The Bolton PAC, the Mercer family, Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica have some serious splainin’ to do. And so do some GOP candidates.
Whistleblowers have provided the Washington Post with some documents from Cambridge Analytica which show that foreigners were running the campaign of some GOP candidates in 2014, which is prohibited by law. It is not a complete list of candidates in 2014. Nor does it include candidates in the 2016 campaign, or any current 2018 campaigns. Former Cambridge Analytica workers say firm sent foreigners to advise U.S. campaigns:
Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections.
The assignments came amid efforts to present the newly created company as “an American brand” that would appeal to U.S. political clients even though its parent, SCL Group, was based in London, according to former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie.
Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called “Project Ripon” for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854.
U.S. election regulations say foreign nationals must not “directly or indirectly participate in the decision-making process” of a political campaign, although they can play lesser roles.
Those restrictions were explained in a 10-page memo prepared in July 2014 by a New York attorney, Laurence Levy, for Cambridge Analytica’s leadership at the time, including President Rebekah Mercer, Vice President Stephen K. Bannon and chief executive Alexander Nix. The memo said that foreign nationals could serve in minor roles — for example as “functionaries” handling data — but could not involve themselves in significant campaign decisions or provide high-level analysis or strategy.
Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group were overwhelmingly staffed by non-U.S. citizens — mainly Canadians, Britons and other Europeans — at least 20 of whom fanned out across the United States in 2014 to work on congressional and legislative campaigns, the three former Cambridge workers said.
Many of those employees and contractors were involved in helping to decide what voters to target with political messages and what messages to deliver to them, the former workers said. Their tasks ran the gamut of campaign work, including “managing media relations” as well as fundraising, planning events, and providing “communications strategy” and “talking points, speeches [and] debate prep,” according to a document touting the firm’s 2014 work.
“Its dirty little secret was that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election,” Wylie said.
Two other former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear that they may have violated U.S. law in their campaign work, said concerns about the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s work in the United States were a regular subject of employee conversations at the company, especially after the 2014 vote.
The two former workers, who, like Wylie, were interviewed in London, said employees worried the company was giving its foreign employees potentially inaccurate immigration documents to provide upon entering the United States, showing that they were not there to work when they had arrived for the purpose of advising campaigns.
“We knew that everything was not above board, but we weren’t too concerned about it,” said one of the former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spent several months in the United States working on Republican campaigns. “It was the Wild West. That’s certainly how they carried on in 2014.”
The former workers’ claims represent the latest in a series of complications for Cambridge Analytica, which was founded in 2013 by the wealthy Mercer family and Stephen Bannon, the conservative strategist who was executive chairman of Breitbart News and later became a top adviser to President Trump.
The former workers’ allegations center on the 2014 campaign, two years before Cambridge Analytica was hired by the presidential campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and, later, Trump.
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Controversy for the company had begun days earlier amid reports in Britain’s Observer and the New York Times that Cambridge Analytica officials had collected data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles under allegedly false pretenses and also improperly shared it. Facebook on March 16 announced it had suspended the account of “SCL/Cambridge Analytica” and two people involved in the data collection, including Wylie.
Cambridge Analytica, whose offices were raided over the weekend by British authorities, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing but did not reply to requests for comment from The Washington Post for this story.
Last week, Cambridge Analytica’s acting chief executive, Alexander Tayler, expressed regret over the firm’s handling of the Facebook data. In a tweet, he said, “As anyone who is familiar with our staff and work can testify, we in no way resemble the politically-motivated and unethical company that some have sought to portray. Our staff are a talented, diverse and vibrant group of people.”
Project Ripon was described by Wylie and other workers as an ambitious effort in which Cambridge Analytica would advise American campaigns on how to use data to find “hidden Republicans.” Ripon also was the name of an online campaign management tool designed for the effort and described in a company brochure produced in London that was subtitled, “WINNING BACK AMERICA.”
Wylie said this initiative resembled previous SCL Group efforts to shape election outcomes on behalf of candidates in several other nations, including Kenya, Nigeria and India, often through affiliated companies run out of London.
Company documents obtained by The Post show the U.S. program involved a staff of 41 employees and contractors, and spent $7.5 million between April and July 2014.
