Cambridge Analytica director met WikiLeaks’ Assange in 2017 ‘to discuss US election’

A former director with Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked with the Trump campaign, met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London last year to discuss the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Embassy visitor logs obtained by The Guardian reveal that Brittany Kaiser, a director at Cambridge Analytica until earlier this year, visited with Assange in mid-February 2017 to discuss the U.S. election.

{mosads}

Kaiser, according to the newspaper, has also been accused of funneling money to the organization in the form of cryptocurrency, which is not illegal but allows the donations to go unreported due to Bitcoin’s private nature.

It was reported last year that Assange had turned down an offer from Cambridge Analytica to help index and go through tens of thousands of stolen emails from former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

“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,” Cambridge Analytica’s then-CEO Alexander Nix said of Assange at an event in Portugal last year.

The February 2017 meeting between Assange and Kaiser is the only known face-to-face meeting of a Cambridge Analytica employee and the WikiLeaks founder. 

Cambridge Analytica announced in May that the firm would shut down due to the negative press it received after it was reported that the firm obtained the private information of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge or consent before the 2016 election.

The firm has denied any wrongdoing and claims the data was not used in its 2016 work for the Trump campaign.