14 new york | august 19–september 1, 2019
like Manafort and Bannon and Cohen, he
was going to spend the next few months liv-
ing on the other side of the Mueller-report
bell jar. That is, inside it.
It had been a wild year. On his best days,
his least bitter ones, he talked about how he
hoped his cooperation might help the coun-
try, even as he feared it was all for nothing or
was—to borrow the words of the
president—a “witch hunt.” “If my life’s gonna
be destroyed,” he told me once, “I’d rather
have some role bringing down a piece-of-
shit president. I mean, if this process does
part of what it’s supposed to do, then it
would almost make the course worthwhile.
I won’t even say worthwhile, but easier to
take. I mean, our country is suffering. If
you’re not suffering and the country is suf-
fering, you’re not very patriotic, are you?”
As they were leaving his house, one of
the FBI agents handed Patten something.
It was a subpoena.T
here were all these differ-
ent threads,” Patten said. “I was
sort of thinking, at that point,
How does this look? That was
what I was worried about. I was
pretty sure all along that the Russia thing
was bullshit ... The whole thing was being
artificially puffed up. So in that context,
I was self-aware enough to be nervous
about where I was. ”
Where exactly was Sam Patten—and
who was he? He had worked in politics con-
sistently since his 20s, when he got a job
with Susan Collins, the United States sena-
tor from his home state of Maine, but most
of his work had been on the fringes over-
seas. He was part of a new generation of
American lobbyists for hire, decamping to
the Wild West of other nations to impart
the good word of democracy and, crucially,
to make out like bandits. He’d been associ-
ated with Cambridge Analytica, the con-
sulting firm founded by Bannon and Rob-
ert Mercer, ever since he met its CEO,
Alexander Nix, at Off the Record, the base-
ment bar at the Hay-Adams hotel, in 2014.
Cambridge brought him to Oregon, where
he worked on behalf of a senatorial candi-
date accused of stalking; to Mexico, where
“the whole thing was a mess,” Patten says,
and nobody got paid; and to Nigeria, where
he worked in a presidential election on
behalf of the incumbent, Goodluck Jona-
than, and where a whistle-blower would
later allege that Cambridge was responsible
for a violent, Islamophobic video that tar-
geted Jonathan’s Muslim opponent (though
not effectively enough, since Muhammadu
Buhari won anyway).
He didn’t seem to know much about, or
have involvement in, the firm’s data-targeting practices. The work he per-
formed was more standard: analysis,
speech writing, ads, attempts to sway the
media. Domestic work was a bore, as he
saw it. It was basic. The reason Patten
admired Manafort and those of his ilk was
that Manafort wasn’t just parachuting into
a place and behaving as if whatever advice
he could offer the local players was gospel
because of who he was; he became a part
of the places where he worked. Patten
aspired to be like that too.
“Most of the time, he’s got good ideas.
Occasionally, he’ll have really left-field
ideas,” Perry Willoughby-Brown, a political
operative who worked with Patten at Cam-
bridge Analytica, told me. “He had an idea
that we should try to start a rumor. In Nige-
ria, there are a lot of behind-the-scenes
people who direct politics. And Sam said we
should start a rumor that one guy
demanded the other guy shine his shoes
and they got into a fight. And then the other
guy did eventually shine his shoes and left
in a huff about it. He wrote a blog about it,
and he tried to push that a bit on social
media.” In the end, Willoughby-Brown said,
“it never really went anywhere.”
But it wasn’t just Cambridge Ana-
lytica. There was also Ukraine. Patten
had first traveled there to aid the pro-
Western president Viktor Yushchenko in
the 2007 Verkhovna Rada elections. An
old friend he’d met once in Moscow,
Konstantin Kilimnik, was working there
too—for the opposition, Viktor Yanu-
kovych—with an American lobbyist
named Paul Manafort, whose reputation
preceded him. Among the consultant
class, Manafort was by then the stuff of
legend, though Patten said he’d never
encountered the guy.
He and Kilimnik didn’t interact much
during the race, Patten says. They met
once in Kiev to catch up over lunch.
Harmless activity, by the standards of
U.S. campaign operatives, whose militant
loyalties are more often to opportunity
than to ideology. But politics was more
gangland than greenroom in Ukraine,
and the friends had been tailed by state
intelligence services, who narked on Pat-
ten to his boss. He was banned from fur-
ther contact with the competition.
Seven years later, at Kilimnik’s invitation,
Patten came back to Kiev to play for the
other team, or what remained of it.
Manafort had been hired by Serhiy Lyo-
vochkin—a former top aide to Yanukovych,
who by then had fled to exile in Russia—
ahead of the parliamentary elections.
Although Patten did share an office with
Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, he
said he wasn’t reporting to Manafort andaffection, so when her barking continued—
loud, urgent, insistent—it was enough to
draw Patten back upstairs.
By the time he made it to the living
room, the FBI agents were already there,
arguing with his wife, Laura Patten. The
intruders were no strangers to her; she
says she spent the last handful of years in
her two-decade career in national security
detailed to the agency. “When you’ve
devoted the bulk of your adult life to pro-
tecting U.S. national security and interests,
it is a very surreal experience to have the
FBI show up at your house,” she told me.
“They were going back and forth about
what they were here for,” Sam said. “And
I came up holding my cell phone and they
were like, ‘That!’ ”
The agents informed Sam that they’d
be taking it. “And I said, ‘You’re not taking
it until we call the lawyer,’ ” Laura remem-
bered. But the agents produced a warrant,
leaving the Pattens with few civil options.
Sam handed over the device and told the
agents the password. They tried to engage
him in conversation about its origin. He
scrunched up his face as he recalled this—
“What’s my thinking of coming up with my
password?”—as if they wanted the name of
his elementary school and the last four dig-
its of his Social Security number. He told
them, “I’d prefer not to say,” then asked if
they wanted some coffee. One of the agents
responded, “I’d prefer not to say.” Sam
rolled his eyes. To me, he said, “You know,
he was being a dick.”
“And one guy was just being a dick,”
Laura said, “and we asked—” Sam cut in,
“They removed him.” The agent had been
“argumentative” with Laura, they agreed,
especially when she asked about the nature
of the investigation. “He got all pissed off,”
Sam said. He called Laura “a contractor,”
when in fact she was “a 17-year blue- badger.”
That’s what made her mad. “I know that’s
ego,” she admitted. “That’s not rational.”
Never before had Patten really thought
of himself as the kind of person who would
end up center stage for literally the world’s
biggest and most obsessively monitored
political scandal—though given its arms
in espionage and business and tech and
law enforcement and real estate, it didn’t
exactly seem adequate to call “the Russia
story” just a political scandal. In a certain
way, Patten was a weird fit next to people
like Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon and
Michael Cohen, swaggering cartoons of
self- promoting influence so ridiculous
you almost can’t believe they’re real. Pat-
ten was sort of ridiculous too (not that he
could see that), a shady bit player and a
professional Zelig who kept popping up at
the wrong place and the wrong time. And,
intelligencer