30 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY JUNE 2018
CLOAK AND DATAwas more in line with the political dirty tricks he and his
colleagues would later discuss with Channel 4’s under-
cover reporter. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange had recently
told a British TV station that he had come into possession
of internal emails belonging to senior Clinton campaign
oicials—the result of a cyberattack later revealed to be
the work of Russian hackers. Nix reached out to Assange
via his speaking agency, seeking a meeting. Nix reportedly
hoped to get access to the emails and help Assange share
them with the public—that is, he wanted to weaponize
the information. According to both Nix and Assange, the
WikiLeaks founder passed on his offer.
Nevertheless, by late June Nix had landed a contract with
the Trump team. At first, a handful of Cambridge employ-
ees set up shop in San Antonio, where Parscale was running
Trump’s digital operation out of his marketing firm’s oices.
But Matt Oczkowski, Cambridge’s head of product, was
eventually put in charge of the San Antonio oice after Par-
scale relocated to campaign headquarters in Trump Tower.
What exactly Cambridge Analytica did for Trump re-
mains murky, though in the days after the election, Nix’s
firm blasted out one press release after another touting the
“integral” and “pivotal” role it played in Trump’s shocking
upset. Nix later told Channel 4’s undercover reporter that
Cambridge deserved much of the credit for Trump’s win.
“We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all
the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the televi-
sion campaign, and our data informed all the strategy,” he
said. Another Cambridge executive suggested the firm had
delivered Trump victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin—states crucial to his ultimate win. “When you
think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular
vote by 3 million votes but won the Electoral College vote,
that’s down to the data and the research.”
Cambridge helped run an anti-Hillary Clinton online
ad campaign for a Mercer-funded super-pac that paid the
company $1.2 million. The ads stated that Clinton “might
be the first president to go to jail” and echoed conspir-
acy theories about her health. But according to multiple
Republican sources familiar with Cambridge’s work for
Trump, the firm played at best a minor role in Trump’s
victory. Parscale has said that $5 million of the $5.9 million
the Trump campaign paid Cambridge was for a large TV
ad buy. When Cambridge bungled that—some of the ads
wound up running in the District of Columbia, a total waste
of money—the firm was not used for future ad buys. During
an interview with 60 Minutes last fall, Parscale dismissed
the company’s psychographic methods: “I just don’t think
it works.” Trump’s secret strategy, he said, wasn’t secret at
all: The campaign went all-in on Facebook, making full use
of the platform’s advertising tools. “Donald Trump won,”
Parscale said, “but I think Facebook was the method.”
Nix, however, seemed determined to capitalize on
Trump’s victory. Cambridge opened a new oice a few
blocks from the White House, where Bannon would soon
take on his new role as Trump’s chief political strategist.
(Bannon retained his stake in the firm, valued between$1 million and $5 million, until April 2017, months after
Trump took oice.) scl, its UK-based ailiate, eventu-
ally relocated its global headquarters from London to
Arlington, Virginia, and began chasing government work,
quickly landing a $500,000 State Department contract
to monitor the impact of foreign propaganda. scl briefly
signed on Lt. General Michael Flynn as an adviser and
later hired a former Flynn associate to run its DC oice.
But even as Nix jetted around the globe and Cambridge
opened new oices in Brazil and Malaysia, the company
found itself with few allies in the United States. Trump
campaign alums and Republican Party staffers distanced
themselves from the company—especially after news broke
last October that Nix had communicated with Assange.
“We were proud to have worked with the rnc and its data
experts and relied on them as our main source for data an-
alytics,” Michael Glassner, the Trump campaign’s executive
director, said in a statement released in response to these
reports. “Any claims that voter data from any other source
played a key role in the victory are false.”
By late 2017, after giving every indication that Cam-
bridge Analytica intended to be a major player in American
politics, Nix told Forbes the firm was no longer “chasing any
US political business,” a decision he framed as a strategic
move. “There’s going to be literally dozens and dozens of
political firms [working in 2018], and we thought that’s a
lot of mouths to feed and very little food on the table.” This
seemed dubious—working on a winning presidential race
is a golden ticket that most consultants would dine out
on for years. In reality, Cambridge Analytica’s reputation
for spotty work had circulated widely among Democratic
and Republican operatives, who were also put off by Nix’s
grandstanding and self-promotion. Mark Jablonowski,
a partner at the firm DSPolitical, told me that there was
“basically a de facto blacklist” of the firm and “a consen-
sus Cambridge Analytica had overhyped their supposed
accomplishments.” Perhaps even worse for a company
that had relied on its billionaire patrons to open doors to
new clients, the Mercers ceased “flogging for” Cambridge,
according to Doug Watts, the former Ben Carson staffer.
For any upstart company, this would have constituted a
crisis. But being shunned from the American political scene,
it turned out, was just the start of Cambridge’s problems.- “I AM AWARE HOW THIS LOOKS”
Nix was near his London oice when a Channel 4 corre-
spondent confronted him. “Have you ever used entrapment
in the past?” the reporter asked, thrusting a microphone in
Nix’s face. “Is it time for you to abandon your political work?”
Captured on tape musing about entrapment and spread-
ing untraceable propaganda, accused of misappropriat-
ing Facebook data to meddle with the minds of American
voters—by March 20, scandal had reached Nix’s doorstep.
He brushed past the reporter and into his building.
“I am aware how this looks,” Nix said in a statement. He
explained that the explosive comments he and his colleagues
had made to an undercover reporter (continued on page 68)