New Evidence of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica's Role in Brexit
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
18 November 18
For two years, observers have speculated that the June, 2016, Brexit
campaign in the U.K. served as a petri dish for Donald Trump's Presidential
campaign in the United States. Now there is new evidence that it did. Newly
surfaced e-mails show that the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and
Cambridge Analytica, the Big Data company that he worked for at the time,
were simultaneously incubating both nationalist political movements in 2015.
Emma Briant, an academic expert on disinformation at George Washington
University, has unearthed new e-mails that appear to reveal the earliest
documented role played by Bannon in Brexit. The e-mails, which date back to
October of 2015, show that Bannon, who was then the vice-president of
Cambridge Analytica, an American firm largely owned by the U.S. hedge-fund
billionaire Robert Mercer, was in the loop on discussions taking place at
the time between his company and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right
nationalist organization. The following month, Leave.EU publicly launched a
campaign aimed at convincing British voters to support a referendum in favor
of exiting the European Union. The U.K. narrowly voted for the so-called
Brexit in June, 2016. The tumultuous fallout has roiled the U.K. ever since,
threatening the government of the Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May.
Bannon did not respond to requests for comment. But his name and private
e-mail address appear on the chain of three e-mails in October, 2015,
between Brittany Kaiser, the director of program development at Cambridge
Analytica, and Arron Banks, who headed the Leave.EU campaign and referred to
himself in the title of his memoir as one of "The Bad Boys of Brexit." Banks
could not be reached for comment regarding the e-mails, which were first
published Saturday by the British Web site openDemocracy.
The precise role played by foreign entities in promoting and possibly
funding Brexit has been clouded in mystery and controversy. British law
forbids foreign contributions to its political campaigns-just as U.S. law
bars foreign campaign contributions. The laws are designed to prevent
international manipulation of domestic affairs. Executives working for
Cambridge Analytica, which filed for bankruptcy this spring, have
categorically denied that the firm was paid to do any work for the Leave.EU
campaign. The new e-mails do not contradict that, but show that, even if the
firm was not paid for its services, it laid some of the early groundwork for
the Leave.EU campaign. The e-mails show that Banks and others in the
Leave.EU leadership met with Cambridge Analytica executives in 2015, and
discussed what Banks called a "two-stage process" that would "get
CA"-Cambridge Analytica-"on the team."
In an e-mail dated October 24, 2015, Banks also discussed tasking Cambridge
Analytica with helping him raise funds through the U.S. for the Leave.EU
campaign. In a note to the Cambridge Analytica executives with whom he had
met, Banks wrote, "It's clear that major donors are sitting on the fence,
but we aim to do something about that." Banks returns to the topic later in
the note, adding, "We would like CA to come up with a strategy for fund
raising in the states and engaging companies and special interest groups
that might be affected by TTIP"-the pending Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership.
Banks did not address the potential illegality of direct foreign donations,
but suggested a strategy that might circumvent the letter of the
campaign-finance laws, if not their intent. Banks suggested enlisting
Cambridge Analytica's help in reaching out to Americans "with family ties to
the UK." Evidently, by targeting Americans with British relatives, the hope
was that they could avoid campaign-finance-law violations. He suggested that
Cambridge Analytica, which boasted of having access to two hundred and
thirty million Americans' voter-registration data, as well as other personal
information, could be solicited "to raise money and create SM [social media]
activity."
The following day, a Cambridge Analytica staffer sent an e-mail back to
Banks, again with Bannon included on the chain, suggesting that the firm was
on board with the idea of developing a proposal that would include "US-based
fundraising strategies."
Whether foreign funds secretly supported the Brexit movement has become the
focus of intense speculation and investigation in the U.K. The British
probes, in many respects, are parallel to the Robert Mueller investigation
of possible Russian support for Trump's 2016 campaign. Banks has drawn
particular scrutiny because his business spent some nine million pounds
supporting the Brexit campaign, making him the country's single largest
political-campaign donor by far, despite questions about whether he had the
personal wealth to contribute that much on his own. Banks has insisted that
his contributions were legal, and that foreign sources, including Russia,
contributed no funds. But multiple British agencies have launched inquiries,
including a criminal investigation into Banks's role by the National Crime
Agency, the U.K.'s equivalent to the F.B.I.
Brittany Kaiser, the former executive at Cambridge Analytica whose name
appears on the new e-mails, has since become something of a whistle-blower,
exposing the company's role in the Brexit campaign to the press. Reached
through a spokeswoman, she declined to comment.
While the e-mail chain includes Bannon, there is no evidence that he read or
commented on the exchange between the Leave.EU leaders and the Cambridge
Analytica executives. In the fall of 2015, Bannon was busy setting up a new
office for Cambridge Analytica in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the
Potomac River from Washington, D.C., and pitching the firm's services to
Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. The firm initially worked for
Ted Cruz's Presidential campaign. But, when Trump won the Republican
nomination, the Mercer family, which had financially supported Trump's
Presidential bid, insisted that Trump put Bannon in charge of the campaign
and bring in Cambridge Analytica, in which the family was heavily invested,
as well.
Executives at Cambridge Analytica claimed that they had access to
unprecedented quantities of advanced "psychographic" data that enabled the
Trump campaign to micro-target its pitch to voters. But, this past May, the
company filed for bankruptcy in the wake of allegations-denied by Cambridge
Analytica executives-that it had improperly obtained millions of people's
personal data from Facebook, without the users' permission, in violation of
the company's regulations.
The possibility that both Brexit and the Trump campaign simultaneously
relied upon the same social-media company and its transgressive tactics, as
well as some of the same advisers, to further far-right nationalist
campaigns, set off alarm bells on both sides of the Atlantic. Damian
Collins, a member of Parliament, and chair of its Digital, Culture, Media
and Sport Committee, which held an inquiry into fake news, told the
Observer, which has broken much of the news about Cambridge Analytica in the
U.K., that the new e-mails "suggest that the role of Bannon and Mercer is
far deeper and more complex than we realised. There's a big question about
whether Mercer's money was used in the Brexit campaign and it absolutely
underscores why Britain needs a proper Mueller-style investigation. There
are direct links between the political movements behind Brexit and Trump.
We've got to recognise the bigger picture here. This is being coordinated
across national borders by very wealthy people in a way we haven't seen
before."
The American investigations into foreign interference in Trump's election,
and British probes into Brexit, have increasingly become interwoven. The
role of the Russian Ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, has
reportedly been the subject of interest both to Mueller's investigators and
to those in the U.K., who have examined his relationship to Banks. The role
of Nigel Farage, the former leader of the far-right, Euroskeptic U.K.
Independence Party, who has been an ally of Bannon and Trump, has also
reportedly stirred the interest of investigators in both countries,
especially after he was spotted in 2017 leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London, in which Julian Assange has taken refuge. Assange's media platform,
WikiLeaks, published many of the e-mails stolen by Russia from the Hillary
Clinton campaign during the 2016 election season.
How and whether all of these pieces fit together is the subject of Mueller's
investigation, but the lack of a similar single, overarching investigation
in the U.K. has led critics to call for one. Emma Briant, for instance, who
has submitted the new e-mails to the British government for further
investigation, told openDemocracy that "this evidence shows that Banks was
seeking foreign funding for Brexit from the very beginning." She argued that
the U.K. inquiry, like the U.S. one, needed to follow the money and the
potential manipulation of public opinion as nationalist policies rose on
both sides of the Atlantic.
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