by WorldTribune Staff, June 11, 2017

With Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller ramping up, the Trump-Russia collusion theory, still unsupported by facts, continues to make headlines despite declining public interest.

But against the good news in economic trends for the new administration, the establishment media-political complex is trotting out a new conspiracy theory involving Brexit and the billionaire who helped bankroll President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

A British report cites a document leaked by a “concerned source” – one that is said to connect both the Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaigns’ data firms directly to billionaire and Trump supporter Robert Mercer.

Lawyers for the data firms have disputed the accuracy of the report.

“British electoral law is founded on the principle of a level playing field and controlling campaign spending is the key plank of that,” the UK’s Guardian reported. “The law states that different campaigns must not work together unless they declare their expenditure jointly.”

According to the new theory and its promoters, Mercer bought Brexit. One source cited in the Guardian story said that the Leave campaign was a “petri dish” for the Trump campaign.

The UK’s Observer was privy to a “confidential document” that provides “clear evidence” of a link between the Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaigns, the Guardian reported.

“More precisely, evidence of a close working relationship between the two data analytics firms employed by the campaigns – AggregateIQ, which Vote Leave hired, and Cambridge Analytica, retained by Leave.EU,” the report said.

The report noted that, at the official launch of Leave.EU on Nov. 18, 2015, American political strategist, Gerry Gunster, took center stage and explained the campaign’s strategy. “The one thing that I know is data,” he said. “Numbers do not lie. I’m going to follow the data.”

Following the data, the Guardian said, “is the key to unlocking what really happened behind the scenes of the Leave campaign. On the surface, the two main campaigns, Leave.EU and Vote Leave, hated one other. Their leading lights, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, were sworn enemies for the duration of the referendum. The two campaigns bitterly refused even to share a platform.”

The links between the foreign data analytics companies – one based in Canada and one based in London – “raise profound and troubling questions about our democratic process,” the Guardian said. “Because these intricate links lead, in not many steps, to Robert Mercer” and his link to the referendum to take Britain out of the EU.

The Observer reported that the two analytics compaines “were working together on a daily basis” at the time of the Brexit referendum and both companies “were being paid by Mercer-funded organizations to work on Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in America.”





Also, the Guardian reported, several “anonymous sources” revealed the two companies, working on two separate British Leave campaigns, “actually shared the same database at the time.”

The Guardian continued: “Follow the data, however, and another story is revealed, which leads directly to Mercer and his close associate, Steve Bannon, now Donald Trump’s chief strategist in the White House.”

Mercer was the owner of Cambridge Analytica, a firm which, as the Observer reported, “was spun out of a British firm with 30 years experience in working for governments and militaries around the world, specializing in ‘psychological operations.’ ”

At the time of the referendum, the Observer noted, Bannon was the head of Cambridge Analytica.

“What was not known, until February, was the relationship between all these figures and the Leave campaign,” the Guardian said. “That was when Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, revealed to this paper that Farage was a close friend of both Bannon and Mercer. ‘We shared a lot of information because what they were trying to do and what we were trying to do had massive parallels.’ ”

Wigmore said that Mercer, Farage and others had all met at a conference in Washington. “The best dinner we ever went to. Around that table were all the rejects of the political world. And the rejects of the political world are now effectively in the White House. It’s extraordinary. Jeff Sessions. [Former national security adviser Michael] Flynn, the whole lot of them. They were all there.”

The Guardian’s report said the UK’s Electoral Commission is looking into Cambridge Analytica and Mercer’s connections to Brexit as “British law, designed to protect its electoral system from outside influence, expressly forbids donations from foreign – or impermissible – donors.”

Coordination between campaigns destroys the “level playing field” on which UK electoral law is based, the Guardian said, adding “it creates an unfair advantage.”

Lawyers for Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections said the Observer’s reporting on the matter “contained significant inaccuracies and amounted to a sustained campaign of vilification designed to paint a false and misleading picture” of their clients.

The lawyers said their clients have done no wrong, broken no laws and breached no one’s rights and had not been part of a “shadowy” or unlawful campaign to subvert British democracy or dupe the British public.

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