President Donald Trump’s former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer sat down with special counsel Robert Mueller for an extensive interview on Monday. During the interview, Spicer and Mueller discussed the firing of FBI Director James Comey, as well as Trump’s meetings with Russian officials and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office, according to a Politico report citing sources familiar with the meeting.
Spicer’s meeting signals that Mueller is increasing the number of interviews with former and current members of the Trump administration. A report by The Washington Post in September found that he was expecting to interview six White House advisers, including communications director Hope Hicks and former chief of staff Reince Priebus.
In fact, Priebus was interviewed last Friday, as the Mueller team considers him important because he was part of Trump’s conversations on firing Comey and meetings with Russian officials. Other White House aides reportedly on the list of possible interviews include White House counsel Don McGahn, communications adviser Josh Raffel and associate counsel James Burnham. The overall investigation intends to shed light on whether Russia meddled in the 2016 elections and colluded with Trump.
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Even though Trump hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, for now, his allies fear the president could face impeachment if Republicans lose the House next year. While it is too soon to predict Trump’s ouster, here are some key elements of the Mueller investigation so far:

• May 17: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to spearhead the Russia probe.
• June 16: Mueller began investigating Jared Kushner’s finances.
• July 15-16: Mueller reportedly asked for the name of the person who represented two Russians with connections to Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 during a 2016 meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr.
• July 25: Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, had his house raided by the FBI under Mueller’s inquiry, The New York Times reported. Authorities found binders and other documents that could lead to possible secret offshore bank accounts opened by Manafort.
• August 1: Mueller appointed former U.S. Justice Department official Greg Andres, who then became the 16^th lawyer on the team.

• August 3: Mueller named a “grand jury,” signaling that a larger investigation was underway.
• August 31: Mueller reportedly teamed up with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to investigate Manafort.
• September 15:  Mueller obtained a search warrant for Facebook accounts linked to Russian operatives that aimed to influence the 2016 presidential election. Experts called the warrant a “turning point” in the investigation.
• September 26: Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut announces that Manafort and Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn could face criminal charges as part of Mueller’s investigation.
• September 28: Ivanka Trump and Kushner’s private email domains face investigation, as well as batches of emails from White House senior aides. The investigation, conducted by the White House, hopes to find anything relevant to Mueller’s Russia probe.
• October 13: Mueller interviewed Priebus.
• October 17: Mueller sat down with Spicer.

Vladimir Putin. Adam Berry/Getty Images

• A person who worked for the Russian “troll farm” Internet Research Agency discussed the organization with the independent Russian news outlet Dozhd.
• The secretive factory had several components, including a “Russian desk,” a “foreign desk,” a “Facebook desk,” and a “Department of Provocations,” according to the former troll, who went by the name “Maxim.”
• The Russian desk operated bots and trolls that used fake social-media accounts to flood the internet with pro-Trump messages and made-up news.
• The foreign desk was more sophisticated, with trolls required to learn the nuances of American politics to best “rock the boat” on divisive issues.
• “Our task was to set Americans against their own government,” Maxim said, “to provoke unrest and discontent.”

