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  • Current Events & Politics Moderators: deficiT | tryptakid | Foreigner

The 2018 Trump Presidency thread

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I'll be honest, half the time I don't even know what thread I'm posting in. Every now and then I check the actual forum and open new threads, but most of the time I'm just using the "new replies to your posts" thing (which if anyone knows how to easily access outside of the mobile version of the site let me know) . So a lot of the time I have no idea what thread I'm on. Often I don't even know what part of the site I'm on apart from "somewhere I posted in once before". :)
 
"The most toxic working environment on the planet"

Never in the 14 months of the Trump White House has there been such a mood of acute anxiety from within the West Wing.

What we're hearing: Nobody knows what exactly is happening, who's about to be fired, or which staffer will next be frogmarched out the door by security for some shadowy clearance issue.

"This is the most toxic working environment on the planet. Usually tough times bring people together. But right now this atmosphere is ripping people apart. There's no leadership, no trust, no direction and this point there's very little hope. Would you want to go to work every day not knowing whether your future career was going to be destroyed without explanation?"

-- A White House official to Axios

Senior officials are equivocating privately when asked whether they think John Kelly and H.R. McMaster are staying or going. Nobody knows because it's Trump, and the way he dealt with Rex Tillerson was sudden, even though he'd long been fed up with his Secretary of State.

But the clearance issues are more serious:

? West Wingers believe more people are set to be escorted out the building for security clearance issues.

? Swan has learned that it's not just Johnny McEntee - the president's trusted body man -who's been pushed out for security clearance issues in recent days.

? The same thing happened last week to an aide to the First Lady. He was escorted from the premises and his former colleagues don't know what the security clearance issue was that forced him out. (The Daily Beast first reported his departure.)

Why this matters: This acute level of uncertainty - and these rapid fire executions, especially the security clearance issues - are shredding an already devastated morale inside the building.

Be smart: This makes it harder than ever to attract top-tier talent. They're going to have big problems replacing the next wave of vacancies.
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The White House is also backing new health ideas, such as calling for 75 percent of opioid prescriptions reimbursed by government health programs like Medicare and Medicaid to be issued by using ?best practices? within three years. That would be scaled up to 95 percent of prescriptions in five years.
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I'm not sure what this sentence means. it sounds like "best practices" is code for refusing to treat chronic pain and taking scripts away from pain patients that have been on them for decades.

I didn't see anything in this article about limiting opioid prescriptions to law abiding pain patients, but i'm sure that's a part of this plan somewhere, just can't find it. anyone can confirm?

I am VERY SCARED that this will raise heroin prices and disrupt the supply of heroin, which is becoming the only available pain treatment in the US

Its obvious this is just a way to execute black and hispanic heroin dealers, while penalties for the mostly white heroin users are being lessened and they get to go to treatment. A very racist way to single out the minorities only using heroin as a scape goat

cduggles said:
McMaster out as National Security Adviser!?!
Breaking...
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the reign of chaos continues. mueller needs to hurry up and take this derranged lunatic down
 
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perfect image summing up our collective reaction to the Trump administration

5aaae1821f00002d0016a84d.jpeg


"Konichiwa"
 
Despite the fact that HR McMaster was fired, this opioid policy proposed by the Trump administration is a really interesting read. :\

Exclusive: Trump finalizing opioid plan that includes death penalty for dealers

By DAN DIAMOND 03/15/2018 01:31 PM EDT Updated 03/15/2018 07:24 PM EDT

The Trump administration is finalizing a long-awaited plan that it says will solve the opioid crisis, but it also calls for law enforcement measures ? like the death penalty for some drug dealers ? that public health advocates and congressional Republicans warn will detract from efforts to reverse the epidemic.

The ambitious plan, which the White House has quietly been circulating among political appointees this month, could be announced as soon as Monday when President Donald Trump visits New Hampshire, a state hard hit by the epidemic. It includes a mix of prevention and treatment measures that advocates have long endorsed, as well as beefed-up enforcement in line with the president?s frequent calls for a harsh crackdown on drug traffickers and dealers.

Trump?s plan to use the death penalty in some cases found at least one fan among congressional Republicans: Rep. Chris Collins of New York, one of the president?s most consistent cheerleaders. ?I?m all in on the capital punishment side for those offenses that would warrant that,? he said when asked about the plans Thursday afternoon. ?Including drug cases. Yep.?

