“I’m not going to lie, this is certainly one of the weirder cases I’ve dealt with,” my lawyer said as we sat in her office in London reading through a June 2015 pre-action letter from Cambridge Analytica (falsely) claiming that I was attempting to set up a rival firm in aid of the nascent Trump presidential campaign. Donald Trump had first come into my life a few months before, in the spring of 2015, when Mark Block called me with a proposition refreshingly far removed from the work I’d done with Cambridge Analytica. As Block explained it, the Trump Organization needed help with market research, either for Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice or his casinos. Block had also called Jucikas and Gettleson, who were still in London. The three of us talked, and we agreed to a meeting with the Trump executives.
In calls with the Trump Organization, we heard about declining ratings for The Apprentice and how fewer people were staying at Trump hotels and gambling in the casinos. With the advent of online gambling and the total dependence on Donald Trump’s public image as a sexy, savvy billionaire, it seemed his team was beginning to realize that an outdated casino system and an aging, orange-stained C-list celebrity didn’t conjure “sexy and fun” for potential new customers. The Trump brand was on a downturn, and the company needed to figure out how to give it a boost.
The project was frustratingly amorphous, the executives weren’t even sure what we did or how we could help, and I started to suspect that the Trump executives were just looking for free advice. When they proposed a meeting for about a month later, I declined, content to let Jucikas and Gettleson report back from Trump Tower. The meeting took place at a Trump Tower restaurant, and the conversation picked up in the same vague place the calls had left off. Could we use data to enhance the image of Trump and his products—to revive the Trump brand? And if so, who would be the targets for such a project?
When Gettleson called to tell me about what went down, he was laughing. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “Trump is planning to run for president.” The meeting had included Corey Lewandowski, who identified himself as Trump’s campaign manager and assured Gettleson and Jucikas that Trump was indeed serious about running for president. He invited us to take part in the campaign—an offer I wanted no part of, for several reasons. One: It was a political campaign, and I had quit Cambridge Analytica and left London specifically to get away from politics. Two: Trump seemed like an utterly ridiculous individual and a likely failure as a candidate. And three: He was running as a Republican, and I was finished doing dirty work for right-wing politicians. It was one thing to explore how to improve ratings for a reality TV show; it was quite another to help a Republican run for president. Gettleson agreed—Jucikas, soon to be a consultant on GOP campaigns, not so much—and the Trump subplot, we assumed, had come to an end.
But a couple of weeks later, on June 5, 2015, we learned that Cambridge Analytica was suing Gettleson, Jucikas, and me. They claimed that we had violated the non-solicitation clause in our NDAs with the firm. We had, according to the lawsuit, solicited one of Cambridge Analytica’s clients: Donald Trump. The letters informing us of the lawsuit gave us two weeks to respond, so even though the case was clearly bogus, I decided to hire a lawyer to make it go away as quickly as possible. At our first meeting, the attorneys were baffled. Imagine how strange this conversation was, long before Cambridge Analytica or Steve Bannon became household names: “So there’s this psychological warfare firm,” I told them. “And it got acquired by this Republican billionaire in the United States. And after I quit, I got invited to talk with Donald Trump—the guy from The Apprentice? Apparently, he’s going to run for president, and he’s secretly a client of theirs. And so now they’re suing me…”
By now, Cambridge Analytica had spread like a disease through the Republican Party, advising prominent candidates in House and Senate races and undertaking projects to study cultural phenomena, such as militarism among U.S. youth, on behalf of right-wing interests. On the face of it, Cambridge Analytica was wildly successful. But behind the scenes, the firm was screwing the Republican Party generally—and the Mercers specifically. For me, the real revelation in the lawsuit was that Cambridge Analytica was connected with Trump as an off-book client at the same time the firm was working for the Mercers’ preferred presidential candidate, Ted Cruz. Not only did Bannon have a different agenda than the Mercers, he also had no interest in supporting Cruz, whom Bannon despised.
After I explained to the attorneys that I wasn’t even working for Trump, they essentially said, “Fine, don’t worry. Firms send these letters all the time as a stern warning, but usually nothing comes of them. It’s probably their director’s insecurity. We can take care of this.”
