Christopher Wylie Says Steve Bannon Sought To Suppress Black Vote In 2016 Election

A whistleblower for Cambridge Analytica told lawmakers on Wednesday that the company used by President Donald Trump‘s campaign in 2016 attempted to suppress black Americans’ votes, upon orders from Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannnon Wanted To Suppress Black Vote In 2016

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie told Congress that Bannon — Trump’s former chief strategist — instructed Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL to conduct research on how to suppress the votes of black Americans and other liberal demographic groups.

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“Mr. Bannon sees cultural warfare as the means to create enduring change in American politics. It was for this reason Mr. Bannon engaged SCL, a foreign military contractor, to build an arsenal of informational weapons he could deploy on the American population,” Wylie said.

In March, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica — a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump Organization — may have collected personal data from around 87 million Facebook users without their consent. This information was then used to influence the results of the 2016 election.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress on the issue and confirmed Wylie’s claim that up to 87 million were likely affected in the scandal.

Earlier this month, Cambridge Analytica announced it would shut down its operations, and even reportedly said it would start bankruptcy proceedings after it began losing several clients. Even National Security Adviser John Bolton was found to have ties to the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook data controversy.

Bannon — the former executive chairman of far-right news website Breitbart — is known to have garnered a reputation of being a white nationalist who was believed to have had a major influence in Trump’s administration, even to the point of playing a role in helping to choose several controversial cabinet members. He was ousted from the White House in August 2017, shortly after the alt-right rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, to which Trump responded by saying the Neo-Nazis and the counter-protesters were both “very fine people.”

Bannon’s relationship with other White House staff members was one of the topics covered in author Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury. Trump later claimed that Bannon had completely “lost his mind.”

Last month, reports surfaced claiming that Bannon was attempting from the outside to help protect Trump in special counsel Robert Mueller‘s Russia investigation.