A former employee of Cambridge Analytica, which is accused of misusing the personal Facebook data of millions to help Donald Trump's presidential campaign, says the company powwowed with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski before Trump declared his candidacy.
"I left Cambridge Analytica before it joined the Trump campaign. What I do know is that Cambridge Analytica was meeting with Corey Lewandowski in 2015 before Trump had even announced," Christopher Wylie, a self-described whistleblower, told NBC's "Today" show on Monday.
In addition, according to Wylie, the British-based company also met with Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon as well as Russian oil companies.
Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica on Friday after it was discovered that Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan built an app to help gather the data for the firm.
According to a report in The New York Times on Saturday, Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles for Trump's campaign with Kogan's help.
Kogan told Facebook and app users he was collecting information for academic purposes. Only 270,000 users gave him permission for their information to be harvested, but Kogan reportedly pulled data from more than 50 million users and gave it to Cambridge Analytica, which used the information to influence and wage a "culture war" during the 2016 election.
"I think what's really important for people to understand is that this company misappropriated data from upwards of 50 million people from Facebook," Wylie told "Today's" Savannah Guthrie.
"We need to step back for a second and depoliticize this because this is about the safety of Americans and the integrity of the American democratic process … This company misappropriated data of upwards of 50 million people from Facebook. They misused that data.
"That data was processed by psychologists who were going back and forth between London and Russia, who were also working on projects in Russia for Russians."
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