But it wasn’t going to be cheap. Indeed, Cambridge Analytica made it clear that they intended to keep badgering me, costing me money and peace of mind, until I gave in. I offered to sign a document saying I would never again work for a Republican, but Cambridge Analytica didn’t want that. They wanted me to never work with data again, which of course was an impossible request. Back and forth we went, for months on end. The whole thing got more and more bizarre. In the course of the legal dispute, I discovered that after Gettleson and I left the firm, CA had invented two fake staff personas—“Chris Young” and “Mark Nettles”—that they continued to use on their site and with clients. Finally I agreed to sign a deed of confidence, which was essentially a super-non-disclosure agreement stating that I would never discuss what I had seen and done at Cambridge Analytica. Unbeknownst to me, the first trap in my future as a whistleblower had been set.
WHEN I MOVED BACK to Canada to work for Trudeau’s research team, my days involved mostly conference calls and meetings, and for the most part I welcomed the stability and warmth of an environment that wasn’t hostile, particularly one in which the boss wasn’t hell-bent on psychologically abusing his staff.
In March 2016, a senior Canadian government official called me asking for a briefing that was slightly outside my mandate. He wanted a read on the Republican primaries in the United States, which were in full swing. Specifically, he wanted to know why Donald Trump was surging in the polls. On March 1, Trump had taken the Republican primaries in seven out of eleven of the Super Tuesday states, and thousands of screaming supporters were packing his rallies across the country. The more outrageously Trump behaved, it seemed, the higher his poll numbers rose: At the March 3 presidential debate, he tangled with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida about, of all things, the size of his penis, with Trump boasting, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” Two weeks later, Trump won four out of six states and territories in a single day—and Rubio dropped out of the race. Trudeau’s people weren’t worried—yet—but they were curious, because the reality TV star turned candidate struck them as ridiculous and weird. Why was he doing so well? What were the Americans thinking? Like many of their fellow Canadians, they took pleasure in smugly shaking their heads at their backward neighbors.
Canadians have a hard time understanding populism because, unlike America or Britain, it has never had any Rupert Murdoch–owned media. There is no Fox News or The Sun in Canada. Because of its more risk-conscious banking system, the country did not experience a housing crisis or financial crash. And unlike the rest of the OECD, Canada is the outlier where patriotism and support for immigration actually correlate positively with each other. So I would find myself repeating the same conversation over and over to baffled Canadians who simply could not understand how Brexit or Trump were even possible.
Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister in the late 1960s and 1970s, once said that living so close to the United States was like “sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast…one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Even if Trump didn’t win—and few people at that point thought he would—his position on trade was already creating ripples. Trump hated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and was riling up the American electorate in states crucial to trade relations with Canada. The fear was not so much that Trump would win, but that the longer he lasted, the more his anti-NAFTA bombast might affect gubernatorial and legislative races in these states, which in turn would shift the national dialogue on trade.
The Cambridge Analytica saga was not yet lodged in the public consciousness, but it was no secret among my Canadian colleagues that my work for the firm had ultimately been passed on to certain U.S. political campaigns. As Trump continued to gain ground, their curiosity grew. I described Cambridge Analytica’s tactics of voter manipulation—how the firm identified and targeted people with neurotic or conspiratorial predispositions, then disseminated propaganda designed to deepen and accentuate those traits. I explained how, after obtaining people’s data from Facebook, Cambridge Analytica could in some cases predict their behavior better than their own spouses could, and how the firm was using that information to, in effect, radicalize people inside the Republican Party.
So while it was obvious that Trump touched a nerve with a certain percentage of American voters, Cambridge Analytica was working behind the curtain to raise his campaign to another level. A bunch of the people they were targeting were those who typically didn’t vote Republican or didn’t vote at all. They were trying to expand the electorate through this while at the same time they were committed to voter suppression. In particular, they focused on disengaging African Americans and other minority communities. One of the ways they did this was to peddle left-wing social justice rhetoric to depict Hillary Clinton as a propagator of white supremacy—while themselves working for a white supremacist. The aim was to move people from all demographics of a more left-wing ideology to vote for a third-party candidate, like Jill Stein.
I had started paying attention to candidate Trump when Cambridge Analytica sued me, because that was when I learned that the firm was working for him. At first, his campaign was a mess. But then he began repeating phrases like “Build the wall” and “Drain the swamp,” and he started rising in the polls. I called Gettleson and said, “Well, this sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it?”—because these were the exact phrases CA had tested and included in reports sent to Bannon well before Trump announced. Meaning that, throughout the spring of 2016, when Cambridge Analytica was supposedly working for Ted Cruz, the fruits of its research seemed to be (wink wink!) making their way to Donald Trump.
