John Bolton Tied To Cambridge Analytica-Facebook Data Scandal Before Becoming National Security Adviser

John Bolton has not yet officially been become National Security Adviser, and he is already facing several ethics issues, among them ties to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica private data controversy.

John Bolton Linked To Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Rachel Maddow lambasted Bolton, a former Ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, on her MSNBC show on Wednesday. Maddow revealed internal documents from Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting company linked to Donald Trump, that showed Bolton is also tied to the firm, which was reportedly utilized to favor Trump and other victorious Republican candidates in the 2016 election.

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Facebook became entangled in the scandal last month when it was discovered that millions of users on the social media giant may have had their information shared with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook announced in a blog post on Wednesday that it estimated around 87 million users may have been affected in this scandal, correcting previous reports that about 50 million people had been impacted.

“I’m quite confident given our analysis it is not more than 87 [million],” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told CNN. “It very well could be less. But we wanted to put out the maximum we felt that it could be as soon as we had that analysis done.”

Cambridge Analytica contested the statistic, saying no more than 30 million people had their information shared with them.

Bolton is a war hawk who was one of the fiercest supporters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to this day believes that was a good decision. Maddow discussed a “Bolton project” and explained that Bolton’s super PAC received large donations from a prominent Trump donor Robert Mercer, and that Bolton then used these funds to invest in the donor’s firm, which happened to be Cambridge Analytica.

“Among the internal Cambridge Analytica documents that were taken by this whistleblower and handed over to the British parliament, among those documents is a whole big section of communications, internal communications, at Cambridge Analytica about the Bolton project and the Bolton data and meetings with the Bolton people,” Maddow explained.

“That’s all about John Bolton, whose super PAC was mega-funded to the tune of multi-million donations from Trump donor Robert Mercer. And then what John Bolton’s PAC did with Robert Mercer’s donations is that he turned around and in large part, he spent those dollars with Robert Mercer’s company, with Cambridge Analytica, which was, at the time, testing out its new techniques about how they were going to use all these tens of millions of stolen data files from American Facebook users and turn them around and use them in an American election on behalf of Republican candidates.”

On top of all this, CNBC reported Wednesday that Bolton is meeting with White House attorneys regarding potential conflicts of interest regarding his PAC and super PAC.

Bolton is set to officially become Trump’s National Security Adviser on April 9, and will replace H.R. McMaster. 

“The ambassador’s transition to national security advisor is going very smoothly and the ambassador will start on Monday,” Bolton’s spokesman Garrett Marquis told CNBC.