NEW YORK STATE — Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah have been getting a lot off ink lately. Robert is the computer wizard and hedge fund billionaire who was one of President Donald Trump’s most important supporters, and he also gave $500,000 to help fund the campaign of Republican Congressman John Faso.

Rebekah is listed as chair of the group Reclaim New York (RNY), the mission of which is spelled out on the group’s website www.reclaimnewyork.org. It says, “Through civic trainings, we empower citizens to engage their state and local government. Most importantly, we’re a group of New Yorkers that believes deeply in helping each citizen reclaim ownership in their relationship with government.”

According to a lengthy piece in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer (tinyurl.com/m37lz8x) about Robert and Rebekah, RNY shares an address in New York City with a company called Cambridge Analytica, which is mostly owned by Robert. Mayer writes of Robert’s connection to this company: “What is clear is that [Robert] Mercer, having revolutionized the use of data on Wall Street, was eager to accomplish the same feat in the political realm. He screened many data-mining companies before investing, and he chose Cambridge Analytica,” with the hope that it could help influence elections with the use of data gathered from social media sites.

The article sparked a letter to the editor to The New Yorker from Joyce St. George, who was a corruption investigator from New York State in the 1970s. She writes of RNY, “The organization has weaponized the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) to ‘request,’ and sue for, financial documents from 250 villages, towns, and cities in Orange, Westchester, Putnam and other counties in New York. Reclaim also holds local ‘workshops’ to build a ‘citizen army’ that floods communities with public-information requests. Its ultimate goal is to overwhelm governments and achieve the deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The RNY communications director called the claim inaccurate and a political attack. He said that group has filed 1,000 FOIL requests and filed 11 lawsuits.