by a senior Trump official is titled “Russia’s Voter Suppression Operation Echoed Trump Campaign Tactics.”333 Evidence recently unearthed by the New Yorker also reveals that Cambridge Analytica played a much larger—but still secretive—role in the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom than was previously appreciated, and that Steve Bannon was entwined with that effort as well.334 The exposé discloses that Bannon “was in the loop on discussions taking place at the time between his company [Cambridge Analytica] and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right nationalist organization.”335
In view of the foregoing, a pressing question remains: Did the Russians gain access to any of Trump’s data firm’s psychographic data in the course of their own 2016 efforts to target American voters? The answer appears to be yes. Christopher Wylie has said publicly that “when I was at Cambridge Analytica, the company hired known Russian agents, had data researchers in St. Petersburg, tested U.S. voters’ opinions on Putin’s leadership, and hired hackers from Russia—all while Bannon was in charge.”336 Kogan, Cambridge Analytica’s “academic” researcher, has since been revealed as an employee of Russia’s Kremlin-owned St. Petersburg State University as well as Cambridge University in the United Kingdom; his work at the Russian institution included not only a teaching position but “grants for research into the social media network,” according to the Guardian.337 In 2014, the Guardian found that a few months before Cambridge Analytica was founded, its British parent company, SCL Group, gave a “presentation” of its work on “micro-targeting individuals on social media during elections” to Russian energy firm Lukoil, an entity “with links to the Kremlin.”338 SCL Group documents shown to Lukoil in 2014, as the Internet Research Agency’s propaganda campaign in the United States was just ramping up, included “posters and videos apparently aimed at alarming or demoralizing voters, including warnings of violence and fraud.”339 Nor were the SCL presentations low-level affairs, as the materials were shared with Lukoil’s CEO, a “former Soviet oil minister who has said the strategic aims of Lukoil are closely aligned with those of Russia.”340
Cambridge Analytica has troubling intersections with Israeli business intelligence firms, as well. While Joel Zamel’s Psy-Group was doing work for Ben Carson’s ill-fated presidential campaign in late 2015, so too was Cambridge Analytica, according to CNN.341 More important, however, on December 14, 2016, five weeks after the 2016 election, Psy-Group and Cambridge Analytica were reunited when the two announced a partnership to “provide intelligence and social-media services … to an array of clients.”342 This joint effort was apparently connected to Trump’s election victory, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that “the partnership was intended in part to help win government contracts—something that Cambridge [Analytica] and its parent company, SCL Group, were aggressively seeking to do as their allies in the Trump administration took power.”343
But Psy-Group had also sought business with Trump prior to his election, with Zamel pitching Donald Trump Jr. directly at Trump Tower on August 3, 2016, by “extoll[ing] his company’s ability to give an edge to a political campaign,” according to the New York Times, which notes that Zamel and Psy-Group had by the August 2016 meeting “already drawn up a multimillion-dollar proposal for a social media manipulation effort to help elect Mr. Trump.”344 Several aspects of this meeting raise serious questions about possible connections and overlap between Cambridge Analytica and Psy-Group: that Zamel’s pitch came just a few weeks after the campaign had hired Cambridge Analytica as its data firm; that Cambridge Analytica had been accused in 2015, by seven individuals with “close knowledge” of a Cambridge Analytica election campaign in Nigeria that year, of “work[ing] with people they [the seven individuals] believed were Israeli computer hackers”; that in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election Michael Flynn, who had been actively (if apparently unsuccessfully) recruited by Psy-Group, took on an advisory role with SCL Group; that by the end of 2016 Psy-Group and Cambridge Analytica would announce a formal partnership; and that in 2018 both Cambridge Analytica and Psy-Group would declare bankruptcy within seventy-two hours of each other—at a time when both outfits were under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.345
Most troubling, however, is that on August 3, 2016—just a few weeks after Cambridge Analytica came aboard the Trump campaign—Donald Trump Jr., according to the New York Times, “responded approvingly” to a proposal from Psy-Group that was on its face redundant with the work already being done (and that would continue to be done) by Cambridge Analytica.346 Apropos of this confusion, the Times notes that