As the primaries continued, it became apparent that Trump’s chances of winning were increasing, and the attitude of people in Ottawa began to shift from “He’s crazy, ha ha,” to “He’s crazy…and he might become president of the elephant next to us.”
AS BREXIT LOOMED AND TRUMP gained ground, I realized it was time to speak up. I decided to connect with a couple of friends who worked in Silicon Valley. One of them—I’ll call her “Sheela”—knew someone at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm co-founded by the tech wunderkind Marc Andreessen. In the early nineties, Andreessen, along with Eric Bina, had created the Mosaic Web browser, forever changing the way people used the Internet. Mosaic became Netscape, which became one of the earliest Internet super-successes with its IPO in 1995. Since then, Andreessen had made hundreds of millions of dollars investing in companies like Skype, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga…and Facebook. He also sat on Facebook’s board.
I flew to San Francisco in the spring of 2016 to start briefing relevant parties on what I’d seen at Cambridge Analytica. Sheela set up a meeting at the Andreessen Horowitz offices, on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. From the outside, the building looked like a slightly upscale suburban dentist’s office, but inside, a rather bland lobby gave way to walls hung with fantastically expensive art. I met with Andreessen employees in a conference room and told them about Cambridge Analytica, the millions of Facebook profiles it had misappropriated, and the malicious way it was using the profiles to interfere with the election.
“Guys, you work for a major shareholder and board member,” I said. “Facebook needs to be aware that this is going on.” They told me they would look into it. Whether that actually happened, I have no idea.
With a Facebook board member now apparently on the case, I went to a party in San Francisco’s Mission District, where a Facebook VP was expected to be among the guests. As it turned out, the party was filled with Facebook employees. The look was standard-issue Silicon Valley—form-fitted gray T-shirts—and it was hard to get through a conversation without hearing a progress report on a keto fasting diet, drinking Soylent meal replacements, and why food was becoming “overrated.” Introduced as the guy from Cambridge Analytica, I quickly became the center of attention, as they’d all heard so many rumors about the company. At the time, they all seemed to be aware of Cambridge Analytica, and I later found out that as far back as September 2015, Facebook employees discussed Cambridge Analytica internally and had asked for an investigation into the possible “scraping” of data by the company. The employees reiterated their request for an investigation in December 2015, and would later be quoted in a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint filed against Facebook describing the firm as a “sketchy (to say the least) data modeling company that has penetrated our market deeply.” But as I answered their questions, it was obvious that threats to democracy didn’t interest them nearly as much as the mechanics of what Cambridge Analytica had pulled off. Even the Facebook vice president seemed mostly unfazed. If I had a problem with Cambridge Analytica, he said, then I should create a rival firm—respond to the Uber of propaganda by developing the Lyft. This suggestion struck me as perverse—not to mention irresponsible—coming from an executive at a company well positioned to take meaningful action. But that was how Silicon Valley operated, I soon realized. The reaction to any problem, even one as serious as a threat to the integrity of our elections, is not “How can we fix it?” Rather, it’s “How can we monetize it?” They were incapable of seeing beyond the business opportunity. I had wasted my time. The U.S. regulatory investigation that I later took part in eventually determined that at least thirty Facebook employees knew about Cambridge Analytica—but prior to the story being made public by my whistleblowing, the company did not put into place any procedures to report this to regulators.
Later, I was invited by Andreessen Horowitz staff to a private Facebook chat group called “Futureworld,” where executives from major Silicon Valley companies were discussing problems facing the tech sector, including issues I had raised. Andreessen also started talking to other executives in Silicon Valley about how their platforms were potentially being misused. He welcomed several other Silicon Valley notables to his house for a dinner group they began to refer to as “the Junta”—a reference to authoritarian groups that rule a country after taking power.
“It’ll sure be ironic if the reason our correspondence lands on the government’s radar,” one group member emailed Andreessen, was because “their algorithms were triggered by our sarcastic use of the word ‘junta.’ ”
IN EARLY SUMMER OF 2016, the Russia narrative started bubbling up. In mid-June, Guccifer 2.0 leaked documents that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee. A week later, just three days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published thousands of stolen emails, opening rifts between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned almost immediately. And, of course, Nix eventually began asking around about Clinton’s emails at the behest of Rebekah Mercer, eventually offering Cambridge Analytica’s services to WikiLeaks to help disseminate the hacked material. I found out about this from a former colleague who was still with the firm and thought everything was getting out of hand.