But several congressional Democrats said they were alarmed by Trump's plan to ramp up punishment. ?We are still paying the costs for one failed 'war on drugs,' and now President Trump is drawing up battle plans for another," said Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts. "We will not incarcerate or execute our way out of the opioid epidemic."

The White House's most concrete proposal yet to address opioids comes after complaints from state health officials and advocates that Trump has moved too slowly to combat the epidemic after his bold campaign promises to wipe out the crisis touching all parts of the country.

However, the plan could cost billions of dollars more than Trump budgeted ? and likely far more than any funding package that Congress would approve ? raising questions about how much of it can actually be put into practice. Trump's emphatic embrace of the death penalty for some drug dealers has also alarmed some advocates, who say the idea has been ineffective when tried in other countries and resurrects the nation?s unsuccessful war on drugs.

Under the most recent version of the plan, which has gone through several revisions, the Trump administration proposes to change how the government pays for opioid prescriptions to limit access to powerful painkillers. It also calls on Congress to change how Medicaid pays for treatment, seeking to make it easier for patients with addictions to get inpatient care. It would also create a new Justice Department task force that more aggressively monitors internet sales.

The administration claims its plan will reduce opioid prescriptions by one-third within three years and that the initiative will fulfill Trump's campaign promise to "stop opioid abuse."

However, that will be a tall order. There were more than 64,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016, mostly involving opioids, according to the most recent federal mortality data. The CDC last week reported that emergency rooms recorded a 30 percent spike in opioid overdoses last summer, indicating that the devastating crisis is worsening.

POLITICO obtained two versions of the White House plan and spoke with four individuals who have reviewed it. The White House confirmed that a plan was in development but didn?t respond to multiple requests for further comment.

Many of the measures in the plan were recommended by the president?s opioids commission last fall or discussed at a March 1 White House opioid summit. For instance, it endorses a long-promised priority: greatly expanding first responders' access to naloxone, a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses. It also calls on states to adopt a prescription drug monitoring database that health care providers can access nationwide to flag patients seeking out numerous opioid prescriptions.

On the policing side, the plan would ramp up prosecution and punishment, underscoring the tension in how public health advocates and law enforcement officials approach the crisis. Public health advocates say the nation's opioid epidemic should be treated as a disease, with emphasis on boosting underfunded treatment and prevention programs. But some law enforcement officials back tougher punishments as a deterrent, especially for drug dealers. The two camps don?t always see eye-to-eye, at times pitting HHS and DOJ officials against each other.

?There is a lot of internal dissension between the health folks and the enforcement folks,? said an official involved in the crafting of the plan.

While Trump this month repeatedly suggested using the death penalty to deter drug dealers and traffickers ? an idea roundly opposed by public health advocates ? many lawmakers have said they weren?t sure whether to take the idea seriously.

?I would have to strongly evaluate and look at any proposal like that,? said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) on Wednesday. ?I don?t know if the president was serious or just said it off the cuff. ? It?s a big issue when you decide to bring a capital case or pass a law that allows for capital punishment.?

According to language circulating this week, the Trump administration will call for the death penalty as an option in "certain cases where opioid, including Fentanyl-related, drug dealing and trafficking are directly responsible for death."

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), whose home state is one of the hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, said she doesn't support the death penalty for drug cases.

?I mean, I get the message he?s delivering: We?ve got to treat it seriously,? she said. ?I don?t see that that?s going to solve the problem.?

The White House plan also calls for making it easier to invoke the mandatory minimum sentence for drug traffickers who knowingly distribute illegal opioids that can be lethal, like fentanyl. It also proposes a new Justice Department task force known as ?Prescription Interdiction and Litigation,? or PIL, which would be empowered to step up prosecutions of criminally negligent doctors, pharmacies and other providers.

The White House is also backing new health ideas, such as calling for 75 percent of opioid prescriptions reimbursed by government health programs like Medicare and Medicaid to be issued by using ?best practices? within three years. That would be scaled up to 95 percent of prescriptions in five years.

