scumofscotland :
King, thank you for your kind response. My objection is that neither you nor i know if the trump campaign had any idea that the services they paid for used data facebook had rightfully demanded be deleted. Unless i missed it, the links cited question the timing of the usage or discussed tangential topics (e.g. Similar case with obama) but nowhere establish proof of fraud. To be clear i am not saying it isn't possible, just that it is not established and therefor should not be stated as fact (trump campaign fraud, i make no defence of cambridge which appear guilty). I get that most of us have a prefered version of the truth ( myself included) but i don't think we have that luxury anymore because it is tearing us appart with a level of distrust, cynicism, hatred, and hypocricy i have not seen before (and i am not a spring chicken). If i missed something in the links that you feel does establish that the trump campaign knew the data was ill gotten please let me know so i can adjust my position.
Here's the thing, though.
I am not saying it isn't possible, just that it is not established and therefor should not be stated as fact (trump campaign fraud
Except that it is NOT stated as fact. The sentence in question is:
The motive in the latest Facebook scandal involves possible election fraud by the Trump campaign via the firm Cambridge Analytica
Your posts treat the sentence as if the word "possible" was not in there. This is what I object most strenuously to. Close to that is your original post citing only a fraction of the sentence rather than the whole thing. It comes off looking like a deliberate attempt to misrepresent what was actually said.
Also, while there's no definitive proof as of this moment of exactly how Cambridge Analytica sold themselves to the Trump campaign, the fact that in a sting operation, Cambridge Analytica has admitted outright to the potential client of the exact tactics they use.
That was in the link from the word "news" in "all over the news." There is also video provided, but I didn't bother with that.
Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the dark arts used by the company to help clients, which included entrapping rival candidates in fake bribery stings and hiring prostitutes to seduce them.
In one exchange, the company chief executive, Alexander Nix, is recorded telling reporters: “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.”
Are you suggesting that they bragged about these tactics, and their presumed effectiveness, only for the first time with the BBC 4 undercover reproters? Or that they always do, but did not do so when discussing work with the Trump campaign?
Do you believe that the company being a US front for a British company (SCL), and Steve Bannon as the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, who was part of the Trump Administration until recently, is just a coincidence? It is illegal for non-US citizens to work on US campaigns.
Cambridge Analytica employed non-American citizens to work on US election campaigns in apparent violation of federal law, despite receiving a legal warning about the risks.
The company’s responsibilities under US law were laid out in a lawyer’s memo to the company’s vice-president, Steve Bannon, British CEO Alexander Nix and Rebekah Mercer, daughter of billionaire owner Robert Mercer, in July 2014. It made it clear that most senior and mid-level positions involving strategy, planning, fundraising or campaigning needed to be filled by US citizens.
“Any decision maker must be a US citizen or green card holder,” the memo, seen by the Observer, warned. It also provided a brief legal history of cases involving foreign involvement in election campaigns, drawn up by a lawyer at the firm founded by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
...
Employees working for Cambridge Analytica in the US at the time claimed that rather than tackling the problem, management appeared to ignore it.
That's from:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-non-american-employees-political
As to the fact that Cambridge Analytica is a shell company for SCL, just to get around the US laws, well:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/cambridge-analytica-alexander-nix.html
Mr. Nix, for instance, holds dual appointments at the two companies. Cambridge Analytica is registered in Delaware and almost wholly owned by the Mercer family, but it is effectively a shell — it holds intellectual property rights to its so-called psychographic modeling tools, yet its clients are served by the staff at London-based SCL and overseen by Mr. Nix, who is a British citizen.
...
But in the footage broadcast by Channel 4, Mr. Nix offered services that go far beyond data harvesting. The Times did not work with Channel 4 on its report about Cambridge Analytica.
“Many of our clients don’t want to be seen to be working with a foreign company,” he told the Channel 4 reporter, who was not identified. “We can set up fake IDs and websites, we can be students doing research projects attached to a university, we can be tourists. There’s so many options we can look at.”
To suggest that the Trump campaign had no idea of any of this, and did not know what kind of actions that CA would take would be ludicrous in its own right, and that absurdity is magnified given that Steve Bannon is the VP of Cambridge Analytica.
Now, I am not a lawyer, so I don't know what exact proof would be required in court for confirmation of fraud. But to suggest that the Trump campaign was completely ignorant of CA given the information available - well, it's an understatement to say that it strains believability.
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