Nix punches back
Former Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix used his return to the DCMS Committee to hit back against the reporting that led to his company’s downfall, and took advantage of parliamentary privilege to attack Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who sparked the run of stories, as a “resentful” “liar” who had made allegations that were “proven false”.
In the face of hostile questioning from MPs, who forced him to recant elements of his previous testimony in front of the committee, Nix made his case that Cambridge Analytica was the victim in the affair: the victim of a “concerted campaign” by the “global liberal media” – including the “extremely powerful” Guardian – to destroy his company in an attempt to spark a second EU referendum and bring down Donald Trump as President.
Collins responds, denying that he, at least, is part of a global conspiracy to overturn Brexit: “A lot of the allegations against you have come from people who worked with you; not just Mr Wylie, but others too. Questions will remain, at least while people speak of you that way. But we’ve got our answers, so thank you for coming and speaking with us today.”
And with that, the committee breaks.
Farrelly asks, if Nix is unfairly victimised, why are so many people out to get him?
Nix: “I think our involvement in the election of a president who’s been so polarising for many voters put a huge target on our back. Since that day, although it was a huge success for the company and our business growth, it turned out to be our undoing, because there were actors, not least the Democrats and the liberal media, who were out to destroy us.
“Couple that with the reporting in the UK, driven largely by Carole and Guardian about our involvement in Brexit, and obviously that has proved to be false reporting in every way… and you add in to the mix an extremely jealous and resentful employee who has sat and stewed in three years over his baby, and he went to Carole and shared every fantastical allegation he could come up with.
“She put this into print, it went viral on a global scale and you have the makings of a perfect storm. You have someone people want to hate, because of our involvement with trump; you have someone out to destroy us who is feeding snippets to a media organisation which is incredibly powerful. And the Guardian and particularly Carole clearly thought that if our involvement in the referendum could be shown to be wrong, they could push for a second referendum. People in America can’t accept that Trump is their president, and people in Britain want to overturn the referendum.
“Yes, gosh, I’m so guilty of being foolish but that hardly justifies the sort of cataclysmic response that we’ve got from the media.
“And that’s your answer.”
Updated
Stevens returns to the Financial Times’ report that Nix took $8m out of the company before it collapsed. Nix: “I’m not answering your question. I haven’t had the ability to consider the matter myself.”
(That’s a much less vehement answer than the one he gave three and a half hours ago, when he said “the allegation is false, the facts are not correct.”)
Jo Stevens: At any one time, how many clients did Cambridge Analytica have?
Nix: In February 2018, we maybe had 30 or 35 clients.
Stevens: Do you ever do any due diligence on prospective clients?
Nix: Clearly not enough, as was demonstrated by the Channel 4 video.
Stevens: But do you ever?
Nix: Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. If you’re working for Mercedes Benz, it’s a different proposition to working for a company you’ve never heard of.
Meanwhile, the Guardian’s Media editor Jim Waterson has been digging on Dominic Cummings’ plans to troll parliament over his refusal to appear in front of this committee. Waterson writes:
A source very close to Cummings told the Guardian the political strategist intends to voluntarily attend parliament in order to watch MPs debate his refusal to attend parliament.
“He plans to unveil a banner from the public gallery reading ‘where the fuck is our £350m for the NHS’ so that he can hijack the BBC 6 [O’Clock News] for Vote Leave’s core message,” the source claimed.
Christian Matheson asks who owns the various arms of SCL, and Nix refuses to answer.
Matheson asks if Steve Bannon or Robert Mercer are shareholders; Nix again refuses to answer.
Matheson notes that a US citizen, investing in a company, which then provides electoral services in a UK election, could be illegal. Nix says that on that matter, he can’t speak, since it’s under investigation. He does add, again, that CA didn’t work on the referendum.
Collins asks Nix to explain the structure of Cambridge Analytica and SCL. Nix whips out a pre-prepared four-page document and asks to hand it to Collins directly: It shows, he says, “the way the company expanded, contracted, and expanded again led to quite a complex structure, but it happened quite naturally and was not the result of a mafia-style organisation as the committee previously said.”
(The document will be published later, Collins says.)
Christian Matheson returns to a leaked Cambridge Analytica pitch doc, which proposed DDoS hacking attacks. Nix says it never set up the company which would have carried out that business, and never carried out such attacks.
Matheson points out that such attacks are illegal. Nix says that since they were never carried out, that is moot.
