May 02, 2018 01:29 PM UTC

So Long, Cambridge Analytica

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• by: Colorado Pols

BBC reports, the highly controversial political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, which played a role in Republican victories in Colorado elections in 2014 before going on to help Donald Trump become President of the United States, will shut down after exposure of its sources and methods tainted both the company and the politicians who benefited:

Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy at the centre of the Facebook data-sharing scandal, is shutting down.

The firm was accused of improperly obtaining personal information on behalf of political clients.

According to Facebook, data about up to 87 million of its members was harvested by an app and then passed onto the political consultancy…

Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive Alexander Nix was suspended in March after secretly being recorded by Channel 4 News.

In the video he suggested that the London-based firm had helped run Donald Trump’s digital election campaign. He also detailed ways that it could discredit other politicians, including sending “girls around to the candidate’s house”.

Here in Colorado, John Frank and Mark Matthews of the Denver Post uncovered hundreds of thousands of dollars paid by Republicans to Cambridge Analytica for research and consulting on election communications. In addition to helping strategize crucial state senate races, Cambridge reportedly helped craft messages that helped Cory Gardner narrowly defeat Mark Udall in the 2014 U.S. Senate race–the most bitter defeat for Democrats in Colorado since their political resurgence ten years before. As recently as March of this year, Cambridge Analytica was still soliciting Colorado Republican campaigns for business, though by then it seems Republicans were as surprised to be hearing from the tainted organization as anyone else.

At this point, there is no one left to defend Cambridge Analytica–only politicians in office, from the Colorado Senate to the U.S. Senate Senate to the White House itself, answering for their own connection to this scandal with a shrug.

We would end by saying “don’t get fooled again,” but as a nation we almost certainly will.