Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into interference in to 2016 election interference has interviewed at least one employee of Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed today during his testimony before the Senate. Zuckerberg confirmed that he himself had not been interviewed, then declined to elaborate, citing the confidentiality of the investigation.
Senator Leahy asked “I assume Facebook has been served with subpoenas from the special counsel’s office?” Zuckerberg replied “yes”, but then noted that “I have to clarify that I’m not sure that there are subpoenas, there may be.”
Leahy then asked if Zuckerberg or anyone at Facebook had been contacted by the special counsel, and Zuckerberg responded “Yes”. When asked if he specifically had been interviewed, the CEO replied “I have not”. Leahy followed up, asking “Others have?” Zuckerberg responded “I believe so.”
Zuckerberg then got cagey, explaining that “I want to be careful here because our work with the special counsel is confidential and I want to make sure that in an open session I’m not revealing something that’s confidential.”
You can watch this part of the testimony below:
Wired reported in January that at least one Facebook staffer employee had been interviewed by Mueller, and that they were associated with the Trump campaign. Facebook provided assistance to both the Trump and Clinton campaigns in using Facebook’s tools.
Now, given information that’s come to light about the Trump campaign working with Cambridge Analytica to optimize its campaigns, and about how Cambridge Analytica attained that data improperly from a Facebook app built by researcher Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, Mueller’s investigation may have been interested to know if the Facebook staffer was aware of the improperly-attained data. Alternatively, Mueller may have simply been interested in whether the Facebook staffer knew of any Russian connection to the campaign.
You can follow TechCrunch’s coverage of the Zuckerberg testimony here:
Source: Tech Crunch