It also calls on Congress to formally repeal a rule barring Medicaid payment to residential treatment for opioid addiction at large facilities, which could cost tens of billions of dollars. The rule, implemented about 50 years ago, was meant to discourage mass institutionalization of people with mental illness, but states say it has been a barrier to addiction treatment. Some states under the Obama and Trump administrations have received federal permission to waive the rule for substance abuse treatment.

The plan also includes measures favored by progressive drug policy reformers like changing the nation's prison system so all federal inmates would be screened for opioid use upon arrival and steered toward treatment at residential re-entry centers as necessary. It also calls for improving tracking systems to rapidly steer resources to areas struggling with the opioid epidemic.

Trump could announce the plan, or aspects of it, on Monday, when he is scheduled to return to New Hampshire with HHS Secretary Alex Azar. It will be Trump's first trip to New Hampshire as president after numerous campaign trips to the state to highlight the opioid epidemic.

Some administration officials hoped to announce the long-developing opioid plan ? including the death penalty for drug dealers ? at the March 1 opioid summit, but it wasn't ready in time. However, Trump still riffed that day about the need to use the death penalty to fight the opioid epidemic.

"If you shoot one person, they give you life, they give you the death penalty," Trump said at the time. "These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people and nothing happens to them."
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LucidSDreamr:
Prescriptions will be limited to through increased premiums, more clinician and pharmacy regulation and prosecution, as well as a possible national database of prescriptions. (See bolded text above.)

This plan is v $$$ and a horrible compromise between public health and the penal system.
 
fair and balanced!

WATCH: FOX NEWS HATED OBAMA TALKING TO DICTATORS BUT LOVES TRUMP MEETING WITH NORTH KOREA'S KIM JONG UN

A viral video depicted Fox News's hosts and guests contradictorily blasting former President Barack Obama for saying he would meet with dictators and enemies of the United States, but effusively praising current President Donald Trump for agreeing to sit down face-to-face with North Korean despot Kim Jong Un.

The video, released Thursday night by the news outlet Now This, showed cuts of some of the network's best-known hosts, like Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Geraldo Rivera, pouring scorn on Obama for suggesting he could meet with leaders from Iran and North Korea without preconditions. Many of those same personalities and commentators are then shown characterizing Trump’s expected talks with Kim as a “win” for the Republican. Some even said Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
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alasdair
 
cduggles said:
Despite the fact that HR McMaster was fired, this opioid policy proposed by the Trump administration is a really interesting read. :\

Exclusive: Trump finalizing opioid plan that includes death penalty for dealers




LucidSDreamr:
Prescriptions will be limited to through increased premiums, more clinician and pharmacy regulation and prosecution, as well as a possible national database of prescriptions. (See bolded text above.)

This plan is v $$$ and a horrible compromise between public health and the penal system.
Click to expand...

That is some scary shit.


I i'm predicting that the year after these prescription limiting programs go into effect heroin deaths will increase by 10-20K people per year.


The nationwide database sounds pointless. There are state databases right now preventing you from getting more than one script plus you can't get scripts if you home address is in a different state than your doctor or pharmacist.

IN FL you can't even fill scripts from a different county in another one.

Sounds like a big waste of money thought up without even analyzing the problem.
 
Okay, what's up with McMaster?

Here's an interesting 03/27/2018 article from Foreign Policy as his future is decided...

McMaster?s Problem Isn?t Trump. It?s Mattis and Kelly.

The "axis of adults" has been running foreign policy, but the national security advisor was quickly pushed to the kids' table.

Donald Trump?s national security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, has spent a lifetime defying the odds ? until now. Some in Washington have expressed surprise at the mounting reports that the career Army officer is being eased out of his White House job. But for anyone closely affiliated with the Trump administration?s national security operation, where McMaster has few remaining allies, the only surprise was that such reports had taken so long to credibly surface.

McMaster has always had a tense relationship with President Donald Trump. But for the last several months his relationships with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis, both of whom were once his strongest defenders, have deteriorated irreparably. At issue, several senior Pentagon officials tell Foreign Policy, is not McMaster?s discipline or competence, but his temperament and relative lack of experience.

McMaster now seems fated to depart the Trump White House as a senior military officer who was never the right fit either with Donald Trump, or with the so-called axis of adults shaping the administration?s foreign policy. McMaster, it turns out, was probably never a part of the latter club to begin with.

