“the details of who commissioned it [the August 2016 Psy-Group proposal] remain in dispute.”347 What is clear is that during Channel 4’s undercover investigation into Alexander Nix and Mark Turnbull, two top executives at Cambridge Analytica, Turnbull tells two reporters posing as prospective Cambridge Analytica clients that his firm does “intelligence gathering” using “specialist organizations that do that kind of work” and with whom Cambridge Analytica has “relationships and partnerships”—a description that perfectly fits Psy-Group, a business intelligence outfit.348 Turnbull says to Channel 4 on camera that these “specialist organizations” allow Cambridge Analytica clients to learn their opponents’ “secrets” and “tactics.”349 In another Channel 4 video, Turnbull speaks of his firm offering, as part of its suite of services, the involvement of “various intelligence-gathering operations that operate very discreetly to find [political opponents’] information”—he accepts the term “dirt” when it is offered to him by the undercover reporters, and he himself adds the phrase “skeletons in the closet.”350 What Turnbull describes is identical to the services Psy-Group pitches to the Trump campaign with respect to Hillary Clinton. Tellingly, Turnbull tells Channel 4 that when Cambridge Analytica is engaged in intelligence-gathering activities, sometimes the firm “contract[s]” with “a different entity” with “a different name,” so that “no record [of the intelligence-gathering operation] exists with our name attached to it at all.”351 Nix, for his part, discusses with the reporters the use of “honey traps” (ruses involving sexual seduction and blackmail) to target and destroy selected politicians.352 He says further that Cambridge Analytica is “used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows.”353
According to the Wall Street Journal, “One person familiar with the work of both firms [Cambridge Analytica and Psy-Group] said Mr. Nix in the [Channel 4] video appeared to be referring to Psy-Group, which does work that tracks closely with Mr. Nix’s description.”354 The Journal notes that, per its sources, Psy-Group was as of 2016 known for using honey traps on clients’ political opponents.355 The reporting by the Journal seems to be conclusively confirmed by Nix’s most candid comment on the question: the Cambridge Analytica CEO at one point tells Channel 4’s undercover reporters that “we use Israeli companies,” among other entities, as they are “very effective in intelligence gathering.”356
The initial outreaches from the Trump campaign to Cambridge Analytica and to Psy-Group both occur in spring 2016. According to reporting by the Times of Israel and the Daily Beast, three Trump campaign members—Rick Gates and two unnamed “members of Trump’s inner circle”—solicit Psy-Group in April 2016 to create “secretive proposals for the Trump campaign” that will involve not only mass disinformation operations but also “collecting opposition research on Clinton and ten of her associates” using both open-source methods and unnamed “complementary intelligence activities.”357 After Gates allegedly “reject[s]” the resulting proposals—in June, around the time the campaign decides to use Cambridge Analytica’s services—Psy-Group’s Zamel nevertheless is given the opportunity to pitch directly to Trump’s son Don: a development, partially coordinated by Erik Prince, that throws into doubt whether Gates’s response to Zamel was in fact a rejection or merely a referral up the chain of command. Certainly, the campaign had previously used Trump Jr.—a trusted member of the Trump family, but also outside the campaign’s infrastructure—to vet potentially explosive campaign gambits, such as the receipt of Clinton “dirt” from Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016.
The proposals Gates sees in late spring 2016 are so top-secret within and outside the Trump campaign that they use code words for the two major-party candidates: “Lion” (Trump) and “Forest” (Clinton).358 Zamel’s initially “rejected” proposal would have cost more than $3 million, a hefty price tag partially explained by the fact that, at the time, it included a primary-related pre–Republican National Convention targeting of Ted Cruz (denominated “Bear” in Zamel’s proposal).359 Notably, immediately after the 2016 election George Nader, MBZ’s adviser, pays Zamel $2 million, an amount roughly commensurate with Zamel having provided only the general-election work he pitched to Gates in spring 2016.360 Indeed, the New Yorker reports that certain of Psy-Group’s services were available for as little as six figures; “one company document reported that Psy-Group’s influence services cost, on average, just $350,000.”361 That Zamel did not conduct any GOP primary work for the Trump campaign is confirmed by the fact that, per the New York Times, he didn’t receive any approving signal from Trump’s campaign until he met with Trump Jr. in August 2016, several weeks after the RNC in Cleveland.
In estimating the cost of the services Zamel might have provided the Trump campaign,