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Recently revealed details about how an infamous Russian “troll farm” operated and its role in Russia’s disinformation campaign shed new light on Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential race.
One former troll, who was interviewed by the independent Russian news outlet Dozhd and went by “Maxim,” or Max, spoke of his experience working for the Internet Research Agency, a well-researched Russian company in St. Petersburg whose function is to spread pro-Russian propaganda and sow political discord in nations perceived as hostile to Russia.
The secretive firm is bankrolled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, CNN reported, a Russian oligarch who is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.
Up to a third of the company’s staff was tasked with interfering in US political conversation during the 2016 election, according to an investigation conducted by the Russian news agency RBC and detailed by another Russian news outlet, Meduza.
The Internet Research Agency, Max told Dozhd, consisted of a “Russian desk” and a “foreign desk.” The Russian desk, which was primarily made up of bots and trolls, used fake social-media accounts to flood the internet with pro-Trump agitprop and made-up news throughout the US presidential campaign, especially in the days leading up to the November election.
The foreign desk had a more sophisticated purpose, according to Max, who worked in that department. “It’s not just writing ‘Obama is a monkey’ and ‘Putin is great.’ They’ll even fine you for that kind of [primitive] stuff,” he told Dozhd. In fact, those who worked for the foreign desk were restricted from spreading pro-Russia propaganda. Rather, Max said, their job was more qualitative and was geared toward understanding the “nuances” of American politics to “rock the boat” on divisive issues like gun control and LGBT rights.
“Our goal wasn’t to turn the Americans toward Russia,” he added. “Our task was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent, and to lower Obama’s support ratings.”
An entire department, the “Department of Provocations,” was dedicated to that goal: Its primary objective was to disseminate fake news and sow discord in the West, according to CNN.
The troll farm also had its own “Facebook desk,” whose function was to relentlessly push back against the platform’s administrators who deleted fake accounts as they began gaining traction. When Internet Research Agency employees argued against having their accounts deleted, Max said, Facebook staffers would write back, “You are trolls.” The trolls would in turn invoke the First Amendment right to free speech — occasionally, they won the arguments.
Facebook is now at the center of congressional and FBI investigations that are examining the extent to which Russia used social-media platforms to influence American political opinion.
Facebook has turned over more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads to Congress. RBC’s investigation found that in 2016 Russia’s propaganda network on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter could have reached 30 million people a week, and a Columbia University social-media analyst published research that found that Russian propaganda may have been shared billions of times on Facebook alone.
In addition to spreading fake news, Russian Facebook accounts went one step further by organizing events, rallies, and protests, some of which galvanized dozens of people. To be sure, RBC found that the Internet Research Agency hired 100 American activists over the internet to hold 40 rallies across different US cities. Those people did not know they were working for a Russian organization, according to the investigation.

The vice chair of the Senate committee investigating Russian meddling in the US election said he was concerned about new revelations that a St. Petersburg troll farm had sent operatives to the US and linked up with activists here.
Sen. Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee was previously unaware of the report by Russian news outlet TV Rain, which said the Internet Research Agency, a so-called troll farm based in St. Petersburg, had a “secret department” that deployed operatives to the US.
“I’d really like to look at it,” Warner said of the report, adding that he’d been concerned “for some time” that the St. Petersburg troll farm was not the only one buying ads and running social media campaigns to try to influence the outcome of elections in foreign countries.
“I believe there are more in Russia and in countries that there may have been Russian-influenced activities in, some of the Eastern European countries,” Warner told reporters on Capitol Hill. “I’m not saying they were all directed necessarily to the United States, but this is why we need this kind of thorough review from the platform companies to really dig in this the same way that we dig in on … a profit-making venture.”
The Internet Research Agency has for years operated as a troll farm, where employees create multiple online characters both to shape public opinion online and to exacerbate political tensions around the world. At the prodding of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian attempts to influence the US election, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have admitted that the agency purchased political ads.
Many of the ads purchased by the St. Petersburg troll farm weren’t explicitly political, but encouraged American users to “like” a page — which meant they would be more likely to see divisive, Russian-made political content in their Facebook feed, according to a source familiar with the ads.
The TV Rain report, citing a former employee using the pseudonym Maxim, is the first time allegations have emerged that the troll farm dispatched operatives to the US. What those employees were assigned to do was not detailed in the report.
The FBI declined to comment on whether it was investigating the report.
A second report, published Tuesday, by Russian outlet RBC details further efforts by the St. Petersburg troll farm’s “American department” to influence opinion in the US, including linking up with activists in order to encourage protests.
The Internet Research Agency is technically a private company, though it’s been linked to the Kremlin and its employees consistently spread pro-Kremlin messages. The Russian government historically maintains a cloak of plausible deniability by outsourcing sensitive operations to private entities. President Vladimir Putin, for instance, referred to “patriotic hackers” when asked about Russian hackers who targeted Democrats in the 2016 election — an operation that major US intelligence agencies agree was ordered by Putin himself.
Warner described the ads and the fake social media accounts as parts of the same influence campaign. “The story in many ways is if the ads are pushing you to a page or to a group, and then you have lots of fake accounts who are then pushing others to try to have that page or that group trend higher, that then attracts a lot of other viewers,” he told BuzzFeed News.
“The ads and the fake accounts work in tandem to generate higher placement,” he said.
Facebook has acknowledged that it’s uncovered evidence that the IRA purchased about $150,000 on political ads targeting Americans. When asked if other affiliates of the Russian government had purchased political ads for the US election, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to an official blog post on the investigation, which admits “It’s possible” others bought ads, and “our internal investigation continues.”
Warner said he believes the St. Petersburg troll farm and others may have had far more influence than social media companies in the US have acknowledged to date. He made a reference to Facebook’s response to meddling in recent elections there to make his point.
“In the French elections, if there were 50,000 accounts that Facebook took down, it just still seems scale-wise [compared to the US], I think there’s more to do,” he said. Facebook has acknowledged taking down 470 accounts and pages it said were linked to the troll farm.
Collier reported from New York.