The White House denies the national security advisor is on the verge of leaving. ?President Trump said that the NBC News story is ?fake news,? and told McMaster that he is doing a great job,? said Michael Anton, head of communications for the National Security Council, at a press conference last Thursday.

But one senior Pentagon official admits that McMaster?s rat-a-tat command style and habit of giving orders that would be instantly obeyed have proven ill-suited to Washington, where military officers regularly rub shoulders with senior civilians. ?He?s a strong cup of tea,? he tells FP. ?It may have helped if he?d had a D.C. tour in the Pentagon or NSC or somewhere.?

McMaster, by all accounts, was at ease in the multiple high-level Army commands in which he previously served. But in Washington, patience, nuance, a certain political deftness and a studied deference to senior civilian officials is prized ? traits that were never among McMaster?s strongest qualities. McMaster has peremptorily interrupted presentations by civilian officials during NSC meetings which Trump attended, according to Pentagon officials, and, in several instances, was seen to be lecturing the president on the finer points of foreign policy. McMaster also has a bad habit of shaking his head in disagreement when civilian experts present their views during key White House meetings.

?You can get away with that when you?re the commander in charge,? a friend of McMaster?s for many years says. ?But you can?t get away with it in the White House.? McMaster also has a habit of painting those who disagree with him in stark, and sometimes, offensive terms: Those who agree with him are ?patriots,? those who don?t are ?reflecting the enemy narrative.?

While McMaster and Trump never forged a close working bond, it was the national security advisor?s deteriorating relationship with Kelly and Mattis that finally tipped the balance against him. Kelly began thinking about replacing McMaster as early as last November, the senior Pentagon official notes, with the chief of staff advising Trump that it might be time to think about finding someone with whom the president was more at ease.

Kelly?s thinking about McMaster has the support of Mattis, according to several Pentagon officials speaking to FP. The defense secretary has been increasingly concerned with McMaster?s sometimes volcanic, and unpredictable, temper ? and his tense relationship with Trump. For both Kelly and Mattis, the dust-up after McMaster?s appearance at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 17 ? when he declared that evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election was ?incontrovertible,? only to be publicly contradicted by Trump one day later ? was evidence that the tensions with the president would likely get worse.

?H.R. wears his emotions on his sleeve,? his friend of many years notes. ?He?s volatile, and that?s a problem for a guy like Mattis, who prizes self-control. A couple of times Mattis has had to intervene with McMaster to calm him down. He doesn?t like doing that ? and doesn?t think he should have to.?

But McMaster has had his own set of complaints. From the moment he took the job as the administration?s national security advisor, he was the odd man out in what was supposed to be a high-powered ?axis of adults? shaping the Trump administration?s foreign policy. ?This is a triumvirate, not a quartet,? a senior Marine officer who is close to Mattis confirmed to me several months ago, referring to the threesome of Kelly, Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. ?His title is ?national security advisor,? not ?national security paper pusher.? But that?s how he?s being treated.?

For military officers, even those personally unacquainted with Mattis, Kelly, and McMaster, none of this has come as a surprise. For them, the fact that Kelly and Mattis retired from the military as full generals, while McMaster remained in uniform as a three-star lieutenant general, almost guaranteed that the three would clash. ?You have to understand the four-star mentality,? one senior retired Army officer says. ?These guys are in the stratosphere, and that?s how they view themselves. And they?re right: the difference between a three-star and a four-star officer is the difference between playing youth baseball and playing the majors. These are the guys who really run things. The only one who gives them orders is the defense secretary and the president. So, you know, for four-star officers like Kelly and Mattis, a guy like H.R. might as well be a private.?

McMaster undoubtedly felt confident nonetheless, because he has spent a lifetime fighting the odds. Although he was one of the heroes of Operation Desert Storm?s Battle of 73 Easting, the celebrated tank battle against the Iraqis, many of McMaster?s fellow officers predicted that, despite his reputation, he would never make general officer rank ? promotion to brigadier general (one star) or above. The word then was that McMaster was too opinionated, a view that was reinforced when he published Dereliction of Duty, his 1998 account of the U.S. military?s senior leadership during the Vietnam War. While the book has been celebrated for its criticism of senior military leaders during that conflict, that was less true in senior military circles and especially among those who knew and worked with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Earle Wheeler and Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson, who are among the targets of McMaster?s harshest criticisms.

Despite this, McMaster not only kept getting promoted, he burnished his reputation in last decade?s Iraq War when he deftly dampened the terrorist insurgency in Tal Afar. But even with this success, McMaster was only promoted to general officer rank at the insistence of his mentor, Gen. David Petraeus, who admired his skills. His competence simply couldn?t be ignored.

McMaster continued to defy the odds even after being named as Donald Trump?s national security advisor ? and even while knowing he wasn?t the president?s first pick for the job. With Kelly?s backing, he imposed discipline on a national security staff that was in chaos after the firing of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, regularized the flow of strategy papers to the Oval Office, stripped the national security council staff of unqualified hangers-on, and weathered a storm of criticism from a gaggle of alt-right partisans that included Steve Bannon ? until, that is, his habit of contradicting the president in public and his constant flare-ups became too much for his sometime defenders, John Kelly and James Mattis, to bear.

Which is why there are those that believe McMaster is more sinned against than sinner. ?For John Kelly to say that H.R. is not a good fit is a hell of a thing,? a retired but still influential senior Army officer notes. ?This is a guy who told the Congress to shut up, called one of its members an empty barrel, supports the president?s wacky views on immigration, and lectured the press on the good old days, whenever that was.? This officer also worries that McMaster?s departure means that America?s military policies will now be firmly in the hands of what he calls ?the Marine triumvirate? ? a list that includes not only Kelly and Mattis, who are both retired four-star Marine officers, but also Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford. In part, the tensions between Mattis and McMaster results from this relationship; Mattis and Kelly admire Dunford?s political intuitions. ?Ironically, it?s Dunford who probably has the best grasp of politics,? the senior Pentagon official says to FP.

The question now is not whether McMaster will be replaced, but where he will go ? and just who he will replace him when he does.

There are those, especially in the army, who would like to see McMaster receive his fourth star. One of the ways to do that would be for him to replace Gen. Mark Milley, who is considered by many to be a weak army chief of staff, but Milley is not yet due for retirement. ?That?s not going to happen,? the retired senior army officer with whom I spoke says. ?Milley is a cipher, but this is the William Westmoreland Memorial Chair [a tongue-in-cheek reference to the former Vietnam commander who did nothing when he headed the army], so all Milley has to do is keep the seat warm.? And McMaster has been mentioned as the first head of the U.S. Army?s new Futures Command ? which will be charged with modernizing the service ? or in a similar Army-only four star role. But, this last weekend, the option of keeping McMaster in uniform seemed to fade, because doing so would require him to be in regular contact with Mattis as defense secretary. Which suggests the recent reports, that McMaster will likely take a position at the Hoover Institution?s Washington, D.C. office, are accurate.

But if he is to retire, according to North Carolina?s Richard H. Kohn, an expert on civil-military relations and McMaster?s graduate school advisor, Trump will have to ask him to leave. ?McMaster is a solider, and he will soldier on until no longer wanted or needed,? Kohn says.

Of greater importance, at least for John Kelly, James Mattis, and Rex Tillerson will be finding the right person to take McMaster?s place. While it might not yet be apparent just who that will be, Kelly, Mattis, and Tillerson are likely to favor someone who will not only get along with the whimsies of Donald Trump, but work well with ? that is, follow the lead of ? the triumvirate of ?adults? now firmly in charge of the nation?s foreign policy.

For those reasons, it now seems likely that the job will go to auto industry executive Stephen E. Biegun, and not the much more controversial John Bolton, long rumored to be among the front-runners for the job. A Pentagon consultant close to Mattis laughs at the mention of Bolton?s name, waving off any chance that he might be appointed as McMaster?s successor. ?No way, there is absolutely no way that Bolton will get the job,? this official says. ?Kelly doesn?t need another power center in the White House and Mattis has a veto here and, believe me, he would veto Bolton. And why wouldn?t he? Mattis is up to his neck in worrying about wars ? the last thing he needs is another one.?
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Obviously written before Tillerson was fired a couple of days ago.

It's interesting that three-star generals are regarded so differently from four-star generals, at least by some, according to the article.

I hope McMaster is given a soft landing "if" he leaves the Trump administration.
 
LucidSDreamr said:
That is some scary shit.


I i'm predicting that the year after these prescription limiting programs go into effect heroin deaths will increase by 10-20K people per year.


The nationwide database sounds pointless. There are state databases right now preventing you from getting more than one script plus you can't get scripts if you home address is in a different state than your doctor or pharmacist.

IN FL you can't even fill scripts from a different county in another one.

Sounds like a big waste of money thought up without even analyzing the problem.
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Agreed completely. The "policy" is so contradictory.

Yes, mandatory minimum sentences are in it.

However, the "bright side" is that you will get screened for opioid addiction and possibly get perks like "transitional housing" once you serve your long sentence.

The plan also includes measures favored by progressive drug policy reformers like changing the nation's prison system so all federal inmates would be screened for opioid use upon arrival and steered toward treatment at residential re-entry centers as necessary.
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From Politico Article about Opioid Epidemic Policy
 
Assaults Increased When Cities Hosted Trump Rallies, Study Finds
A study published on Friday appears to confirm what news reports suggested long ago: President Trump’s campaign rallies were associated with a rise in violence when they came to town.

A city that hosted a Trump rally saw an average of 2.3 more assaults reported on the day of the event than on a typical day, according to the study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and published in the journal Epidemiology. The authors found no corresponding link between assaults and rallies for Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

“It appeared to be a phenomenon that’s unique to Donald Trump’s rally,” said Christopher Morrison, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the study.

It may come as little surprise that the rallies were associated with increased violence, as the often volcanic clashes between Mr. Trump’s supporters and opponents were widely covered at the time.

In March 2016 alone, a Trump rally in Chicago was called off after violent clashes broke out, while an anti-Trump protester was punched at a rally in North Carolina and another was punched and kicked at a rally in Arizona. The following month, several Trump supporters were assaulted at a California rally.

Mr. Trump himself repeatedly seemed to endorse attacks on his detractors, too.

“Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he said of one protester who was reportedly punched and kicked in November 2015. “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell ya,” he said of another a few months later. He even offered to pay legal fees for his supporters if they became too aggressive.

The supporters also often aimed offensive and violent rhetoric at Mrs. Clinton, suggesting she be killed.

To determine whether those words and news reports corresponded with an actual shift in violence, the researchers compiled a list of 31 Trump rallies and 38 Clinton rallies held in cities with assault data available online.

They compared the number of assaults reported on the day of the rally to the number reported on the corresponding day of the week, for each of the four weeks before and after the event.

On a typical day, cities saw an average of 19.4 assaults, they found. On the day of a Trump rally, that number rose to 21.7.

The pattern held even when the researchers controlled for the influence of factors like population size, data sources and the day used for the comparison.

The researchers offered two explanations for the increase in assaults. Either they were the result of clashes at or near the rallies, or they occurred elsewhere in the cities after the aggressive mood on display by Mr. Trump, his supporters or his opponents had spread through “social contagion.”

There were some limitations to the findings, the authors noted. They may not apply to the rallies or cities that weren’t studied, and a greater police presence during the rallies may have made it more likely for an assault to be reported.
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Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.”

Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data.

The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising.

The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.

It comes only weeks after indictments of 13 Russians by special counsel Robert Mueller which stated they had used the platform to perpetrate “information warfare” against the US.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are one focus of an inquiry into data and politics by the British Information Commissioner’s Office. Separately, the Electoral Commission is also investigating what role Cambridge Analytica played in the EU referendum.

“We are investigating the circumstances in which Facebook data may have been illegally acquired and used,” said information commissioner Elizabeth Denham. “It’s part of our ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes which was launched to consider how political parties and campaigns, data analytics companies and social media platforms in the UK are using and analysing people’s personal information to micro-target voters.”

On Friday, four days after the Observer sought comment for this story, but more than two years after the data breach was first reported, Facebook announced that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica and Kogan from the platform, pending information over misuse of data. Facebook instructed external lawyers and warned us we were making “false and defamatory” allegations, reserving Facebook’s legal rights.

Last month both Facebook and the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, told a parliamentary inquiry on fake news that the company did not have or use private Facebook data.

Simon Milner, Facebook’s UK policy director, when asked if Cambridge Analytica had Facebook data, told MPs: “They may have lots of data but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Nix told the same MPs: “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”

Wylie, a Canadian data analytics expert, who worked with Cambridge Analytica and Kogan to devise and implement the scheme, showed a dossier of evidence about the data misuse to the Observer which appears to raise questions about their testimony. He has passed it to the National Crime Agency’s cybercrime unit and the Information Commissioner’s Office.

It includes emails, invoices, contracts and bank transfers that reveal more than 50 million profiles – mostly belonging to registered US voters – were harvested from the site in the largest ever breach of Facebook data.

Facebook on Friday said that it was also suspending Wylie from accessing the platform while it carried out its investigation, despite his role as a whistleblower.

At the time of the data breach, Wylie was a Cambridge Analytica employee, but Facebook described him as working for Eunoia Technologies, a firm he set up on his own after leaving his former employer in late 2014.

The evidence he supplied to authorities in the UK and US includes a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers sent to him in August 2016, asking him to destroy any data he held that had been collected by GSR, the company set up by Kogan to harvest the profiles.

That legal letter was sent several months after the Guardian first reported the breach and days before it was officially announced that Bannon was taking over as campaign manager for Trump and bringing Cambridge Analytica with him.

“Because this data was obtained and used without permission, and because GSR was not authorised to share or sell it to you, it cannot be used legitimately in the future and must be deleted immediately,” the letter said.

Facebook did not pursue a response when the letter initially went unanswered for weeks because Wylie was travelling, nor did it follow up with forensic checks on his computers or storage, he told the Observer. “That to me was the most astonishing thing. They waited two years and did absolutely nothing to check that the data was deleted. All they asked me to do was tick a box on a form and post it back.”

Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a data protection specialist, who spearheaded the investigative efforts into the tech giant, said: “Facebook has denied and denied and denied this. It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law.

“It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”

A majority of American states have laws requiring notification in some cases, including California, where Facebook is based.

Facebook denies that the harvesting of tens of millions of profiles by GSR and Cambridge Analytica was a data breach. It said in a statement that Kogan “gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels” but “did not subsequently abide by our rules” because he passed the information on to third parties.

Facebook said it removed the app in 2015 and required certification from everyone with copies that the data had been destroyed, although the letter to Wylie did not arrive until the second half of 2016.

“We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information. We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens,” Paul Grewal, Facebook’s vice-president, said in a statement. The company is now investigating reports that not all data had been deleted.

Kogan, who has previously unreported links to a Russian university and took Russian grants for research, had a licence from Facebook to collect profile information, but it was for research purposes only.

So when he hoovered up information for the commercial venture, he was violating the company’s terms. Kogan maintains everything he did was legal, and says he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.

The Observer has seen a contract dated 4 June 2014, which confirms SCL, an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica, entered into a commercial arrangement with GSR, entirely premised on harvesting and processing of Facebook data.

Cambridge Analytica spent nearly $1m on data collection, which yielded more than 50 million individual profiles that could be matched to electoral rolls. It then used the test results and Facebook data to build an algorithm that could analyse individual Facebook profiles and determine personality traits linked to voting behaviour.

The algorithm and database together made a powerful political tool. It allowed a campaign to identify possible swing voters and craft messages more likely to resonate.

“The ultimate product of the training set is creating a ‘gold standard’ of understanding personality from Facebook profile information,” the contract specifies. It promises to create a database of 2 million “matched” profiles, identifiable and tied to electoral registers, across 11 states, but with room to expand much further.

At the time, more than 50 million profiles represented around a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly a quarter of potential US voters. Yet when asked by MPs if any of his firm’s data had come from GSR, Nix said: “We had a relationship with GSR. They did some research for us back in 2014. That research proved to be fruitless and so the answer is no.”

Cambridge Analytica told the Observer that its contract with GSR stipulated that Kogan should seek informed consent for data collection and it had no reason to believe he would not.

GSR was “led by a seemingly reputable academic at an internationally renowned institution who made explicit contractual commitments to us regarding its legal authority to license data to SCL Elections”, a company spokesman said.

SCL Elections, an affiliate, worked with Facebook over the period to ensure it was satisfied no terms had been “knowingly breached” and provided a signed statement that all data and derivatives had been deleted, he said. Cambridge Analytica also said none of the data was used in the 2016 presidential election.
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