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THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCANDAL IS GOING GLOBAL
The data firm has woven a complex—and potentially illegal—web that stretches across the Atlantic.
The exterior of Cambridge Analytica in London, photographed on March 21st.
The exterior of Cambridge Analytica in London, photographed on March 21st.
By Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images.
What began as an unseemly scandal for Cambridge Analytica is drifting into the realm of potential illegality. Last week, former Cambridge employee Chris Wylie recalled in an interview how the data-mining firm took discrete steps to comply with U.S. campaign-finance rules, establishing its operation with deliberate finesse. Such attention to detail, however, was apparently short-lived. Despite an explicit warning from an attorney to abide by laws limiting foreign involvement in domestic elections, Cambridge Analytica reportedly assigned at least 20 non-U.S. citizens to work on congressional and legislative campaigns for Republican candidates in 2014, former employees told The Washington Post:
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.
In a memo, New York attorney Lawrence Levy reportedly advised the company’s leadership that British C.E.O. Alexander Nix would have to be “recused from substantive management of any such clients involved in U.S. elections.” Foreign nationals could collect and process data, the memo warned, but “may not play strategic roles including the giving of strategic advice to candidates, campaigns, political parties or independent expenditure committees.” Yet Nix was reportedly part of multiple conference calls in which strategic matters were discussed. Worse, according to Wylie, the task force working on the program was virtually entirely foreign. “It’s a dirty little secret that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election,” said Wylie, who provided documents to the Post detailing a staff of 41 employees and contractors, and a budget of some $7.5 million between April and July 2014. Cambridge Analytica, Levy, and Nix all declined the Post’s request for comment.
According to Wylie, Levy’s memo was raised in multiple conversations between co-founder Steve Bannon and Nix, who was recently suspended from the company after an undercover video was released that appeared to show him discussing possible bribes and extortion schemes to ensnare political rivals. (Bannon, too, declined the Post’s request for comment.) Speaking anonymously for fear they may have breached U.S. law in their campaign work, two other Cambridge Analytica workers told the Post that anxieties around the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s work in the United States were commonplace, especially after the 2014 vote. Some within the company suspected that it gave its foreign employees inaccurate immigration documents indicating they were not in the U.S. to work on advising campaigns. “We knew that everything was not above board, but we weren’t too concerned about it,” said one former staff member, who spent several months in the U.S. “It was the Wild West. That’s certainly how they carried on in 2014.”
Christopher Wylie
Christopher Wylie, co-founder and whistleblower of Cambridge Analytica, photographed in London on March 21st.
By Jake Naughton/Getty Images.
Cambridge Analytica, which claims that most of the Republican candidates it worked with in 2014 won their races, also provided support for candidates in Arkansas, New Hampshire, and North Carolina through a super PAC controlled by John Bolton, who has just been named Trump’s third national security adviser. A spokesman for Bolton told the Post it was he, rather than Cambridge Analytica, who made decisions related to the super PAC’s work, adding that the contract with the company stated Cambridge Analytica was “in compliance with applicable laws.”
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Fallout from the Cambridge Analytica bombshell has likewise landed across the Atlantic, placing certain inhabitants of 10 Downing Street in an exceptionally uncomfortable position. Over the weekend, as the authorities raided Cambridge Analytica’s office, the Observer reported that Vote Leave—a pro-Brexit group led by foreign secretary Boris Johnson and environment secretary Michael Gove—might have breached referendum rules. According to whistleblower Shahmir Sanni, then a recently graduated volunteer with the company, a £625,000 donation was funneled to an ostensibly independent campaign group called BeLeave, and then passed to the digital-services firm AggregateIQ (AIQ), which as Gizmodo reported on Monday, created software for Cambridge Analytica. That donation, Sanni alleges, was in breach of electoral rules because Vote Leave shared offices with BeLeave and essentially controlled the smaller organization, which was run by 23-year-old fashion student Darren Grimes. Rules require campaign groups that coordinate with each other to have a shared spending limit. Sanni also alleged that, after the Electoral Commission opened an investigation, senior Vote Leave figures began deleting traces of their presence in files shared by the two groups. (In response to the Observer, Grimes said that any allegations of wrongdoing were “damaging” and “untrue.”)
“I know that Vote Leave cheated . . . I know that people have been lied to and that the referendum wasn’t legitimate,” Sanni said in a separate interview with Channel 4. “In effect, they used BeLeave to overspend, and not just by a small amount . . . Almost two-thirds of a million pounds makes all the difference, and it wasn’t legal.” (The official Brexit-campaign’s director, Dominic Cummings, described that claim as “factually wrong and libelous.” Johnson, who famously claimed that leaving the E.U. would generate an extra £350 million a week to spend on the National Health Service, dismissed Sanni’s claims as “ludicrous.”) Though Sanni is still a believer in Brexit, he was spurred to speak out for a bleaker reason: he believes Grimes was exploited. Charged with helming BeLeave in his twenties, and advised to put his name on official documents, Grimes was the one fielding calls from reporters rather than their experienced colleagues over at Vote Leave. “Vote Leave didn’t really give us that money. They just pretended to. We had no control over it. We were 22-year-old students. You’re not going to just give nearly a million pounds to a pair of students and let them do whatever,” he says. “Darren’s working-class as well. And it’s his name all over this. He’s the one being investigated. It’s his name on the form. And he just did what Vote Leave told him.”
Alexander Nix Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica C.E.O. Alexander Nix photographed leaving the offices in London on March 20th.
By Dominic Lipinski/PA Images/Getty Images.
Following his decision to come forward, Sanni endured what appeared to be a pointed attack at the hands of said Downing Street denizens: in a statement delivered without Sanni’s consent, former Vote Leave official Stephen Parkinson, now Theresa May’s political adviser, publicly outed him as gay, stating that the pair dated each other for a year and a half, including during the period when Parkinson was at Vote Leave and Sanni worked as a volunteer and treasurer at BeLeave. Sanni, whose family was unaware of his sexuality, has accused Parkinson of trying to twist his story into some sort of romantic vendetta. “I didn’t want to talk about this at all because it is not relevant,” he said. “I had to come out to my mother the day before yesterday as well as my entire family, as well as take security precautions in Pakistan for my family.” May defended Parkinson in the House of Commons on Monday, saying that she would not fire Parkinson over the statement, and that he “does a very good job.”) As the Cambridge Analytica vortex continues to produce increasingly alarming reports shrouded in obfuscation and corporate jargon, the apparent exploitation of Grimes and Sanni by older, more savvy players offers a disquieting interpersonal footnote to a story about unregulated technologies shaping democracy.
STEVE BANNON
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