The company aggressively courted political work beginning in 2014, signing on with numerous GOP candidates in what turned out to be a successful year for the party. That year, Cambridge Analytica documents show it advised a congressional candidate in Oregon, state legislative candidates in Colorado and, on behalf of the North Carolina Republican Party, the winning campaign for Sen. Thom Tillis.
Tillis said that he expects all services provided to his campaign to be lawful and that it would be “deeply disturbing” if his campaign was misled by a vendor. Dallas H. Woodhouse, the North Carolina GOP’s director, said that the party paid Cambridge Analytica $150,000 in 2014 for get-out-the-vote efforts and mail operations on behalf of Tillis and other GOP candidates but that he was not aware of any foreign workers involved with the effort. The party would not tolerate any unethical behavior by a vendor, he said. (Riiight).
“No foreign workers worked for us,” Woodhouse said.
The company, which asserted that Republican candidates won most of the races it worked on in 2014, also was hired by a super PAC controlled by former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who was named last week by Trump to be national security adviser. Bolton’s super PAC provided independent expenditure support in 2014 of candidates in Arkansas, New Hampshire and North Carolina.
Bolton’s spokesman, Garrett Marquis, said that Bolton, not individuals at Cambridge Analytica, made all strategic decisions related to the super PAC’s work. Marquis added that the contract with the company stated that Cambridge Analytica’s use of data “was in compliance with applicable laws,” that Bolton’s group hasn’t worked with the company since 2016, and that Bolton had been unaware of any alleged impropriety by Cambridge Analytica until recent news reports. The group no longer uses any of the data.
Wylie, who left Cambridge Analytica at the end of 2014 because of rising uneasiness about its politics and the leadership of Nix, said in interviews with The Post that he was part of multiple conference calls in 2014 with Bannon and Nix, a Briton, in which strategic campaign matters were discussed.
Wylie said these conversations also often featured discussions about the legal issues raised in the July 2014 Levy memo, which was made public in recent days by Wylie. The memo was previously reported by the Guardian, a British paper, and the New York Times.
Levy did not respond to requests for comment. Cambridge Analytica had told the Times previously that “personnel in strategic roles were U.S. nationals or green card holders” and that Nix “never had any strategic or operational role” in election campaigns in the United States.
Wylie declined to comment on whether he believed that he may have violated U.S. election law while working for Cambridge Analytica.
The restrictions on foreigners working in U.S. elections are broad, election attorneys said, with the key distinctions centering on involvement in campaign decisions.
Levy wrote in his July 2014 memo, “Foreign Nationals may work in a U.S. political campaign, but may not play strategic roles including the giving of strategic advice to candidates, campaigns, political parties, or independent expenditure committees. On the other hand foreign nationals may act as functionaries that collect and process data, but the final analysis of said data should be conducted by U.S. citizens and conveyed to any U.S. client by such citizens.”
Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at Akerman LLP, said the accounts of Wylie and the other former Cambridge Analytica workers raises legal concerns. “If Mr. Wylie’s allegations are true, the Justice Department could prosecute Cambridge Analytica and its managers for knowing and willful violations of the prohibition on foreign national contributions.”
Trevor Potter, a campaign finance attorney who advised the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said that “it is permissible for campaigns to hire foreigners” as long as they are involved in lower-level activity in a campaign.
“It would be a problem for a U.S. super PAC — or any other domestic political actor — to have foreign nationals involved in running a political operation, including making decisions on strategy, targeting and expenditures for that political entity,” he said. “If foreigners were involved in the senior levels of decision-making for a political organization, that would be a violation of federal law.”
A 2014 Cambridge Analytica post-election report describing its work in congressional and legislative races said that the company played a central role in the Oregon congressional race for Republican Arthur B. Robinson. The report also indicated that it had played this role within the bounds of the law. Robinson lost that election.“
For the Art Robinson for Congress campaign, Cambridge Analytica SCL assumed a comprehensive set of responsibilities and effectively managed the campaign in its entirety, with strategic advice channeled through US nationals on the CA-SCL team,” the document said.
Former Cambridge Analytica workers said there were few U.S. citizens among their ranks. Yet they routinely worked on U.S. campaigns, developing messages, creating campaign materials such as ads and videos, and helping the campaigns decide whom to target with those messages.