O’Hara asks Nix about the Psy Group, an Isreaeli social media firm dragged into special prosecutor Mueller’s investigations into the US election. Nix says he’s never heard of them, and that reports that they worked with SCL may or may not be true, since he doesn’t know what was happening in those parts of the group.
“The first I heard of this company was in this article, and I can’t speak more than that.”
Collins turns to the claims that an Israeli intelligence firm worked alongside Cambridge Analytica in its campaigns in Nigeria. Was Nix aware of that?
Nix: “This is another groundless accusation that I believe was made by Mr Wylie. He suggests that this is something that has been reported to the authorities, so while it would be tempting to talk through with you, this is another area that I can’t discuss.”
Collins now quotes from a transcript of the Channel 4 report: Channel 4 asked if Nix had worked with Black Cube, and Nix said yes. Nix now recants that, and says he was completely mistaken.
Nix has “not knowingly” worked with former or current Israeli officers, he says.
Collins notes he may not have been aware of someone else in his company doing it, and Nix replies pointing out that all he meant is that one cannot tell who is and isn’t an intelligence officer: “You might be an intelligence officer right now,” he says to Collins.
Updated
Collins asks Nix whether CA has worked in South America, specifically Argentina. “As I said last time, we don’t generally like to talk about specific clients, because there’s confidentiality there.”
Collins asks if it was an anti-Kirchner campaign. Nix says he doesn’t believe it was. Collins reads from a note he was handed, which Nix says suggests that he pitched for an anti-Kirchner campaign (implying that he didn’t win that particular pitch).
Collins reads from another note, that mentions Russia. Nix is confused, and asks to see the note – not happening, says Collins.
“We’ve never worked for a Russian client, or had anyone Russian working for us.”
O’Hara accuses Nix of playing the victim, to which Nix responds: What if we were the victim? What if none of this was true? What if we were just the guys who contributed to the Trump campaign, were wrongly linked with Brexit, and as a result, the global liberal media took umbrage with us and launched a co-ordinated campaign to destroy out business?
O’Hara: “So, you are the victim in all this?
Nix: ““If you’re sitting where I am right now you’d probably feel quite victimised.”
Updated
Brendan O’Hara, SNP, quotes from Channel 4’s response to Nix’s claim of misleading editing: Nix was recorded saying that the stings and honeytraps “could be done and had been done.”
Nix says when he said they “had been done”, he meant by other companies, not by Cambridge Analytica. “I didn’t commit to doing anything for them, I simply played along and listened to this potential client’s desires.”
O’Hara: “Surely any reasonable person would think that was an offer?”
Nix: “You don’t need to sit there and sully my reputation; I’ve already done that, to a worldwide audience… yes, it was foolish of me, and it was a well-crafted entrapment, sting, whatever you want to call it. Channel 4 got their man.”
Nix: “I take exception to the fact that Christopher Wylie can point blank lie to you, as he’s lied on many issues, and yet I’m sitting here and being subjected to frankly ridiculous accusations based on the most tenuous claims that are simply not supported by evidence.”
Ian Lucas asks who introduced Cambridge Analytica to Arron Banks. After a long pause, Lucas prompts: Brittany Kaiser said it was Steve Bannon. Nix agrees, saying it may well have been, he can’t remember.
“Banks and Bannon,” Lucas says, “have been involved in two of the most important elections in recent years. It’s very small world, in which Cambridge Analytica is a very prominent player. The assertion that Cambridge Analytica had nothing to do with the election is nonsense.”
Nix explodes: “The fact is, there is no evidence to support your position. What you are doing is building a conspiracy theory.”
Channel 4 'destroyed' Cambridge Analytica, Nix says
The Channel 4 report, Nix says, “wasn’t my finest hour… chapeau to Channel 4 for destroying an excellent British technology company.”
Updated
Farrelly asks Nix which is true: is it a shadow political game-changer, as he has told political operatives, or a boring toothpaste advertiser, as he is now telling parliament?
Nix says both are true: once it was the first, but towards the end of its life, it was the latter.
Nix again attacks Wylie, who said that Cambridge Analytica played a “pivotal” role in Brexit. “It is deeply troubling that this conspiracy theory has spread so widely, and caused such damage to our company.”
Nix quotes from the Electoral Commission that found that Cambridge Analytica did no work for Leave.EU.
