Top Democrats on the House and Senate Russia investigations and a top digital staffer from the campaign of President Donald Trump split sharply on whether the campaign colluded with Russia, but many agree that Facebook holds the answers investigators are looking for and they want the social media giant to give up the goods.
Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, met with Facebook officials in California more than a month ago as part of his committee’s investigation into potential collusion or election interference, and he’s convinced the company can explain whether anyone from the Trump campaign helped Russians boost fake news articles targeting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Warner is testing the theory popular among Democratic operatives that Russia was behind spikes in fake news that were anti-Clinton and that Russia had help targeting those articles from U.S. political operatives.
“If the Russians know, how are the Russians smart enough to target in areas where the Democrats weren’t knowledgeable enough? I don’t feel like I have run that to ground yet,” Warner told CNN.
“There are two questions. One is: Was there coordination or collusion between the campaigns and these technology tools, which overwhelmed the search engine tools so that certain stories popped up at the top of your newsfeed. The second is, on a broader basis going forward: How do we prevent this from happening again?” Warner said.
Likewise, House investigators plan to interview former Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale as part of their probe. A Democratic committee source said they want to know whether Parscale or anyone else from the campaign helped guide Russian targeting of fake news stories.
Parscale, who announced last week he would testify before the House, and other Trump campaign digital staff have denied this allegation, saying they are unaware of any Russian activity.
Trump’s digital staff have said the best way to clear their names is for Facebook to testify.
A digital staffer who worked with the Trump campaign, Gary Coby, said Facebook would know exactly what the Trump campaign was doing — and that the campaign was not coordinating with Russian operatives – because Facebook staff worked side by side with the Trump digital campaign staff.
But both the Democrats and Trump’s digital staff are likely to face a tough battle trying to get answers from Facebook, which has previously fought government requests citing personal privacy and free speech concerns.
“We’ve been in touch with a number of government officials, including Senator Warner, who are looking into the 2016 U.S. Presidential election,” a Facebook spokesman told CNN. “We will continue to cooperate with officials as their investigations continue. As we have said, we have seen no evidence that Russian actors bought ads on Facebook in connection with the election,” a reference to a line of inquiry Warner is investigating.
At the core of Warner’s questioning is a theory among Democratic operatives and former top-level Clinton campaign staff that Russia had help from domestic political operatives to micro-target fake news articles. No evidence has been uncovered to prove that theory.
Last month, Senate intelligence staff interviewed Brett Horvath, a social media technology expert who argues it’s possible that Russian operatives got political data that could then be used for successfully micro-targeting swing voters on Facebook.
“Facebook has all the data that could prove this is happening or not happening, that’s the starting point,” Horvath, a veteran Democratic political operative, told CNN.
“The tech companies, the vendors as we call them, all had people assigned to help us. Google, Twitter and Facebook,” said Coby, who was working with the Trump campaign as part of the Republican National Committee’s support team.
“Since we were spending so much with Facebook we worked with the Facebook team the most,” Coby said. “We were starting from scratch and welcomed all the help we could get.”
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