A notorious Russian internet “troll factory” spent about $2.3 million during the 2016 election cycle to meddle in US politics, paying the salaries of 90 “US desk” employees who helped wage disinformation campaigns via social media that reached millions of Americans. The operation also contacted US activists directly and offered them thousands of dollars to organize protests on divisive issues, including race relations.
These revelations and many more came out in an investigation published on Tuesday by the Russian newspaper RBC about the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a tech firm based in St. Petersburg, Russia, that has developed a specialty in spreading pro-Kremlin messages in the West.
The IRA has been written about before by a number of news outlets, and by RBC itself. But this latest piece from RBC—a respected business newspaper in Russia known for angering the Kremlin with its reporting on Putin’s associates—is the first to home in on the IRA’s operations during the 2016 US election.
RBC’s investigation reveals an unprecedented level of detail about the money and staffing that went into IRA’s US-influence operation. Here are some of the key data points:

• By the middle of 2015, as the US election was ramping up, the IRA’s staffing had increased to between 800 and 900 people. The organization had also shored up its arsenal of media tools to include “videos, infographics, memes, reporting, news, analytical materials,” and more.
• In spring 2015, a number of IRA staffers held an experiment to see if they could successfully organize a live event in the US from behind their computer screens in St. Petersburg. They did this by targeting New Yorkers on Facebook and attempting to lure them to a specific event where they would receive a free hot dog. There were no actual hot dogs, but enough people showed up at the specified location to make the agency deem the experiment a success. “From this day, almost a year and a half before the election of the US President,” writes RBC, “the ‘trolls’ began full-fledged work in American society.”
• Within the next year, the staff of the IRA’s “American Department” grew threefold, increasing to between 80 and 90 people—about one-tenth of the entire agency.
• Three former employees of the IRA told RBC that the head of the American Department is a 27-year-old Azerbaijani man named Dzeihun Aslan, a point also corroborated by an internal Telegram chat obtained by RBC. (Aslan denied any such involvement in conversation with RBC.)
• By RBC’s calculations, the American Department spent about $1 million annually on salaries. The lowest-level employees were paid about 55,000 rubles ($960) per month, but also received bonuses based on “the reactions of participants in communities” they were targeting.
• RBC identified 118 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts linked to the IRA’s meddling in US politics.
• In September 2016, at the height of the US election season, the American Department posted more than 1,000 pieces of content per week, reaching between 20 and 30 million people that month.
• A source close to the leaders of the IRA told RBC that most of the agency’s American content had less to do with supporting a specific candidate than with promoting volatile social issues that happened to dovetail with Trump’s rhetoric. “There was no directive to ‘support Trump,’” one source told RBC. “Direct connections were drawn between societal problems and the actions of the ruling party at that time [the Democrats]. Hillary [Clinton] is the party’s representative, which means she’s also to blame.”
• RBC analyzed hundreds of IRA posts and found that Clinton was mentioned in the posts much more often than Trump.
• The total budget for promoting political ads to American audiences came to about $5,000 a month, or about $120,000 from June 2015 to May 2017. About half of that was spent on content aimed at sowing racial divisions.
• The IRA spent about $80,000 to support 100 US activists who organized 40 different protests across the United States.

