Forget the Russians. It was the embeds.

[Trump campaign digital director Brad] Parscale received help utilizing Facebook’s technology from Facebook employees provided by the company who showed up for work to his office multiple days a week. He says they had to be partisan and he questioned them to make sure.  “I wanted people who supported Donald Trump.”  Parscale calls these Facebook employees “embeds” who could teach him every aspect of the technology. “I want to know everything you would tell Hillary’s campaign plus some,” he says he told them.

Both campaigns used Facebook’s advertising technology extensively to reach voters, but Parscale says the Clinton campaign didn’t go as far as using “embeds.” “I had heard that they did not accept any of [Facebook’s] offers.”

The conservative Parscale sees an irony in all this. “These social platforms are all invented by very liberal people on the West and East Coast.  And we figure out how to use it to push conservative values. I don’t think they thought that would ever happen,” says Parscale.