did not reveal publicly until an August 2017 financial filing; and in October 2017 Kremlin cutout Julian Assange revealed that Alexander Nix himself “reached out to him during the [presidential] campaign in hopes of obtaining private emails belonging to Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton”—a revelation that, along with Flynn’s secretive work for SCL Group, puts SCL Group and its offshoot Cambridge Analytica squarely in the midst of the Trump campaign’s repeated attempts to secure Clinton’s stolen emails from Russian sources throughout the summer of 2016.308
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Cambridge Analytica begins its work for the Trump campaign in June 2016 as the result of a decision made by Jared Kushner; Kushner’s decision is opposed by outgoing campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—it is unknown if his opposition is in part responsible for his exit—as well as incoming campaign manager Paul Manafort, who has his own reasons for wanting internal campaign data to remain within his own sphere (and that of his handpicked pollster, Tony Fabrizio) rather than anyone else’s, particularly that of a company co-founded by Steve Bannon (see chapter 4).309 That Lewandowski leaves the campaign just as Cambridge Analytica joins it, and that Manafort’s departure from the campaign on August 17, 2016, is immediately followed by Bannon’s ascension to the role of campaign CEO, underscores the central position the data firm has during the 2016 general election.
The New York Times reports that in co-founding Cambridge Analytica in January 2013, Christopher Wylie’s ambition was to use “inherent psychological traits to affect voters’ behavior”; in funding Cambridge Analytica, Mercer’s hope was to become “a kingmaker in Republican politics”; and in steering Cambridge Analytica first toward Texas senator Ted Cruz’s GOP primary campaign and ultimately into Trump’s general election campaign, Bannon aimed to “shift America’s culture and rewire its politics” through “personality profiling.”310
In 2014, after the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University had refused to work with Wylie and his team, a professor at the university, Kogan, agreed to do so, beginning his work in June, three months after Trump’s “soft” announcement of his presidential candidacy on Twitter.311 Kogan in short order authored an app that represented to end users that any personal data it harvested would be used exclusively for academic purposes; in reality, copies of everything were being transmitted to Bannon, Mercer, Wylie, and Nix.312 Yet the situation was far worse than even this for most social media users caught up in the scheme, as only 270,000 users actually consented—by participating in a survey with substantial fine print—to have their data harvested at all, even as Kogan was providing more than 50 million raw profiles to Cambridge Analytica (30 million of which were robust enough to produce psychographic voter profiles).313
In transmitting the profiles, Kogan tells Bannon and his team that the profiles he has created have predictive qualities: they reveal whether a given voter is open, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic, satisfied, intelligent, fair-minded, male or female, old or young, and conservative or liberal. They can even offer information on a voter’s job, religion, hobbies, major at university, and belief in astrology.314
Impressed with Kogan’s 2014 work, Mercer and Bannon, who had formed the American company Cambridge Analytica as an offshoot of the British firm SCL Group in late 2013, form SCL USA (later renamed Cambridge Analytica UK) at the beginning of 2015; the duo’s two transatlantic incorporations appear to be a byzantine effort to either honor or subvert U.S. election laws—which one being a subject of ongoing investigation. Of the original Cambridge Analytica the New York Times will report, “the firm was effectively a shell … any contracts won by Cambridge, originally incorporated in Delaware, would be serviced by London-based SCL [Group] and overseen by Mr. Nix, a British citizen who held dual appointments at Cambridge Analytica and SCL. Most SCL employees and contractors were Canadian, like Mr. Wylie, or European.”315 The business model the Times describes is a problem—potentially a serious violation of federal law—as months earlier, in July 2014, “an American election lawyer advising the company, Laurence Levy, warned that the [Cambridge Analytica–SCL Group] arrangement could violate laws limiting the involvement of foreign nationals in American elections.”316 According to the Times, by the time of the 2016 general election, Cambridge Analytica had—its 2015 incorporation of SCL USA/Cambridge Analytica UK notwithstanding—made few substantive changes to its employment model, “hir[ing] more Americans to work on the races that year” even as it remained the case that “most of its data scientists were citizens of the United Kingdom or other European countries.”317 These foreign nationals “performed