1. Podcasts in Russian from mikenova (7 sites): ХРОНИКА ДНЯ – Настоящее Время: Как работает “американский отдел” троллей из Ольгино. Главное из расследований РБК и “Дождя”

Как российские “тролли” пытались влиять на американскую политику  ХРОНИКА ДНЯ – Настоящее Время 1. Podcasts in Russian from mikenova (7 sites)

Italy, of course, is not alone in trying to find a way to grapple with the global proliferation of propaganda that has sown public confusion and undermined the credibility of powerful institutions.
Pope Francis recently announced that he would dedicate his 2018 World Communications Day address to the topic of fake news, and the United States Congress is investigating how Russian agents manipulated Facebook and Twitter to spread false stories and stoke conspiracy theories to sway the 2016 presidential election.
But ahead of crucial Italian elections early next year, the country has become an especially fertile ground for digital deceit. Frustrated by economic woes, upset by a migrant crisis and fed a steady diet of partisan media, many Italians subscribe to all kinds of conspiracy theories. It is what they call dietrologia, the belief that there is also always something dietro, or behind, the surface.
The Italian passion for seeing intrigue — whether or not it exists — around every corner runs deep, said Alessandro Campi, a professor of political science at Perugia University. “All of this is part of the Italian cultural heritage,” he said.
A history of scheming Borgia cardinals, waves of foreign domination, papal crackdowns and corrupt governments had imbued Italians with an abiding distrust in authority, Mr. Campi said.
In recent years, this background has helped erode the standing of traditional political parties while being expertly exploited by political upstarts, insurgents and outsiders, none more so than the surging Five Star Movement and its founder, Beppe Grillo.
“I’d say that the Five Star Movement believes more than any other political party in conspiracy theories,” said Mr. Campi, an editor of “Conspiracies and Plots — From Machiavelli to Beppe Grillo.”
“It’s not only a tactic,” Mr. Campi said of the movement, which has succeeded in attracting votes from the left and the right with an ideologically ambiguous form of populism. “It’s their political worldview.”
Nicola Biondo, a former chief of communications for the Five Star Movement, said that for the party, spreading conspiracies was akin to a policy.
“They use the term Great Powers, never specifying who those powers are,” said Mr. Biondo, who has recently written a book, “Supernova: How Five Star Was Killed,” with another party defector. “It is a mantra.”
Ms. Boldrini, sponsor of the new student curriculum, asserts that the web cannot be forfeited to the fringes, and that the government must teach the next generation of Italian voters how to defend themselves against falsehoods and conspiracy theories designed to play on their fears.
She said she had included Google and Facebook in the project in an acknowledgment that virtual space is where many young Italians live.
Nevertheless, she expressed skepticism in particular about Facebook’s commitment to reining in fake news and hate speech, and recognized the possibility that the Italian school project provided the embattled giant with a much-needed public relations boon.
Facebook was quick to applaud the program. Laura Bononcini, chief of public policy for Facebook in Italy, Greece and Malta, said on Tuesday that “the program is part of an international effort. Education and media literacy are a crucial part of our effort to curb the spread of false news, and collaboration with schools is pivotal.”
Ms. Boldrini also noted that Facebook was contributing by promoting the initiative through targeted ads to high-school-age users, and she said she hoped that the program, which aimed to show students how their “likes” were monetized and politicized, could become a “pilot program” for Facebook throughout Europe.
But some of the Italian course load seems unrealistic. While some tips are useful, such as keeping an eye out for parody URLs, students are also called upon to reach out to experts to verify news stories, essentially asking the students to re-report articles.
The program seeks to deputize students as fake-news hunters, showing them how to create their own blogs or social accounts to expose false stories and “showing how you uncovered it.”
In Italy, that gives them a lot of ground to cover.
For months here, conspiracy theorists who reject scientific consensus have connected vaccinations to medical conditions including autism in children, often blaming pharmaceutical companies as a dark force behind the medical practice. It was an issue that struck a nerve in Italy and played right into the wheelhouse of the Five Star Movement’s distrust of expertise and authority.
In May, amid a measles outbreak, Italy strengthened its vaccination requirements for school-age children, prompting so-called No-Vax activists to protest outside the Italian Parliament for the right to choose.
The vaccination opponents were especially strong in the Five Star Movement, whose leader, Mr. Grillo, once attacked vaccines as a scam by pharmaceutical companies with the intention of “weakening children’s immune systems.”
His wildly popular blog has alleged that some vaccines “can kill,” and websites, such as La Fucina, run by another party leader, Davide Casaleggio, have published anti-vaccine reports.
(In the past, other sites associated with Mr. Casaleggio or Mr. Grillo have also carried sensational reports by Russian-backed news outlets that were deemed false and damaging to the movement’s political enemies.)
“It’s what the pharmaceutical companies do, and it’s questionable,” said Paola Barile, 65, as she stood with a Five Star Movement flag wrapped around her shoulders at a protest last week in front of Parliament. “The spell has been broken for us also on vaccines.”
At the same rally, Five Star activists screamed “shame” and railed against the political parties, right and left, for joining forces to draft a new electoral law they considered (maybe correctly this time) designed to keep the movement out of power.
But the Five Star Movement is not the only political force to have profited from fake news, and students are not the only ones who can be deceived by it.
Last weekend, Gian Marco Centinaio, a senator from the Northern League, a right-leaning party, acknowledged that he had put on Facebook a post, subsequently shared 18,000 times, of a picture of a man identified as Ms. Boldrini’s brother, and complained how the news programs “don’t cover” the man’s no-show job that paid 47,000 euros, or more than $55,000, a month. The man in the image was not her brother and none of the allegations were true.
Mr. Centinaio called the post a joke and said, “People should be less credulous.”
A healthy dose of skepticism is exactly what the new Italian program hopes students will adopt.
“If people are prepared, educated on digital,” Ms. Boldrini said, “maybe they don’t fall for it.”
Continue reading the main story

