LONDON -- Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections.
The effort was designed to present the newly created company, whose parent, SCL Group, was based in London, as "an American brand" that would appeal to U.S. political clients, according to former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie.
Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called "Project Ripon" for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854.
U.S. election regulations say foreigners must not "directly or indirectly participate in the decision-making process" of a political campaign, although they can play lesser roles.
Those restrictions were explained in a 10-page memo prepared in July 2014 by a New York attorney, Laurence Levy, for the heads of Cambridge Analytica, including company President Rebekah Mercer, Vice President Steve Bannon and now-suspended Chief Executive Officer Alexander Nix.
The memo said foreign nationals could serve in minor roles -- for example as "functionaries" handling data -- but could not involve themselves in significant campaign decisions or provide high-level analysis or strategy.
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 Analytica workers said.
Many of those employees and contractors were involved in helping to decide what voters to target with political messages and what messages to deliver to them, the former workers said. Their tasks ran the gamut of campaign work, including "managing media relations" as well as fundraising, planning events and providing "communications strategy" and "talking points, speeches [and] debate prep," according to a document touting the firm's 2014 work.
"Its dirty little secret was that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election," Wylie said.
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 elections.
The two former workers, who, like Wylie, were interviewed in London, said employees worried the company was giving its foreign employees potentially inaccurate immigration documents to provide upon entering the United States, showing that they were not there to work when they had arrived for the purpose of advising campaigns.
"We knew that everything was not aboveboard, but we weren't too concerned about it," said one of the former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spent several months in the United States working on Republican campaigns. "It was the Wild West. That's certainly how they carried on in 2014."
Company officials did not respond to multiple queries from The Washington Post, nor did Bannon, Mercer or Nix.
The former workers' claims represent the latest in a series of complications for Cambridge Analytica, which was founded in 2013 by the wealthy Mercer family and Bannon, the conservative strategist who was executive chairman of Breitbart News and later became a top adviser to President Donald Trump.
The former workers' allegations center on the 2014 campaign, two years before Cambridge Analytica was hired by the presidential campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and, later, Trump.
Project Ripon was described by Wylie and other workers as an ambitious effort in which Cambridge Analytica would advise American campaigns on how to use data to find "hidden Republicans."
Wylie said the initiative resembled previous SCL Group efforts to shape the outcomes of elections on behalf of candidates in several other nations, including Kenya, Nigeria and India.
Company documents obtained by The Post show the U.S. program involved a staff of 41 employees and contractors and spent $7.5 million between April and July 2014.
The company, which asserted that Republican candidates won most of the races it worked on in 2014, also advised candidates in Arkansas, New Hampshire and North Carolina through a super PAC controlled by former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who was named last week by Trump to be national security adviser.
The campaign of then-U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton paid the firm $20,000 during the Dardanelle Republican's run for the Senate seat he now holds, his chief of staff has said.
Cambridge Analytica has been criticized over reports that it wrongfully obtained the data of an estimated 50 million Facebook users and used that information to help the Trump campaign.
The campaign's work with Cambridge Analytica was first reported after Trump secured the Republican nomination and the Mercers endorsed his campaign. But Democrats remain skeptical of how veterans of the Trump campaign, which paid $5.9 million to Cambridge Analytica, now characterize the firm's influence.
"Even the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, bragged about their value," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on NBC. "Then, after the election, you've seen nothing but the Trump campaign trying to distance themselves."
FACEBOOK CRITICIZED
Warner also criticized Facebook on Sunday, saying the social media network hasn't been "fully forthcoming" as Congress investigates Russia's attempted meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Warner said on Meet the Press that he questioned "the use of this really sketchy firm Cambridge Analytica" but that Facebook "blew that off" as they did other concerns over Russia's actions.
The revelation of Cambridge Analytica's actions has caused days of backlash against Facebook and its co-founder and chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg. Two congressional committees have invited Zuckerberg to testify, and he has said he will agree if he is the right person to appear.
Warner repeated his call for Zuckerberg to testify.
Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch was called before Congress last year to testify in the Russia investigations.
After last year's hearings, Zuckerberg promised a "major ads transparency effort," including requiring political advertisers to include a disclosure of their identities. Warner has said he wants Facebook to go further. The senator has pressed tech companies for more information about Russian meddling in U.S. elections and called on them to harden their networks.
Questions remain about how Russia used Facebook during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. An indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller described a multiyear effort by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian outfit, and others to shape American opinions, including by impersonating Americans on Facebook, Instagram, Google's YouTube, and Twitter.
In addition, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is scrutinizing whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree with its handling of personal user data transferred to Cambridge Analytica without users' knowledge, according to two people familiar with the matter. It is also facing an investigation in the United Kingdom.
Facebook took out ads in multiple newspapers Sunday apologizing for what it called a "breach." The ads in multiple U.S. and British newspapers apologized for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying the social media platform doesn't deserve to hold personal information if it can't protect it.
The ads said Facebook is limiting the data that apps receive when users sign in. It's also investigating every app that had access to large amounts of data. "We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected," the ads stated.
On the same day as Facebook's ads ran, the social media site faced new questions about the collection of phone numbers and text messages from Android devices.
The website Ars Technica reported that users who checked data gathered by Facebook found that it had years of contact names, telephone numbers, call lengths and text messages.
Facebook said Sunday that the information is uploaded to secure servers and comes only from Android users who opt in to allow it. Spokesmen say the data are not sold or shared with users' friends or outside apps. They say the data are used "to improve people's experience across Facebook" by helping to connect with others.
The company also says in a website posting that it does not collect the content of text messages or calls. A spokesman said Facebook uses the information to rank contacts in Messenger so they are easier to find, and to suggest people to call.
Users get the option to allow data collection when they sign up for Messenger or Facebook Lite services, the Facebook posting said. "If you chose to turn this feature on, we will begin to continuously log this information," the posting said.
The data collection can be turned off in a user's settings, and all previously collected call and text history shared on the app will be deleted, Facebook said.
Information for this article was contributed by David Weigel, Craig Timberg and Tom Hamburger of The Washington Post; by Ben Brody, Todd Shields, Mark Niquette and Laurie Asseo of Bloomberg News; by Tom Krisher and staff members of The Associated Press; and by staff members of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A Section on 03/26/2018