Simon Hart, Conservative, quotes Nigel Oakes describing the works as the “backbone” of Leave.EU’s campaign, saying it “provided a proof of concept” for the work. Nix demurs, noting that Oakes doesn’t know Cambridge Analytica that well: “Apart from my close personal relationship with him, he could have been a stranger.”
Farrelly turns to Kaiser’s testimony that CA pitched work to Aaron Banks’ insurance companies. Nix says he is unaware of those pitches, and that they lead to no work.
(Banks will be testifying himself on Tuesday, to answer some of these questions in his own inimitable style.)
“Do you know what use was made of the work you did for UKIP?”
“We never handed over any work to UKIP.”
“Do you know what use was made of the work you did for UKIP?”
“…no?”
“Do you know what use was made of the work you did for UKIP?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”
Farrelly follows up by showing Nix an invoice from Cambridge Analytica to UKIP. How, he asks, does that work square with Nix’s statements about a lack of interest in UK politics.
“You’re really scratching round here,” Nix says. “We do 8, 9 elections around the world every year, and we’ve never done an election in the UK, so I stand by my statement that it’s not a target market.” The referendum, he says, was unique, which is why it was interested in the work, but it didn’t actually carry it out, he says.
“The committee was satisfied,” Nix says, “that we didn’t do any work for Leave.EU.”
We’re back, and conversation is turning to Brexit. Farrelly quotes Nix saying CA has never worked on UK campaigns, out of concern for British staff members.
Farrelly quotes from a pitch document, from CA’s pitch to Leave.EU, that proposed targeting adverts for donations overseas. WAs Nix advised this was legal?
Nix says he thought that soliciting donations from British nationals overseas was legal, but that it was unclear, and that in any event the work was not carried out.
While the Committee takes a break, here’s Channel 4’s response to Nix’s allegation that he fell prey to their “dark arts”:
Channel 4 News responds to Alexander Nix's comments to MPs in Parliament today https://t.co/30ygNMPSWo pic.twitter.com/CYmkHugHqD
— Hayley Barlow (@Hayley_Barlow) June 6, 2018
Nix returns to his attack on Wylie: “He went around America pitching his business. My point is you have an individual, claiming to be a whistleblower… who purports to be a protector of data sovereignty but who actually acquired a significantly larger dataset than ours, and then went and tried to commercialise it in exactly the same way we did, and then spent the last two or three years getting bitter and jealous.”
Farrelly jumps in, knocking Nix’s break back further. Did Nix mislead over how useful GSR data was?
Nix says he did not. “That data was less useful than simply using Facebook’s own advertising algorithms.”
Farrelly: “It’s an interesting exercise in semantics.”
Nix: “No, it’s not… that data was less useful than we’d hoped.” Nix again notes that this avenue of questioning relies on testimony from Chris Wylie to the contrary.
Farrelly points out that the data which Nix dismissed in February as “fruitless research” was actually used in CA’s work in the US.
Nix: “I urge you, whilst I take a break, to revisit the testimony of Dr Kogan. He was extremely articulate in explaining how this data was modelled… the data was ultimately fruitless.”
Collins pushes back, pointing out that regardless of how useful the research was, a lot of it was delivered, and a second contract was signed. “Given the substance of the work that was done, to say it was fruitless clearly doesn’t reflect your view at the time.
“When we asked these questions initially, people chose to gloss over information they perhaps should have disclosed.”
Nix: “You will recall that when I appeared before you, the issue of Facebook data was not a sensational news story…”
(Ian Lucas: “Because you didn’t tell us about it!”)
Nix: “I gave you as much attention on it as you gave it yourselves. Clearly things have changed in the last three months.”
Collins: “What we asked you was pretty clear, and you chose not to talk about any of this.” Collins adds that Facebook, too, didn’t fully answer questions the first time the company appeared, only being fully open once it was quizzed after the information had already entered the public domain.
One last question, from Rebecca Pow, before a short break: who is the “team” that Nix refers to occasionally? Nix says they are his former colleagues, who he asks for advice from as a friend.
Pow adds a second question, noting that there’s another discrepancy, between Kaiser and Nix’s testimony about how Facebook surveys worked for Cambridge Analytica. “My former colleagues assured me that my original testimony was accurate… my understanding is that no data was collected.”
He refrains from continuing further, because again this topic falls under the investigation from the ICO.