As the Democrats tried to get their convention back on track, Donald Trump lobbed another metaphorical grenade at the party. At a news conference on July 27, he casually invited Russia to continue its interference in the campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening,” he blustered, “I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing”—a reference to emails that Clinton had deemed personal and deleted, rather than turning them over to investigators looking into her use of a private email server.
Over the summer and into the fall, Trump and Putin exchanged admiring comments, and I started thinking back on the weird Russia connections I’d noticed at Cambridge Analytica. Kogan’s ties to St. Petersburg. The meeting with Lukoil executives. Sam Patten’s boasts about working with the Russian government. Cambridge Analytica’s internal memos alluding to Russian intelligence. The Putin questions inexplicably inserted into our research. And even Brittany Kaiser’s apparent connection to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. At the time, I had thought these were strange events, each one incidental to the others. But now they began to seem like something more.
Trump became the GOP nominee at the Republican National Convention on July 19. If my hunch was correct, Cambridge Analytica was not only using the data tool I had worked on to manipulate American voters into supporting him, it may have been knowingly or unknowingly working with Russians to sway the election. Now that I was outside Cambridge Analytica looking in, it was as if I had X-ray vision. I knew the depths this company was willing to plumb, and the moral void at its core. I felt sick to my stomach. And I knew I had to tell someone—to raise the alarm.
I approached someone in the Trudeau government—I’ll call him “Alan”—and told him about my concerns. I started describing all the connections between Russia, WikiLeaks, and Cambridge Analytica. I told him I had come to believe that Cambridge Analytica was a part of the Russia story and suggested that we share the details with someone in the U.S. government.
We didn’t want to cross a line, and we wanted to stay respectful of the U.S. election. We were concerned that even though we only wanted to warn the United States about potential security threats, particularly from Russia, coming forward could be misinterpreted as a case of foreign actors attempting to interfere in the election—which we definitely were not. We settled on an alternative plan—a trip to Berkeley for a conference focused on data and democracy, where we could aim for a discreet chat with a couple of White House officials who we knew would be there.
The other person I had talked to extensively about all this was Ken Strasma, Obama’s former targeting director. I had met with Strasma in New York and told him about Cambridge Analytica’s data targeting. Since his firm had just provided microtargeting services for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, naturally he was interested.
After Clinton clinched the nomination, in late July, Strasma called me and said, “Now that we’ve lost, I’m going to see if I can talk with Hillary’s data team.” He asked whether I’d be interested in meeting with them to outline my suspicions about what was happening with the Trump campaign. Yes, of course, I told him. Unfortunately, we were never able to connect with the Clinton team.
IN AUGUST, I TRAVELED to Berkeley for a conference with some advisers from Justin Trudeau’s office. We would be there for only a few days, so I asked another friend from Silicon Valley, whom I will call “Kehlani,” to help us arrange meetings. The most important one would be with the White House staffers.
I knew the meeting with the White House officials would be short, which meant we would have one shot to get our point across. And since it was likely that my audience would not be familiar with Cambridge Analytica, there was a good chance they wouldn’t understand what we were talking about and would miss its significance. So I asked Kehlani to find a discreet setting where we could set up base and plan our meeting.
“How discreet do you want it?” she replied. “I can get you a place that doesn’t have cellphone reception.”
“A little unnecessary, but okay,” I said with a laugh. She gave us an address.
The following afternoon, we drove to where the GPS pointed us, which turned out to be the middle of a shipyard. Kehlani was waiting. She led us past a warehouse, down the dock. Things were getting weird, and they got even weirder when we had to step around giant harbor seals. Past them, we came upon a 135-foot Norwegian ferry, rusting in parts—it definitely wouldn’t have passed inspection. The once-white ship had become gray, with barnacles stuck along its entire base. Someone threw down a ladder so we could climb up to the ship as it bobbed and swayed in the water.
Kehlani had found the most secure environment imaginable: a hacker ship. Anchored near San Francisco, the vessel was home to a handful of coders engaged in startups and other indeterminate tech activities. We didn’t ask. In light of everything that was going on, it all felt perfectly apropos. We based ourselves on this ship throughout the trip.
