Cambridge Analytica's chief executive officer Alexander Nix

Britain’s Channel 4 conducted a lengthy sting operation on the strategic data firm that helped get Donald Trump elected. And what they found was a company that used sex, bribery and blackmail to get what they want.

Channel 4 launched their investigation after interviewing former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie. It was Wylie that revealed how CA worked with Steve Bannon to create a “psychological warfare mindfuck tool” that would take military-style disinformation campaigns and ramp them up using big data and social media. That tool, and a lot of stolen data from Facebook, enabled Trump’s campaign to plant just the right story in just the right place.

But the second part of Channel 4’s investigation into Cambridge Analytica is even more explosive.

Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers. … “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.”

The problem for Nix, and for Trump’s friends at Cambridge Analytica, was that they were explaining how they stung candidates—to someone who was stinging them.

Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.

Cambridge Analytica was funded by the Mercers, on an idea by Steve Bannon. And it’s clear that Bannon’s attitude toward the law is all over the company.