun working for President Donald Trump’s campaign. 

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix said Thursday he asked the office that handles his speaking engagements to contact WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in “early June 2016,” after reading a newspaper report that WikiLeaks planned to publish a trove of Clinton-related emails. He said Mr. Assange was asked “if he might share that information with us.” 

“We received a message back from them that he didn’t want to and wasn’t able to, and that was the end of the story,” Mr. Nix said at the digital conference Web Summit in Lisbon. He called the exchange “very benign.” 

When Mr. Nix’s approach to WikiLeaks was reported by The Wall Street Journal last month, it wasn’t clear whether Cambridge was working for the Trump campaign at the time. Federal Election Commission records show the first payment by the campaign to Cambridge Analytica is dated July 29, 2016.

Okay so how many people working for the Trump campaign actively tried to get those nonexistent Clinton emails now?

Five?

Six?

All of them?

To be clear the Russians only gave Wikileaks emails from John Podesta, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign.

These proved to be largely innocuous.

They NEVER got a hold of any of the emails on Hillary's private server, which once again proves the intelligence on her part of using that in the first place. 

Head of the Trump Campaign's data-analytics firm admits he reached out to Wikileaks for Hillary's deleted emails.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

Alexander Nix, who heads a controversial data-analytics firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s campaign, wrote in an email last year that he reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s missing 33,000 emails. 

On Wednesday, Assange confirmed that such an exchange took place. 

Nix, who heads Cambridge Analytica, told a third party that he reached out to Assange about his firm somehow helping the WikiLeaks editor release Clinton’s missing emails, according to two sources familiar with a congressional investigation into interactions between Trump associates and the Kremlin. (CNN later reported Cambridge backer Rebekah Mercer was one of the email's recipients.) Those sources also relayed that, according to Nix’s email, Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn’t want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own. 

The interchange between Nix—whose company made millions from the Trump campaign—and Assange represents the closest known connection between Trump’s campaign and Wikileaks.

Aha!

As we know Cambridge Analytica was funded by the Mercer family, and had deep ties with both Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn.

This was the Trump campaign's go to shop for analyzing voter data and formulating a strategy based on what they learned.

However that is an inconvenient reality and therefore the Trump folks must reject it.

Trump campaign issues statement downplaying Cambridge Analytica‘s role working for campaign, doesn’t address Assange/emails pic.twitter.com/N6L7MVtsse

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) October 25, 2017

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:

When Trump adviser Jared Kushner bragged to Forbes about his role in steering the Trump campaign to victory, he emphasized the merits of its unique data operation. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica,” he said, referring to the Robert Mercer-backed analytics company. “We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months.” The relationship was lucrative for the firm, too: Between July 29 and December 12 of last year, the Trump campaign reportedly paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. But on Wednesday, after the Daily Beast reported that its C.E.O., Alexander Nix, had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with an offer to help release Hillary Clinton’s missing e-mails, Team Trump moved to distance itself from the company. 

In a statement, Michael S. Glassner, the Trump campaign executive director, highlighted the operation's reliance on Republican National Committee data. “Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics,” he said. “Leading into the election, the R.N.C. had invested in the most sophisticated data-targeting program in modern American history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to have worked with the R.N.C. and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics.”

Nothing to see here, just move along. Move along dammit!

Apparently the Trump team still thinks there might be too many bread crumbs leading to the campaign's doorstep, so they also made this extraordinary move:

WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of emails apparently hacked from the Democratic National Committee was legal and specifically protected by federal law, the Trump campaign argued in a court filing Wednesday. 

Lawyers for the Trump presidential campaign came to the controversial transparency website's defense in a bid to defeat a lawsuit three Democratic activists filed in July accusing Trump's presidential campaign of conspiring to publish sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers and information suggesting that a Democratic National Committee employee was gay. 

The Trump campaign's motion to dismiss the case argues that WikiLeaks qualifies as the kind of online service that Congress rendered immune from legal liability through legislation passed more than two decades ago.

Do you know how they say that animals can smell fear?

Yeah, well I think I am getting a whiff of that myself.