today.
MR. SCHIFF: And when you talk about the connection between the Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign, is that a line you're drawing through Cambridge Analytica, or were there other lines you were drawing there?
MR. SIMPSON: Well, Bannon went over to the UK in or around 2011. And originally, he was trying to set up a sort of British tea party, which was an inopportune choice of
MR. SCHIFF: The anti tea party.
: One minute.
MR. SIMPSON: And so, you know, some of it - so there's -- it really isn't, I don't think, that Cambridge is the nucleus. I think that it's there's some Bannon connections. I know there's - and there's some other Bannon Stone associates, a guy named Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, who was -- is an American who was living over there and associating with UKIP and, I believe, is a significant figure in this.
So I don't - I had had some run into Cambridge and Analytica previously, and I would - there was a lot of skepticism about whether they really were capable about doing anything or whether they were just selling snake oil, and that was certainly my view when I first heard about them years earlier. So I don't view them as nucleus. The Mercers, I think are significant.
MR. SCHIFF: And, I mean, were you able to find any factual links between the Mercers and Assange or WikiLeaks or Farage?
MR. SIMPSON: Well, I mean, the things that we heard, which, you know, I think could be sorted out by an official inquiry are that Nigel Farage made a number of trips to New York and had a number of meetings -- Nigel Farage and
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
