Thread by @peterjukes

Me for @BylineTimes on just some of the many revelations from @DamianCollins and @CommonsCMS landmark final report on Disinformation - especially what it reveals about the Trump Russia Brexit connection bylinetimes.com/2019/02/18/exp…

As @DavidLammy says of the explosive #DCMS report “the scale and depth of malicious disinformation and foreign interference this report uncovers demands an urgent response from the Prime Minister on behalf of the British government.”

“It is now blindingly obvious that we need a criminal investigation – equivalent to the US’ Mueller inquiry – to investigate any possible links between the 2016 Leave campaign, Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russia,” @DavidLammy told the @BylineTimes

Lots of detail on Russian interference, and the startling revelation that the interim @CommonsCMS report last July "was more popular in Moscow than in London."

Confirmation that Putin's troll farm was pumping out Islamophobic stories and “tried to fuel social divisions, including religious tensions, in the aftermath of the Westminster, Manchester, London Bridge and Finsbury Park terror attacks” according to the parliamentary report.

But the big revelations are about AIQ,, Cambridge Analytica, and the two Leave campaigns "The report’s findings about the official Vote Leave campaign… suggest even more collusion—both with foreign actors and between the two campaigns."

AIQ worked for a host of Brexit-supporting organisations... Veterans for Britain spent £100,000 on their online ads, BeLeave £625,000 and DUP Vote to Leave £32,000. According to Jeff Silvester, these organisations approached him independently of each other.

In the shared used of data, voter profiles and targeting strategies that a deeper coordination and joint purpose can be found between the Brexit backing organisations and the Trump campaign.

Vickery handed over 20,000 folders and 113,000 files to the committee which suggest a common data set—the DataBase of Truth—shared between employees of the three companies, and also used by Donald Trump's campaign.

Also exposed in the new report is more forensic traces suggesting how Cambridge Analytica worked in close concert with the news website Breitbart...
a newly discovered executable “config” file suggests the coordination of targeting data and news stories was automated by AIQ.

Bannon has described Breitbart as... his “weapons”. Since Cambridge Analytica’s special targeting software was classified by the UK government as a “weapons grade” technology... the military imagery may not be a metaphor.

It’s not just dark money which is the focus of the NCA investigation. The parliamentary report examines evidence that Russia had access to the Cambridge Analytica database.... and reveals this has been referred to the NCA by the information commissioner Elisabeth Denham.

Many of the Mueller indictments flow from US laws about lobbyists registering as agents of foreign principals and political interests, and the DCMS report concludes that Britain needs a “UK version of the US Foreign Agents and Registration Act (FARA)”

But the committee goes further and suggests that Britain needs something like its own Mueller inquiry. The report concludes by calling for an “independent investigation into past elections”