Finally, Nix addresses the number, 87 million people, whose data was harvested by GSR. “What Dr Kogan made amply clear is that while he collected data from 87m people… Cambridge Analytica only received data on about 20m people in the USA. The only person to receive the entire dataset, which I believe Dr Kogan said was 96% more data than that which Cambridge Analytica received, was Christopher Wylie.
“A lot of the allegations, 90% of the allegations, that gained traction in the media have all come from a single source: Mr Wylie. If you permit me, I would just like to give a little bit of background. Where so many allegations have been made, and so many of them have been proven to be false.”
(Pow interjects to note that Wylie was in the UK on an exceptional talent visa. “If he went on to change his status, I can’t speak to that.”)
“Christopher Wylie was at the company for ten months, and he was instrumental in defining the relationship with Dr Kogan. As that business grew, he became more and more resentful, to the point of openly discussing with clients that he wanted to build a competitor to Cambridge Analytica without Nix – that is, without me.
“He developed a pitch that he took to Silicon Valley… He was totally agnostic about where the money came from… One San Francisco-based investor—” Nix is cut off by Collins, who asks how this is relevant.
“What we have is not Christopher Wylie’s opinion, but documents,” Collins says. “That’s what we’re basing our questions on. Evidence that you do not dispute.”
Collins asks whether, given technical evidence showing that audience files were shared between SCL and AIQ, Nix’s claims the two weren’t involved with each other stand up.
Nix says that working on the same data doesn’t mean that two companies are intertwined. “That would be dealt with the contract with us.”
“My data team assured me that there was no raw data that went in to the Ripon platform,” Nix adds.
One last question from Farrelly: “You had a staffer from your company working on data from Breitbart… was any data gathered from that secondment to Breitbart, and if so how would that have been used by the company?”
Nix “can’t think of anyone who was seconded to Breitbart… I haven’t heard about that before.”
Nix, at this point, refuses to answer further questions on further matters relating to GSR and Facebook data, based on the ICO investigation.
“The ICO took advantage of my parliamentary privilege last time I was here to use my testimony as part of their application to search my premises. Clearly my privilege is not as absolute.
“The committee should be reacting to findings from the ICO and not the other way round,” Nix adds.
Collins points out that none of this is in front of courts, and that the ICO is fine with Nix talking, but he’s happy to drop it.
Farrelly: “He was mixing his tenses up and you misunderstood the question. So why did you not take the opportunity to clarify it in the supplementary information?” Nix says he didn’t realise he’d made the error until it was flagged to him, and that he agreed to come in and clarify in person.
Farrelly returns to Nix’s initial statement. “When you came to us in February, the chair asked whether any data came from GSR” – Alex Kogan’s Cambridge-based psychometrics company. At the time, Nix denied that, flatly and repeatedly.
Farrelly continues: “Since then, we’ve had some conflicting evidence from Dr Kogan, from Christopher Wiley – who described it as ‘the foundational data of the company’. Do you want to clarify the evidence you gave in February?”
Nix: “I would like to continue with the very short statement on this. Clearly I accept that some of my answers could have been clearer but I assure you that I did not intend to mislead you. It was my firm impression that Mr Collins’ questions were about whether we were currently in possession of the data… so I answered no.
“When I read the transcript, it became clear that Mr Collins was also asking whether we had ever held it. Clearly the answer should have been yes. The fact that we received data from GSR was already in the public domain from as early as December 2015, when the Guardian published an article.
“I also stand by my evidence that we do not work on Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data. That data was given by GSR, and subsequently deleted at Facebook’s request.”
Paul Farrelly returns, to ask whether all of SCL has gone into administration. It has, Nix confirms.
Has the brand been toxified? “It’s the case that all SCL companies are in administration,” Nix responds.
“What’s happened with your side of the company has made the business so toxic that the whole group is in administration?” Nix responds that “the board decided the company was no longer a viable going concern.”
Nix adds: “It would not be unusual for us as a firm to undertake data analytics on behalf of our clients; sometimes we would take receipt of that data, and sometimes we would work behind their firewalls. Just because we work on their data, does not mean that we have a right to that data. And that was the relationship with AIQ.”
(This matters, broadly, because the stronger the link to AIQ, the stronger the link between Cambridge Analytica and the EU referendum.)
Collins pushes further on the links between AIQ and CA. Nix: “You are not correct when you talk about data sharing. AIQ are a software engineering company, and CA is a data analytics company. They built the car and we put the petrol in.
