00:00This is the town of Lake Arthur New Mexico population 433. It's three and a half hours from Albuquerque. And to call it a sleepy southwestern town would be an understatement . This is Will Norwood. Until recently he was Lake Arthur's police chief Lake Arthur was an unusual department. Almost every one of Norwood's officers were volunteers. Eighty four in all. One of those volunteers Robert Mercer Robert Mercer is the fabulously wealthy computer scientist who helped bankroll the election of President Donald Trump. And for six years by serving as a volunteer policeman in Lake Arthur Mercer was getting something money alone can't buy the right to carry a concealed firearm anywhere in America. Bloomberg Zack miter uncovered this latest chapter of the many incredible but true stories about Robert Mercer. I was definitely surprised but I'm just sort of used to being surprised by all the interesting things that Robert Mercer is up to. So who is Robert Mercer. Here's what we know about this incredibly secretive political kingmaker in some of the fringe ideas he bankrolls. Robert Mercer is notoriously private . As far as we know Mercer has never spoken publicly about his political beliefs. He really is not interesting in talking publicly about what he believes or why. So one of the only ways to get a clearer picture of Mercer is to follow his web of money and a lot of that money supports projects as far from the mainstream as you could possibly get. That's a theme that you see with Mercer again and again is that he's deeply skeptical of the received wisdom and that connects to a lot of his support for what you might call kind of fringe science and fringe economics ideas and really his willingness to bankroll people like Steve Bannon who at the time was not considered an A-list political player. Steve Bannon led Trump's campaign in the final months leading to the election. And of course he later moved to the White House. For years Mercer was the money behind Bannon's projects. The biggest one being bright Bart news Bannon had this very distinct vision for a new kind of conservative politics that would be much more kind of populist than the standard kind of Republican playbook. In 2011 Mercer gave the far right populist Web site 10 million dollars. Soon after Bannon became bright Bart's executive chairman and the site's audience exploded. Bannon really builds this thing into a juggernaut of conservative politics. Mercer also helped fund a band and led nonprofit which published a book portraying Hillary Clinton as corrupt. It does involve the Clintons and an enormous mining company called Uranium One this company Uranium One which controlled about a fifth of America's uranium giving away nuclear capability to our enemies. All of that came from the book Clinton Cash. The third big Bannon project that Mercer bankrolled was Cambridge analytics. Bannon and Mercer co-founded the political data firm in 2013 with Mercer giving 15 million dollars later the Trump campaign hired the firm to help get Trump elected. This is the Cambridge analytics that in 2018 became the center of a tech and political firestorm for using the personal data of 87 million Facebook users without their approval. And those are just some of the political projects that Mercer's funded as a family. The mergers have given more than 40 million dollars to GOP candidates and super PACs since 2010. Outside of politics some of the more quirky ideas that Mercer has funded include a scientist in Oregon who has a gigantic stockpile of human urine with the goal of extending human life. A counter conference in Jackson Hole Wyoming promoting the use of the gold standard and he gives millions to multiple groups attacking the science of global warming. Mercer now 71 wasn't always rich and able to bankroll his idiosyncratic views. He grew up in New Mexico with an interest in computers . Through his mid to late forties he was kind of like a research almost like a professor. He worked at IBM and he was a researcher. He's responsible for doing really interesting cutting edge work but he wasn't a zillionaire at IBM. He was part of a team laying the groundwork for modern day speech recognition software like Google Translate. It wasn't until his late 40s when he left IBM for Renaissance Technologies arguably the most successful hedge fund in the history of the world . Mercer became co CEO of the fund in 2009 making him a very wealthy man. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index values Mercer's wealth at almost a billion dollars. Which brings us back to Lake Arthur and the one thing Mercer's money alone couldn't buy . It seemed to me like a story about the lengths that a person of really astonishing dreams will go to to get something that they otherwise couldn't get the right to carry his gun anywhere in the U.S.. Mercer is a serious gun enthusiast. To give you a picture he co owns a gun company bought the largest private collection of these machine guns and has a factory in South Carolina that makes assault style rifles. We also know when he built his house which is the sort of sprawling palace on the north shore of Long Island he actually included in it a pistol range right. Right in the basement of his home. But getting a concealed carry permit where she lives is incredibly difficult. And even if he did get a permit he would not have been able to take his gun to New York City and other states until 2004 when Congress passed a law which says police officers can carry concealed guns in any state . Since then small police departments around the country including the one in Lake Arthur have been rumored to hand out badges to exchange for cash. The so-called badge factories for Business Week spotlighted the Lake Arthur department. The mayor quickly shut it down. We still don't know exactly what was going on in Lake Arthur. What we do know is that during the six years he wore that badge Mercer supported the town generously . So after all that who really is Robert Mercer I think he's kind of more whimsical than most people would imagine. I think he . Here's an interesting idea. And he says this is something worth exploring and let's give it a shot .

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Trump Megadonor Robert Mercer Is Also a Cop

Robert Mercer is the fabulously wealthy computer scientist who helped bankroll the Trump presidency. Bloomberg Businessweek's Zachary Mider discovered that Mercer also wears a badge. This is a profile of Mercer and the latest chapter in the many incredible-but-true stories about the secretive hedge fund tycoon. (Video by Michael Byhoff, Jordan Oplinger, Sylvia Yang, Nathalie Milbank. Voiced by Matt Goldman) Note: For most of the past six years, Mercer's badge came from Lake Arthur, New Mexico. Mercer gave up that badge in September 2017. Since producing this profile, Mider uncovered that Mercer has a new badge from Yuma County, Colorado. (Source: Bloomberg)