Arriving at the conference the next day, we made arrangements for our unofficial meeting. Alan, in particular, was eager for us to emphasize that we were having this conversation in a personal capacity, not as representatives of Trudeau. The meeting would introduce employees of the Canadian government who were not representing that government to White House staffers who were not representing the White House. The topic was the U.S. election and what was happening in the Republican Party with respect to Cambridge Analytica, including its massive surveillance database and its potential relationships with foreign intelligence agencies.
Someone from the White House group asked if we could talk outside, as they’d been cooped up all day at the conference. Which is how we ended up in a rather bizarre tableau: a group of high-level government advisers, crowded around a picnic table near the UC Berkeley campus, talking about Cambridge Analytica and Russian involvement in the U.S. presidential election—all while weed-smoking, backpack-wearing students strolled past.
I got right to the point, warning the Americans about Cambridge Analytica’s likely involvement in Russian interference. “We know that there are individuals working on Trump’s campaign who have ties to foreign intelligence services,” I said. “They have built up a massive social media database which is being deployed on American voters.”
I detailed Cambridge Analytica’s Russia connections and described the presentation Nix had made to Lukoil. I told them about the company’s work to undermine people’s confidence in the electoral process.
Their reply was…ho-hum. One of the Americans said they couldn’t do much, for fear of being accused of using the weight of the federal government to influence a vote. (I distinctly remember the phrase “move the dial.”) The Obama group seemed extremely concerned about not tainting what they believed was a near-certain Clinton win. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time, the rumor was that, after his inevitable loss, Trump intended to launch Trump TV as a rival to Fox News. He was also expected to claim that the election had been rigged—that the deep state had influenced it, or Clinton had cheated, or both. Worried that Trump would use any irregularity to delegitimize the election, the Obama administration wanted to make sure it gave him nothing concrete to complain about.
When the White House guys told me about Trump TV, it made sense. I figured they knew what they were doing—and, after all, this was happening in their country, not mine. We all shook hands and went our separate ways. And this response was not unique. In early 2016, senior Facebook executives had identified that Russian hackers had probed the platform for individuals connected to the presidential campaigns, but chose not to warn the public or the authorities, as it would cause reputational issues for the company. (Facebook first publicly outlined the extent of the Russian information operations on its platform in September 2017, more than a year after it first identified the issue, and seven months after beginning to investigate what was called a “five-alarm fire” of disinformation spreading on its site.) Ultimately, between the Democrats’ indifference to the threat and Silicon Valley’s inability to understand how to solve a problem without creating another “Uber of X,” my efforts to warn the Americans went nowhere. When you try to sound an alarm and people keep telling you “Don’t worry about it” or “Don’t rock the boat,” you start to wonder if maybe you’re overreacting. I wasn’t in the Clinton campaign or in the White House. I was just a guy in Canada, shouting into the wind.
The unfunny punch line, of course, is that, following the supreme reluctance of the Clinton and Obama teams to “interfere” in the election, FBI director James Comey would sashay in and blow everything out of the water with his eleventh-hour decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation. At that point, back in Canada, I felt like I was watching a self-destructive friend finally tip over the edge. You can only stand there in horror, thinking, I tried to tell you! But in this case, the friend wasn’t just burning down his own house. He was burning down the whole neighborhood.
IN LATE AUGUST, Senator Harry Reid publicly urged the FBI to investigate Russian interference in the election. But at that time, most people still thought the race was Clinton’s to lose. At the same time, Cambridge Analytica officially announced that it was working with the Trump campaign. This put nerves on edge in Ottawa, because I had been clear about the power and reach of Cambridge Analytica’s data. The firm’s work on behalf of Trump was worrying enough, but when you added the Russian connections into the equation, the whole situation seemed very alarming.
The possibility of a Trump win was the talk of Trudeau’s office, though it was still mostly a laughing matter. On a scale of unimaginable to unthinkable to terrifying, just how unimaginable was it? We had one meeting where a couple of people were making fun of Trump. God, these Americans! They outdo themselves every time! And everybody laughed. Well, almost everyone. I wasn’t laughing, because I understood the power of psychological warfare at scale.