“The petrol that was put in was not raw data, it was modelled data. They did not have access to the raw data, and the only way they could have would be if they took a copy of the data illegally.”
Nix is asked about whistleblower Chris Wylie, and his involvement in linking Cambridge Analytica to AIQ. Nix responds by pulling Wylie further in, noting that he was heavily involved in everything the company was doing to data at that point.
Elliott now follows up with a question about some leaked AIQ source code, which was accidentally kept public and discovered in April. Nix notes that the leak was Aggregate IQ, not Cambridge Analytica.
“The confusion seems to be that this codebase was the same as the data on the platform… my understanding is that the codebase contained to the platform. There is no correlation between the codebase for the platform and the data that went in it.” He explains further with an odd metaphor about building a car.
“There’s nothing sensitive or put at risk by the code for a program being left on an open forum,” Nix says, citing the open source programming community’s choice to do exactly that.
Julie Elliott, Labour, asks Nix if he wants to revise his answer that Cambridge Analytica has no relationship with Aggregate IQ, a Canadian agency that was involved with the EU referendum.
Nix says he is happy with his answer, because it was in the present tense: AIQ does not work with CA, but it did once, to build a digital platform called Ripon.
“We used AIQ as an independent company of software engineers to help us build a voter engagement platform” – Ripon.
“The vast majority of data that was used in this platform was a combination of voter registration data… and consumer and lifestyle data,” Nix adds.
Matheson asks about the Guardian’s report, published just over an hour ago, that Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser had met with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.
Nix says he knows nothing about that meeting, prompting Matheson to ask whether Nix knows anything at all about the actions of his staff.
“It might have been useful,” given Wikileaks’ role in politics, “if you had been aware of that,” Matheson says.
“I don’t know how I can say this more clearly, I wasn’t aware of that,” Nix says. “She certainly wasn’t there representing Cambridge Analytica and SCL.”
Collins follows up, asking if Nix knew that Kaiser knew Julian Assange. “Whether she knew Assange directly or had ever met him, I can’t speak to that, but I knew she had a relationship with John Jones,” Assange’s lawyer, Nix says.
Nix admits – as he did back in February – that he was curious about Wikileaks’ emails, and reached out to Assange, but heard nothing back.
Christian Matheson, Labour, says Nix was “a bit unlucky with Channel 4,” if every other meeting had been ethical and yet the only unethical one was the one that had been filmed.
“It wasn’t luck,” Nix responds, “it was a very deliberate program of deception by Channel 4.”
“I know the committee would like to believe the media’s impression that we’re this large nefarious multinational company that influences politics around the world.
“The truth of the matter is that we’re a very small advertising agency that happens to work in a number of sectors, one of which is political campaigns. Most of our time is spent selling toothpaste and automotives and things like that.”
Updated
Ian Lucas, Labour, asks why Cambridge Analytica never turned down an advert from a client. Nix says it shows that CA’s clients were morally upstanding, and tacks on a denial that some unpleasant adverts aired in the Nigerian election CA worked on had anything to do with his company: the Nigerian adverts, he said, came from a US digital consultancy that CA had nothing to do.
Not rejecting an advert on ethical grounds, Nix reiterates, “simply means we have not been asked to air unethical adverts”.
Updated
Rebecca Pow, Conservative, again quotes from more CA documents that seem to detail the company’s use of the “Dark Arts”. Nix points out that what Channel 4 did – undercover filming – is similarly “dark”.
Nix narrows his language, denying “honeytraps” and “infiltrations”, but says there’s a different between them and “what Channel 4 would call an exposé”. He seems to be saying that Cambridge Analytica did the latter, but not the former.
Collins turns to a document on CA’s actions in Mongolia covering “proactive intelligence”, which details “stings” the company apparently offers.
Nix says he’s not familiar with the document, but says that in 2014, when CA worked in Mongolia, “we didn’t have the wherewithal to undertake that sort of work, even if we wanted to, which we didn’t want to, and we never have.”
Collins notes that in documents, and in Channel 4’s undercover filming, Cambridge Analytica says is carries out these sorts of dubious tactics, even while Nix claims the company doesn’t.
The Channel 4 interview, Collins says, “wasn’t a one-off. This is the sort of thing you tell new clients.”