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) -A former high-ranking FBI official in Honolulu is under fire after a local nonprofit accused him of stealing more than $33,000.
In a police statement filed last month, the nonprofit Hawaii LGBT Legacy Foundation said that between November 2016 and August 2017, 56-year-old Robert Kauffman wrote improper checks and made several unauthorized withdrawals from the foundation’s bank account.
Kauffman is a former assistant special agent-in-charge of the FBI’s Honolulu field office, and served with the bureau for more than 20 years where he investigated organized crime and espionage cases. He also served as the foundation’s treasurer.
“Several of these checks and bank account withdrawals were in excess of $3,000, which requires the approval of two board members,” attorney and foundation director David Brustein wrote.
“Robert did not have signatures or board approval,” Brustein added.
But Kauffman’s attorney, Myles Breiner, said his client is “innocent of any embezzlement,” and was safeguarding the money from being misspent.
He said Kauffman returned the money with a cashier’s check even before the foundation went to the police.
“Mr. Kauffman is innocent of any embezzlement. We believe that there was a disagreement over the handling of funds by the Legacy Foundation,” said Breiner.
“(He) was concerned about some of the decision being made about the costs and financing of various projects the foundation was endorsing.”
Kauffman is currently chief investigator for the state Judiciary’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which oversees attorney conduct.
He’s also listed as the CEO of The Wellness Group LLC, which unsuccessfully applied for a medical marijuana dispensary license. Among the Wellness Groups’ investors included foundation board members Brustein and Dr. David McEwan.
Brustein said Kauffman’s role at the two organizations are unrelated.
The Hawaii LGBT Legacy Foundation is a tax-exempt organization that supports causes for the gay, lesbian and transgendered people and is a big organizer of the Honolulu Pride festival happened throughout October.
The $33,000 is nearly half of the foundation’s annual revenues. Legal experts said allegations of theft or mismanagement can be financially exhausting for a nonprofit.
“It is more damaging, not only to the organization but the people who the organization was set up to assist,” said Hawaii Pacific University assistant professor Randal Lee, a retired Circuit Judge who has investigated hundreds of white-collar crime cases as a Honolulu deputy prosecutor.
Honolulu police are investigating and have turned over the case to its white-collar division. Kauffman plans to fight the allegations.
Copyright 2017 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.