The Germans have an expression called Mauer im Kopf, which translates roughly as “the wall in the mind.” After the East and the West reunified in 1990, the legal border between the two Germanys was dissolved. The checkpoints disappeared, the barbed wire was ripped away, and the Berlin Wall was finally taken down. But even fifteen years after reunification, many Germans still overestimated the distances between cities in the East and the West. There was, it seems, a lingering psychological distance that betrayed the nation’s geography, creating a virtual border in people’s minds. Although that wall of concrete and steel had long since crumbled, its shadow lived on, etched into the psyches of the German people. When this new candidate came out of nowhere, demanding that America build the wall, I knew that this was not a literal demand. Democrats and Republicans alike seemed at a loss for how to react to such an absurd campaign platform. But, unlike this new dark horse, they could not peer into what was happening in the minds of America. They could not see that those people were not merely demanding a physical wall. It was not about building a literal wall—the very idea of the wall itself was enough to begin to achieve Bannon’s aims. They were demanding the creation of America’s very own Mauer im Kopf.
Alan wasn’t laughing, either. In one meeting he said, “I actually think Trump can win.” People looked at him and rolled their eyes, and someone said, “Come on.” Then he looked at me, and I said, “Yeah, I think he can win, too.” That was the moment when I truly grasped, to my utter horror, that the tools I had helped build might play a pivotal role in making Donald Trump the next president of the United States.
A couple of weeks later, a letter from Facebook arrived at my parents’ house. How Facebook got their address, I had no idea. My mother forwarded the letter to me. It had been sent by a law firm Facebook had hired, Perkins Coie, which was the same firm that the Clinton campaign was using to fund the private investigation into what later became the Trump-Russia dossier. Facebook’s lawyers sought to confirm that the data Cambridge Analytica had obtained was used only for academic purposes, and that it had been deleted. Now that Cambridge Analytica was officially working on the Trump campaign, Facebook had apparently decided it would be bad optics to have millions of its users’ personal profiles raided for political gain, not to mention Cambridge Analytica’s astonishing commercial enrichment. The letter made no mention of using company data to turn the world inside out. And, of course, the letter was preposterous, a feeble gesture, because Facebook had given the data-harvesting application used by Cambridge Analytica express permission to use the data for non-academic purposes—a request I had made specifically to the company while working with Kogan. I was even more confused at Facebook’s feigned pearl-clutching reaction, as in or around November 2015 Facebook hired Kogan’s business partner Joseph Chancellor to work as a “quantitative researcher.” According to Kogan, Facebook’s decision to hire Chancellor came after the company was told about the personality profiling project. Later, when the story became public, Facebook played the role of shocked victim. But what it did not make clear was that it was content to hire someone who had actually worked with Kogan. However, in a statement Facebook later said, “The work that he did previously has no bearing on the work that he does at Facebook.”
There was no way Cambridge Analytica had deleted the Facebook data, of course. But I had left the firm more than a year earlier, and had been sued by them, and wanted absolutely no part of speaking for them. I replied, saying that I no longer had the data in question, but I had no idea where the data was, who else got ahold of it, or what Cambridge Analytica was doing with it—and neither did Facebook. But I was paranoid enough about being connected to Cambridge Analytica in any way that, instead of just popping the letter into the outgoing mail from the Canadian Parliament, I walked downtown to mail it. I didn’t want the taint of Cambridge Analytica anywhere near my work for Trudeau.
On September 22, 2016, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Adam Schiff released a statement saying that Russia was attempting to undermine the election. And in the first presidential debate, on September 26, Hillary Clinton sounded the alarm. “I know Donald is very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin,” she said. Putin had “let loose cyber attackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee. And we recently have learned that this is one of their preferred methods of trying to wreak havoc and collect information.”
“I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC,” Trump responded. “She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China, could also be lots of other people. It also could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?”
On October 7, less than an hour after the Access Hollywood tape of Trump saying “grab ’em by the pussy” became public, WikiLeaks began publishing emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. They would continue to release emails, bit by bit, until Election Day, and the fallout for the Democrats was disastrous. Scandals erupted over details of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street, among other revelations, and the lunatic fringe of the alt-right used the emails to fuel the deranged theory that the Clinton campaign, at the highest levels, was involved in a child sex ring being run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. My mind kept returning to the connections among Cambridge Analytica, the Russian government, and Assange. Cambridge Analytica seemed to have its dirty hands in every dirty part of this campaign.
