Previous reports have indicated that at least some of the people who huddled in Donald Trump’s San Antonia IT center were not US workers, but exports from Cambridge Analytica’s parent company in the UK. While it’s not yet clear how many of those workers came from outside the US, or the extent of their contribution to the campaign, there is precedent. Cambridge Analytica got its start in the US in 2013, meaning it was on the ground in time to work for Republican congressional campaigns in 2014.
And the Washington Post reports that those campaigns were also a … showcase of international talent.
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.
Those workers helped target US voters, help raise money from US sources, helped set ads that appears on US media, and even took management positions in US campaigns. all of which would seem to be in direct violation of US law.
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.
If a candidate’s Canadian cousin is in town, he could knock on doors. He could work on a phone bank. But when he’s the one deciding which doors get a knock, which phones receive a call, and what the message of the campaign should be—that’s over the line. But Cambridge Analytica—whose US office is really little more than a shell for the British firm SCL—eradicated that line. And they knew it.
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.
As in the case of Donald Trump’s election, Cambridge Analytica did not hold back in using their 2014 work as a means of pushing their services to new clients.
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.
That plan included a complete strategic rewrite of Robinson’s previous approaches, creating a new image for the candidate, and reworking his message—hardly the stuff of low-level office workers.
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.
Republicans picked up 16 House seats from Democrats in that 2014 election, giving them their largest majority in the House in almost 90 years. However, it’s worth noting that Robinson’s race wasn’t one of those victories—it was the third time he ran against incumbent Democrat Peter DeFazio, and the third time he lost.
But it isn’t just the workers who should be concerned. The candidates involved certainly knew they had foreign workers in responsible positions on their staffs. And, of course, there was the team that sent the Cambridge Analytica workers across the country—Steve Bannon and the Mercers.
The prospect of new legal scrutiny for Bannon comes at a turbulent time for the conservative strategist. He left his job as a senior White House strategist in August and in January stepped down from Breitbart News after harsh quotations attributed to him about Trump and family members appeared in the Michael Wolff book “Fire and Fury.” The Mercer family, long Bannon’s financial patrons, also have distanced themselves from Bannon.
But the Mercers haven’t distanced themselves from CA, or from the strategy Bannon brought them about using the tools to widen social gaps and win elections by planting both ads and stories designed to increase tension in America.
The over 50 million Facebook profiles with associated data would have also been available to 2014 campaigns assisted by Cambridge Analytica.
British officials raided Cambridge Analytica’s offices in the UK over the weekend. Nothing has yet been released about what was recovered.
More than a dozen investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office entered the company’s central London office late Friday, shortly after a High Court judge granted a warrant. The investigators were seen leaving the premises early Saturday after spending about seven hours searching the office.