“The nature of targeting is fundamentally influential to the direction of a campaign because you’re deciding what messages go to whom and when,” Wylie said. “There’s no such thing as managing targeting in a non-influential way.”
Questions about the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s actions crystallized in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 vote, during which Republican candidates — including those helped by Cambridge Analytica — made significant gains.
In a video conference featuring Levy, the attorney brought up the restriction on foreigners working in U.S. campaigns, said a former Cambridge Analytica worker who heard the call and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
For some company workers in the London office, it was the first indication of any potential violation of U.S. law, causing them unease at an otherwise celebratory moment.
“It only percolated down to the ranks once it was too late,” the former CA employee said.
This former employee added, “CA didn’t handle only data. They have decided targeting strategy. They helped decide messaging.” The ranks of company campaign workers included a “small handful of U.S. citizens” but dozens of foreign workers.
The former Cambridge Analytica workers did not provide information about what transpired in 2016, when the company did work for Cruz and Trump.
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Nix, the chief executive, has portrayed his role as central to Trump’s winning effort, though others involved in the campaign have expressed doubts about this.
He told TechCrunch in 2016 that Cambridge Analytica, which federal records show was paid at least $6 million by the Trump campaign, was key to campaign decisions on data analytics, research, digital advertising, television spots and collecting donations: “Overnight [the contract] went from being originally just data, to end to end.”
Nix made similar claims in secretly recorded video released in recent days by Channel 4 in Britain, saying the company “did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy.”
As Brett Kappel said above, “If [these] allegations are true, the Justice Department could prosecute Cambridge Analytica and its managers for knowing and willful violations of the prohibition on foreign national contributions.”
UPDATE: Common Cause has filed DOJ & FEC Complaints Against Cambridge Analytica for Violating Prohibition on Election-Related Activities by Foreign Nationals in Work for Trump, Others:
Today, Common Cause filed complaints with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging reason to believe that Cambridge Analytica LTD and its sister company, SCL Group Limited, and numerous employees of the London-based companies repeatedly violated the prohibition on foreign nationals performing certain election-related activities over two U.S. election cycles – including extensive work for the Trump campaign.
As the complaint outlines in detail, publicly available data and numerous published reports make abundantly clear that numerous employees of the companies “violated the federal law prohibition on foreign nationals ‘directly or indirectly participat[ing] in the decision-making process of any . . . political committee . . . such as decisions concerning the making of . . . expenditures’” in connection with U.S. elections.
Among the foreign nationals employed by the two companies named in the complaint are Alexander Nix, Nigel Oakes, Alexander Tayler, Mark Turnbull and Christopher Wylie who all reportedly did significant work for U.S. election campaign during the 2014 and 2016 election cycles. The companies, staffed almost entirely by foreign nationals, did more than $5 million worth of work for the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as well as millions of dollars more for other campaigns and Super PACs including the John Bolton Super PAC and Make America Number 1.
In addition to alleging violations of campaign finance law, the complaint filed with the DOJ notes that certain U.S. nationals operating and/or working for Cambridge Analytica and its political committee clients, including the Trump campaign and the John Bolton Super PAC, may have aided and abetted foreign national offenses against the U.S., conspired to commit offenses against the U.S., and/or attempted to conspire to commit offenses against the U.S. in violation of the U.S. criminal code.
“We are a nation of laws and our campaign finance laws must be enforced by the FEC and the Justice Department in order to safeguard the integrity of our elections from foreign interference,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause. “These companies and individuals ignored the law, enriched themselves performing millions of dollars of prohibited work for candidates and committees, and then boasted about the effectiveness of their activities in swaying U.S. elections.”
“It defies belief that even after their own attorney warned them that they would be violating the prohibition on performing certain election-related activities in U.S. elections that they did so anyway,” said Paul S. Ryan, Common Cause vice president for policy and litigation. “A full investigation must be conducted, and if Cambridge Analytica and its staff did in fact repeatedly violate our laws, then there must be punishment levied sufficient to deter similar lawbreaking in future.”
To read the DOJ complaint, click here.
To read the FEC complaint, click here.