when it was reported that cambridge analytica, this data firm founded by trump's biggest donor, robert mercer, headed up by his campaign chief steve bannon, this firm they paid millions of dollars to late last ar, we learned that firm had reached out to one of the entities that s distributing en russi cambridge analytica offered their services, offered their help to help index andlici these stolen materials. and that kind of just sounds like details, right? sounds just like, oh, one more been walking since trump was e elected as we've been trying to figure out what exactly happened there in that election and what exactly russia did. itt unds like one more detail. but step back from it for a second. whmeans when we found out that cam reached out to wikileaks and said hey, can we help? what that means is we've got a russian intelligence operation under way to illegally influence the u.s. election in trump's favor, and we've got the data firm paid by the trump campaign offering operational help to that effor so that was a big deal when we got that revelation last year, that cambridge analytica o

information. >> thank you, my understanding is that you are aware of the founders of funders, including robert mercer, providing moni so that they would not be quote, necessarily considered the clear will campaign contributions, are you aware of conversations to that effect by mr. mercer or anybody else? >> what i'm referencing is what was explained to me, after i inquired of to the relatively convoluted setup in the united states, withrespect to the setup of cambridge analytica, this is not the primary reason, it could be an ancillary benefit, but when you invest money as an investor to a company that you own, it doesn't necessarily constitute an electoral contribution which is declare bowl.>> let me just cut right to the intent of my question. was there specific exatn to you that the purpose of structuring these funds as investments was to, in effect, avoid the reporting requirements or other provisions of united states election laws? >> it was explained to me as a benefit of the setup. >> were there any firewalls during the time you worked at cambridge analytica that separated work on different ca

host: robert mercer? guest: the funder of all of this. he funded cambridge analytic a deadly believe may have had a link to the russians. in fact, the head of channel 1 in russia, that ted turner of russia, said he was breached by donald trump on cambridge analytic a's efforts -- analytica's efforts in 2014 and 2015, the same time russian intelligence treated the internet research agency and started engineering social media through facebook and twitter. none of these things are coincidences. coincidence takes a lot of planning. this and they not only hit us, they hit the french, the british during brexit. the british are now having investigations that the robert cer of england funded the same thing and secretly met with the russians. host: jim, the democrat. you are on the air with malcolm nance. caller: thank you for c-span and thank you, mr. nance. i have heard you speak on msnbc and you do an outstanding job. let me apologize for that fellow on the west coast who called you a hack. it is much like you are saying. people want to believe