As the Trump campaign got underway, Cambridge Analytica became one of the effort’s most important tools. Despite official claims that the company didn’t deploy its psychographic weaponry to help Trump, in a discussion with Wired, Parscale’s description what CA did for the campaign sounds … exactly like their advertised psychographic weaponry.

Parscale says Cambridge also helped the campaign with what he calls "persuasion online media buying. They also helped us identify potential donors. And they created a visualization tool that showed in each state which areas were most persuadable and what those voters care about.”

Though Parscale at first denied that he had relied on the dataset provided by CA and claimed that that the campaign only used RNC data, the fact that the Trump campaign conducted fundraising through Cambridge Analytica before they were given the RNC data, later caused Parscale to admit that they had used the CA data on at least one occasion.

With the Facebook data, CA’s toolset, and Facebook’s own targeting advertising tools that allowed Trump’s campaign to put a story or ad right back in the lap of selected voters, Parscale and CA could customize what each potential voter saw to bring them to the polls. Or, in many cases, to make them stay home by planting stories about supposed issues around Hillary Clinton.

It wasn’t just Bannon and Parscal who came to love the way CA could seek and implant the right message with the right people to do the most damage. The company became a favorite of Jared Kushner, who bragged that he was the one who actually made Cambridge Analytica a central part of the campaign. He was fascinated with the capabilities of CA’s toolset. Enough so that investigators believe that Kushner’s discussion of Cambridge’s abilities may have gone well beyond just chatting up his NYC friends. In a Vanity Fair profile, experts pointed out the eerie precision with which Russian ad buys were able to target the American public.

Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. “Could they have hired a warehouse full of people in Moscow and had them read Nate Silver’s blog every morning and determine what messages to post to what demographics? Sure, theoretically that’s possible,” said Mike Carpenter, an Obama administration assistant defense secretary who specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. “But that’s not how they do this. And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.” Maybe no one. Or perhaps the chaotic Trump campaign unwittingly enlisted Russian-connected proxies who were eager to exploit any opening to damage Hillary Clinton’s run. It’s also plausible that Trump’s long-shot, anti-establishment bid was willing to take on assistance without asking too many questions. “Are we connecting the dots? I’m finding more dots,” said Quigley, who recently traveled to Prague and Budapest to learn more about the history of Russian influence campaigns. “I believe there was coordination, and I’m going to leave it at that for now.”

In a not-at-all-coincidence, as the Russians spent 2014 establishing an IT operation designed to exploit existing divisions in the United States, Cambridge Analytica was doing exactly the same thing. And as Cambridge was working with the Trump campaign to plant stories that both pushed their supporters to the polls and convinced Clinton supporters to sit on their hands, Russia was doing the same thing. In the same places. Using the same Facebook ad tools.

That there was a connection between Cambridge Analytica and Russia is more than speculation. One of the items revealed in the last week is that CA held multiple meetings with officials from Russia’s state-owned oil company Lukoil in 2014 and 2015—at the same time they were advertising their tools to persuade the American public. Which is exactly why Russia came to them. The first presentation that Cambridge Analytica gave to Russia's Lukoil was on how they could use micro-targeting not to get out the vote, but to suppress the vote.

Cambridge also pointed out their parent company’s ability to not just get their desired candidates elected during a campaign in Nigeria, but to completely disrupt the election process. As described in The Guardian:

A slide presentation prepared for the Lukoil pitch focuses first on election disruption strategies used by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, in Nigeria. They are presented under the heading “Election: Inoculation”, a military term used in “psychological operations” and disinformation campaigns. Other SCL documents show that the material shared with Lukoil included posters and videos apparently aimed at alarming or demoralising voters, including warnings of violence and fraud.

The means that the company used for this disruption were given more detail by the undercover investigation conducted by the UK’s Channel 4. Pretending to be a political consultant from Sri Lanka, the reporter was given a much fuller glimpse of the services provided.

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.”

How much of this arsenal was deployed in the US race isn’t clear—though Channel 4 is promising more information from their operation that specifically addresses Cambridge Analytica’s actions in the United States.

But Lukoil is far from Cambridge Analytica’s only known tie to Russian attempts to sway the outcome of the US election. Stories from the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal show that Michael Flynn was both working with Cambridge Analytica and with Republican operatives who were in contact with the Russian hackers. Cambridge Analytica seems to have had early knowledge about the role that WikiLeaks would play in disseminating stolen Democratic emails. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix—the same man who bragged to the Channel 4 reporter about his ability to entrap politicians through bribes and hookers—reached out to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

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.

The report shows that Cambridge Analytica was seeking to get the information stolen by Russia through WikiLeaks so they could use it in their psychographic campaigns. They made this outreach at the same time they were negotiating their deal with the Trump campaign, making it difficult to claim that they sought this data for any other reason than to help Trump.

Since the election, Nix has tried to claim no contact with Russia. But the relationship between the kind of analysis CA provided, and the actions of Russians in both planting ads and utilizing bots is hard to ignore. As reported by Vox, bots pushing pro-Trump stories outnumbered those pushing Clinton stories by more than five to one, and they didn’t just blindly press forward. They adjusted, in real time, in an amazing way.

Pro-Trump programmers “carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled activities after Election Day.”

Using this technique, even when a pro-Clinton story began to take off, the bots captured it, attached hash tags and snippets of the story to pro-Trump material, and used sheer numbers to swamp the original story.

Following the election, those around Trump, who were so high on the benefits of Cambridge Analytica during the campaign, have attempted to downplay the role the company played in the election. And Nix and others at Cambridge Analytica have denied both their use of the Facebook data, their outreach to Assange, and their numerous other contacts with the Russians.

But the statements from Parscale, from Kushner, and from Bannon remain. So does the essential nature of what Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign, as described by Esquire.

Playing on people's psychological weak points or preexisting biases is part of any advertising strategy, and political advertising in particular. But Cambridge Analytica's work was different, not least because the information they served Facebook users often was not marked as an ad, which is customary on television and radio. It was quintessential fake news: information with an agenda presented as disinterested and objective.

Cambridge Analytica, a creation of Steve Bannon and the Mercers, built expressly to turn military disinformation tools loose on the American public to disrupt not just elections, but society, worked exactly as planned. And if there is not yet absolute proof that they did so hand-in-glove with Russian intelligence operations seeking the same goals, there seems to be more than enough evidence to suggest a further investigation.

It was no coincidence that the first demonstration that Cambridge Analytica made to interested Russians was not of their ability to persuade, but of their ability to generate fear and discord. Their ability to not win an election, but destroy the integrity of an election.

Because that’s what they’re designed to do.