ON THE NIGHT OF the election, I was at a watch party in Vancouver. We had CNN on one giant screen, and other news channels on smaller screens, and at the same time I was on the phone with Alistair Carmichael, the MP from the Shetlands, whom I’d grown close to during my time in London. I was getting the U.S., Canadian, and British reactions in real time as the numbers started looking more and more dire for Clinton. The moment CNN projected Trump as the winner, a shocked pall fell over the room.
My phone started buzzing with text messages from people who knew about my work with Cambridge Analytica. Some bewildered supporters at Hillary Clinton’s victory party began directing their anger toward me. I don’t recall many of the specifics, just an overwhelming tone of rage and despair. There is one comment I do remember, though, because it cut me to the bone. A Democrat I was friendly with wrote, “This may have been just a game to you. But we are the ones who have to live with it.”
That night and the day after, Trudeau’s advisers were in meltdown, because everything they thought they knew about the elephant to the south had suddenly changed. Was Trump going to cancel NAFTA? Would there be riots? Was Trump a plant for the Russians—an actual Manchurian candidate? People were desperate for answers, and because I was the only guy who knew anything about Steve Bannon, who was now in a position of immense power, they kept asking me what was going to happen. They wanted advice on how to deal with these new alt-right advisers whom they would soon be negotiating with on issues of massive national (and international) importance. All I could think was: Holy fuck. The man I’d met in a hotel room in Cambridge three years earlier now had the ear of the future president of the United States.
When Carmichael called me the day after the election, it was a relief to hear his calming Scottish brogue. “Let’s think carefully about what you’re going to do,” he said. Over the years, I had confided everything about Cambridge Analytica to Carmichael, who was one of the few people in the world I trusted completely. He knew me well enough to understand that I was unlikely to be able to sit by while Trump and Bannon took control after a tainted election. The stakes had been raised exponentially. The ridiculous reality TV star was no longer just a shameless rabble-rouser. He was going to be the leader of the free world.
Throughout November and December, I contemplated what I might say, and to whom I might say it. Trump’s election still didn’t seem real, because Obama remained president. It was as if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen after January 20.
Before the election, friends in the Democratic Party had offered to help get me tickets to Clinton’s inaugural ball. But instead of flying to D.C. to party with deliriously happy Democrats, I watched the sparsely attended Trump inauguration on CNN. And that was when I saw something that was almost hard to believe. There they were: Bannon, looking like a windswept gremlin. Kellyanne Conway, whom I’d met through the Mercers, in full Revolutionary War cosplay. Rebekah Mercer, wearing a fur-lined overcoat and Hollywood-starlet sunglasses. And then I remembered what Nix had said to me a couple of years earlier, at the restaurant where I told him I was quitting Cambridge Analytica. “You’re only going to understand it when we’re all sitting in the White House,” he’d said. “Every one of us, except for you.” Well, Nix wasn’t in Washington, but the rest of them certainly were.
That January, Bannon was appointed to the National Security Council. Now Carmichael’s warning for me to “be careful” seemed even more apt, as Bannon had the levers of the entire American intelligence and security apparatus at his disposal. If I pissed Bannon off, either by whistleblowing or through some other provocation, he had the capacity to destroy my life.
Just as worrisome, Bannon was in a position to help arrange for Cambridge Analytica to get contracts with the U.S. government. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, was already working on projects for the U.S. State Department. This meant that CA could access the U.S. government’s data, and vice versa. To my horror, I realized that Bannon could be creating his own private intelligence apparatus. And he was doing it for an administration that didn’t trust the CIA, the FBI, or the NSA. It felt like I was living in a nightmare. Worse, it felt like Richard Nixon’s wet dream. Just imagine if Nixon had had access to that kind of intimate, granular data on every single American citizen. He wouldn’t have just fucked rats, he would have fucked the whole Constitution.
Government entities normally need a warrant to collect people’s private data. But because Cambridge Analytica was a private company, it wasn’t subject to that check on its power. I started to recall the meetings with Palantir employees, and why some of them were so excited by Cambridge Analytica. There was no privacy law in the United States to stop Cambridge Analytica from collecting as much Facebook data as it could. I realized that a privatized intelligence unit would allow Bannon to bypass the limited protections Americans had from federal intelligence agencies. It occurred to me that the deep state wasn’t just another alt-right narrative; it was Bannon’s self-fulfilling prophecy. He wanted to become the deep state.