But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated.
Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reportsthat cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.
“They’ve got a lot of really smart people,” said Brent Seaborn, managing partner of TargetPoint, a rival business that also provided voter data to the Trump campaign. “But it’s not as easy as it looks to transition from being excellent at one thing and bringing it into politics. I think there’s a big question about whether we think psychographic profiling even works.”
At stake are not merely bragging rights, but also an emerging science that many believe could reshape American politics and commerce. Big data companies already know your age, income, favorite cereal and when you last voted. But the company that can perfect psychological targeting could offer far more potent tools: the ability to manipulate behavior by understanding how someone thinks and what he or she fears.
A voter deemed neurotic might be shown a gun-rights commercial featuring burglars breaking into a home, rather than a defense of the Second Amendment; political ads warning of the dangers posed by the Islamic State could be targeted directly at voters prone to anxiety, rather than wasted on those identified as optimistic.
“You can do things that you would not have dreamt of before,” said Alexander Polonsky, chief data scientist at Bloom, a consulting firm that offers “emotion analysis” of social networks and has worked with the center-right Republican Party in France.
“It goes beyond sharing information,” he added. “It’s sharing the thinking and the feeling behind this information, and that’s extremely powerful.”
Both conservatives and liberals are eager to harness that power. In Washington, some Democratic operatives are scrambling to develop personality-profiling capabilities of their own. But even as Cambridge seeks to expand its business among conservative groups, questions about its performance have soured many Republicans in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
Cambridge is no longer in contention to work for Mr. Trump at the Republican National Committee, a company spokesman confirmed, nor is it working for America First Policies, a new nonprofit formed to help advance the president’s agenda.
In recent months, the value of Cambridge’s technology has been debated by technology experts and in some media accounts. But Cambridge officials, in recent interviews, defended the company’s record during the 2016 election, saying its data analysis helped Mr. Trump energize critical support in the Rust Belt. Mr. Nix said the firm had conducted tens of thousands of polls for Mr. Trump, helping guide his message and identify issues that mattered to voters.
But when asked to name a single race where the firm’s flagship product had been critical to victory, Mr. Nix declined.
“We bake a cake, it’s got 10 ingredients in it. Psychographics is one of them,” he said. “It’s very difficult to isolate exactly what the impact of that ingredient is.”

Drawn to America

Cambridge’s parent company, the London-based Strategic Communication Laboratories Group, has a long record of trying to understand and influence behavior. Founded in 1993 by a former British adman, the firm has worked for companies and candidates around the world, as well as for government and military clients. SCL has studied Pakistani jihadists for the British government and provided intelligence assessments for American defense contractors in Iran, Libya and Syria, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times.
“Their approach was seen as serious and focused,” said Mark Laity, chief of strategic communications at NATO’s military headquarters in Europe, who has taken part in NATO-affiliated conferences where SCL has made presentations.
In recent years, the company has moved to exploit the revolution in big data to predict human behavior more precisely, working with scientists from the Cambridge University Psychometrics Center. The United States represented a critical new market. Europe has strict privacy protections that limit the use of personal information, but America is more lightly regulated, allowing the sale of huge troves of consumer data to any company or candidate who can afford them.
In 2013, Cambridge Analytica was created as SCL’s American operation, and the two companies today share many of their roughly 200 employees, several top executives, and offices in New York and Washington.
To develop its profiling system, Cambridge conducts detailed psychological surveys — by phone and online — of tens of thousands of people, differentiating them by five traits, a model widely used by behavioral researchers.
Uniquely, the company claims to be able to extrapolate those findings to millions of other people it has not surveyed, assigning them one of 32 distinct personality types. Cambridge then blends those profiles with commercial data and voting histories, revealing “hidden voter trends and behavioral triggers,” according to a 2016 company brochure.
Those profiles, in turn, would allow campaigns to customize advertising, direct-mail slogans and door-knocking scripts, each calibrated to prod the targeted voter toward — or away from — a candidate.
The promise of psychometrics appealed to Mr. Mercer, a computer scientist who made a fortune helping to lead Renaissance Technologies, a Long Island-based hedge fund. Mr. Mercer and his daughter Rebekah presided over a growing political empire that included millions of dollars in contributions to conservative groups and a stake in Breitbart, whose nationalist and racially antagonistic content prefigured Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.
Mr. Mercer became Cambridge’s principal investor, according to two former employees. (Like several others interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing nondisclosure agreements and the threat of lawsuits.) Mr. Bannon, the family’s political guru, also advised the company and served as vice president of its board, according to Delaware public records.
Mr. Mercer has never spoken publicly about his policy views in depth, but his giving is eclectic: He has financed anti-Clinton documentaries, right-wing media watchdogs, libertarian think tanks and both Senator Ted Cruz, a religious conservative, and Mr. Trump, a thrice-married nationalist.
“The genius here is Bob, and the billionaire in this is Bob, and the person with the extreme views of how the world should be is Bob,” said David Magerman, a Renaissance research scientist who was recently suspended after criticizing his boss’s support for Mr. Trump.
In the run-up to the 2014 elections, Breitbart, under Mr. Bannon, set up a London office and made common cause with populist conservatives in Europe. But back in the United States, Cambridge was at first slow to land big accounts. It was rebuffed by the political network overseen by the billionaire conservative brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, to which the Mercers were major donors. Federal Election Commission records show that the firm had nine clients in House and Senate races that year, among them three “super PACs” partly financed by Mr. Mercer.
As the 2016 presidential campaign began, however, Cambridge landed a marquee political client: Mr. Cruz, the Texas senator. Mr. Mercer seeded a super PAC with $11 million to support him.
Cambridge had a talented salesman in Mr. Nix, an Eton-educated SCL director chosen to lead the American effort. Among colleagues, his skills at cajoling clients are legendary. At an office party at a London dog track in the summer of 2015, one young employee offered an affectionate toast.
“He is so smooth he’ll rub shoulders with politicians and their campaigns,” the employee joked, according to a video of the event posted on YouTube, “and, in their face, tell them he’s going to rip them off.”