(When Nix was called to Parliament, Dominic Cummings, the leader of Vote Leave, was also summoned; Nix agreed, but Cummings refused. There will now be a Commons debate on Cummings’ refusal to attend… which Cummings will attend:
NEW: Dominic Cummings has told friends he *will* turn up to watch the Commons debate on his failure to attend a Commons select committee —— from the public gallery in the Commons.
— Sam Coates Times (@SamCoatesTimes) June 6, 2018
👽 https://t.co/SzQx54XQEh
Trolling parliament is a risky strategy.)
Stevens hits back, quoting a Cambridge Analytica brochure that discusses a “digital attack” on a candidate as part of a “campaign that turned nasty”. “Are these the values of Cambridge Analytica?” she asks.
“There are huge areas of positive work I could point to,” Nix says, “but the media and this committee are intent on pointing to this one meeting which is not representative of the ethics of this company.”
Labour’s Jo Stevens asks about Channel 4’s secret filming of Nix, in which he claimed the company used bribery, honeytraps and extortion to win elections.
Nix says he is embarrassed by the fact that he “spoke with such exaggeration and hyperbole … I didn’t represent the company properly, I didn’t represent what we do … and there was significant impact.”
“My colleague was absolutely crystal clear in telling the reporter that we’re not in the business of fake news, of lying, of entrapment … there are companies that do this but to me that crosses the line–”
Nix tries to continue, but Stevens interrupts, noting that “you were suspended by Cambridge Analytica.”
He responds: “I caveated my words, very clearly, by saying the answers were hypothetical.” These caveats, he says, were edited out.
“In our overzealousness to secure a contract, Mark Turnbull and I were guilty of hyperbole of agreeing on matters that, not only had we never done, but we had no understanding of. We were telling a client what we thought he wanted to hear.”
Updated
Labour’s Paul Farrelly follows up with another question about Nix’s apparent benevolence. Did he receive any of that money back? “I did not … at that time, none of us envisaged that this outcome would happen.”
Collins: “After the publication of the story in the Observer newspaper … things were removed from the offices of Cambridge Analytica. What was removed, and have they been made available to investigators?”
Nix asks why Collins thinks things were being removed, Collins says he saw pictures in the press, and Nix responds that those were pictures of staff from another company in another office in the same building. “Those boxes were not ours.”
“As far as I’m aware, the ICO were the only people to remove documents, files and hardware from that office,” Nix adds.
Updated
After a brief silence, Nix refuses to answer Collins’ opening question about the current status of Cambridge Analytica, and begins reading his statement again.
Collins cuts him off. “The way this works is we ask questions and witnesses answer them.” Another heated exchange later, and Nix grudgingly asks Collins to repeat his question.
“Cambridge Analytica is in chapter seven in the US … and administration in the UK,” Nix says. “I have no further involvement.” He adds that that is also the case with the SCL group.
Collins follows up with a question about the FT’s report today that Nix had taken $8m out of Cambridge Analytica.
“The allegation is false, the facts are not correct,” Nix says. He adds that he has personally paid money into the company to ensure staff salaries continued to be paid.
Updated
We’re off. Collins offers Nix the chance to open with an update on the current status of Cambridge Analytica … which immediately leads to a clash, as Nix instead tries to open with a “few clarifications”, but is shut down.
“These aren’t ordinary circumstances,” Nix says, and again tries to read a brief statement.
Nix firstly says he was very happy to give evidence, but that he wanted to either give evidence after investigations into Cambridge Analytica had been concluded, or give written or private evidence.
He says that, since he has been compelled, “there is a limit to the extent I can answer certain questions.”
He then says that he disputes the allegation that he “misled” the committee … before, again, Damian Collins cuts him off.
“Your opening statement is now going into the substance of the issues we want to raise with you,” Collins says. “I’m not going to allow an opening statement.”
Nix “insists”; Collins points out Nix isn’t really in a position to insist anything.
Updated
The digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee’s “fake news” inquiry continues today, as Damian Collins and colleagues prepare to grill, for a second time, the former Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix.
Nix has already appeared in front of the committee, back in February. But the committee recalled him to give further evidence once his company’s use of data harvested from millions of Facebook profiles was made public by the Observer in March.
In his formal summons to Nix, Collins wrote:
The committee will wish to examine apparent inconsistencies between your evidence and other evidence that we have received.
The session promises to be fiery indeed. MPs do not like feeling misled, and Nix has already attempted to avoid reappearing before parliament, but ultimately gave in to the summons.
Updated
