Bolton PAC hired data-mining firm

Company tapped Facebook to develop voter profiles for client, files show

WASHINGTON -- The political action committee founded by John Bolton, President Donald Trump's incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, according to former Cambridge employees and company documents.

Bolton's organization, known as the John Bolton Super PAC, hired the data firm to develop psychological profiles of voters with data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, according to the ex-employees and documents.

It first hired Cambridge Analytica in August 2014, months after the political data firm was founded and while it was still harvesting the Facebook data.

In the two years that followed, Bolton's super PAC spent nearly $1.2 million primarily for "survey research," which is a term that campaigns use for polling, according to campaign finance records.

But the contract between the political action committee and Cambridge Analytica, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, offers more detail on just what Bolton was buying. The contract broadly describes the services to be delivered by Cambridge Analytica as "behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging."

To do that work, Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data, according to the documents and two former employees familiar with the work.

"The data and modeling Bolton's PAC received was derived from the Facebook data," said Chris Wylie, a data expert who was part of the team that founded Cambridge Analytica. "We definitely told them about how we were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings."

Cambridge Analytica, which rose to prominence through its work with Trump's 2016 election campaign, has found itself confronting a deepening crisis since reports last weekend in the Times and The Observer of London that the firm had harvested the data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles in its bid to develop techniques for predicting the behavior of individual U.S. voters.

Cambridge Analytica's so-called psychographic modeling techniques, which were built in part with the data harvested from Facebook, underpinned its work for Trump's campaign in 2016, setting off a furious -- and still unsettled -- debate about whether the firm's technology worked. The same techniques were also the focus of its work for Bolton's super PAC.

"The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp-wristed and spineless, and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues," Wylie said.

"That really meant making people more militaristic in their world view," he added. "That's what they said they wanted, anyway."

Using the psychographic models, Cambridge Analytica helped design concepts for advertisements for candidates supported by Bolton's PAC, including the 2014 campaign of Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., according to Wylie and another former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

One advertisement, a video that was posted on YouTube, was aimed at people who scored high for conscientiousness, and were thought to respect hard work and experience. It emphasized Bolton's time working for Ronald Reagan and how Tillis embodied the spirit and political ethos of the late president.

Beyond their conservative politics, Trump, Bolton and Cambridge Analytica all share a patron -- the Mercer family of Long Island, whose patriarch, Robert Mercer, made a fortune at the helm of a top-yielding hedge fund.

Cambridge Analytica, which grew out of the London-based SCL Group, was founded in 2014 with a $15 million investment from Mercer, whose daughter Rebekah sits on the firm's board of directors. Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon was also a co-founder.

At the same time, Robert Mercer was financially supporting Bolton's PAC, donating $5 million between April 2014 and September 2016, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The Mercers also backed Trump in the presidential election.

The Mercer family has not publicly commented since the reports about the misuse of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica first surfaced last week.

The reports have prompted calls from lawmakers in Britain and the United States for renewed scrutiny of Facebook, and at least two U.S. state prosecutors have said they are looking into the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica.

Also, the company suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after a television broadcast this week in which he was recorded suggesting that the company had used seduction and bribery to entrap politicians and influence foreign elections.

A Section on 03/24/2018

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