Cambridge Analytica CEO Brags About Influencing Elections With Sex Workers and Bribes

Digging up dirt on political opponents is a long tradition. However, the data firm that took credit for President Donald Trump’s election win took the idea further than usual.

According to a new Channel 4 investigation, top officials at Cambridge Analytica were recorded saying they could entrap politicians with sex workers and bribes. This adds to a growing list of shady practices associated with the company.

The Trump campaign sent $6 million to these same U.K.-based consultants in 2016 — and later denied it. Cambridge Analytica is also under fire now for using data from a Facebook app without users’ consent.

Reporters pretended to be potential clients who wanted to influence the upcoming elections in Sri Lanka.

The recordings revealed CEO Alexander Nix explaining that his firm secretly skews campaigns worldwide using subcontractors or other companies as a front. Channel 4 reports:

In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr. Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house,’ adding that Ukrainian girls ‘are very beautiful, I find that works very well.” In another he said: “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.”

As Channel 4 notes, offering bribes to politicians is illegal in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Meanwhile, a Cambridge Analytica spokesman denies that the firm actually uses “entrapment, bribes, or so-called ‘honey-traps’ for any purpose whatsoever.”

No matter the company line, the scrutiny of Cambridge Analytica continues. And the former employee who revealed Cambridge Analytica’s shady tactics collecting Facebook data is scheduled to testify in a House committee soon.

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