“After five minutes — done,” Nix told ITN Channel 4 News, adding that Republican members on the body asked him just three questions.
“They’re politicians, they’re not technical,” he said. “They don’t understand how it works.”
Nix also said he felt the Democrats on the committee were motivated by “sour grapes,” on account of having lost the election. “They don’t understand because the candidate never, is never involved. He’s told what to do by the campaign team,” Nix said.
He also described how the firm used “proxy organizations” to get its messages out without being revealed as the source.
“Sometimes you can use proxy organizations who are already there. You feed them,” Nix said. “They are civil society organisations…Charities or activist groups, and we use them — feed them the material and they do the work…We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding — so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”
Nix also aid his company employed a secret email system where messages actually self-destruct.
“No one knows we have it, and secondly we set our… emails with a self-destruct timer… So you send them and after they’ve been read, two hours later, they disappear,” he said. “There’s no evidence, there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing.”
In a statement to NBC News Tuesday, Cambridge Analytica said it had been “completely transparent about our simultaneous work on both political campaigns and political action committees (including publicly declaring our work on both with FEC filings)” and maintained it was “committed to supporting and assisting the House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian interference in the election in any way that we can.”
“CA is not under investigation, and there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the company,” the company said. “They deny any involvement in the alleged Russian attempts and say such an allegation is entirely false.”