Second, it claims that Cambridge Analytica also played a critical role in the other 2016 vote that shocked the world: The successful Brexit campaign to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Both that result and Trump's election achieved the key strategic goal of Russia: Destabilizing the Western alliance. That's no proof of collusion, of course. But you can see why investigators are stepping up their probes. In the case of hacking, we know that the Trump campaign was seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton and the Democrats and that dirt — courtesy, it is alleged, of Russian hackers — appeared just weeks later. In the case of data, we know that Jared Kushner wanted to target specific voters and the Russians set up an operation to create "fake news" content for exactly those readers. Either it's the world's greatest coincidence, or something darker was going on. This take by the Guardian's writer Carole Cadwalladr is as dark as it gets: