Nothing to see here folks. It’s all just Democratic hysteria.
The man who bankrolled the campaign for Britain to quit the European Union boasted about a backchannel to WikiLeaks after Brexit leader Nigel Farage’s secret meeting with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, according to private Twitter messages that have been leaked online.
The messages hacked from Farage’s biggest financial backer, Arron Banks, also raise legal questions over the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit referendum, undeclared lobbying efforts in the U.S. on behalf of a foreign power, and a breach of data-protection law by pro-Brexit campaigners.
Banks also joked about being a “full agent” of the Russian state a couple of weeks after Trump was elected president.
Brexit campaigners and Trump staffers became close in 2016 as the two upstart campaigns shocked mainstream politicians and won unexpected victories at the ballot box.
The House Intelligence Committee heard two years ago that Farage was a likely Trump-Wikileaks go-between. Farage says he was just visiting Assange to set up an interview. But the hacked messages seem to say otherwise:
The day after the meeting, Banks sent a private Twitter message to a friend. “I had a drink with nigel,” he wrote. “He had an interesting time with wiki leaks.” On the same day, Banks wrote to a Guardian columnist: “You will have plenty of new material soon ! Wiki leaks specialise.”
Glenn Simpson, whose company, Fusion GPS, came to prominence after the controversial Steele dossier on Trump’s alleged relationship with Russia, told the House Intel committee he had been informed that Farage delivered material to the embassy via a thumb drive.“Nigel and Donald love each other … The media don’t really get how deep the links go.”
“Nigel Farage and Arron Banks had a number of trips to the U.S.… there’s been a misrepresentation of the length of that relationship and the extent of it,” Simpson told the committee. “There was a somewhat unacknowledged relationship between the Trump people and the UKIP people and that the path to WikiLeaks ran through that.”
It turns out Banks has been making the same point about the depth of the relationship with Team Trump in his private Twitter messages for years.
I’m sure they’re all lying in their private messages, just as the Americans testifying about the presidential plot to smear Joe Biden were lying. And all the former staffers appalled by what goes on in the White House are lying. And our own lying eyes.
Everyone’s lying but Trump and his accomplices all of whom are as honest as the day is long.