‘Not About Tricking People’

But Cambridge’s psychographic models proved unreliable in the Cruz presidential campaign, according to Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, and another consultant involved in the campaign. In one early test, more than half the Oklahoma voters whom Cambridge had identified as Cruz supporters actually favored other candidates. The campaign stopped using Cambridge’s data entirely after the South Carolina primary.
“When they were hired, from the outset it didn’t strike me that they had a wide breadth of experience in the American political landscape,” Mr. Tyler said.
Ms. Mercer and Mr. Bannon were aggressive advocates for Cambridge. When the campaign disputed a $2.5 million invoice, they lit into Mr. Cruz’s senior campaign team during a conference call, according to the consultant. Cambridge Analytica, Ms. Mercer and Mr. Bannon claimed, was the only thing keeping Mr. Cruz afloat. (The company declined to comment on the exchange, as did a personal spokeswoman for Mr. Bannon and the Mercers.)
After the Cruz campaign flamed out, Mr. Nix persuaded Mr. Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, to try out the firm. Its data products were considered for Mr. Trump’s critical get-out-the-vote operation. But tests showed Cambridge’s data and models were slightly less effective than the existing Republican National Committee system, according to three former Trump campaign aides.
Mr. Bannon at one point agreed to expand the company’s role, according to the aides, authorizing Cambridge to oversee a $5 million purchase of television ads. But after some of them appeared on cable channels in Washington, D.C. — hardly an election battleground — Cambridge’s involvement in television targeting ended.
In postelection conversations with potential clients, Cambridge has promoted itself as the brains behind Mr. Trump’s upset victory. One brochure circulated to clients this year, which details Cambridge’s expertise in behavioral targeting, also calls the company’s “pivotal role” in electing Mr. Trump its “biggest success politically in the United States.”
Trump aides, though, said Cambridge had played a relatively modest role, providing personnel who worked alongside other analytics vendors on some early digital advertising and using conventional microtargeting techniques. Later in the campaign, Cambridge also helped set up Mr. Trump’s polling operation and build turnout models used to guide the candidate’s spending and travel schedule. None of those efforts involved psychographics.
In some recent public settings, Cambridge executives have acknowledged that. “I don’t want to break your heart; we actually didn’t do any psychographics with the Trump campaign,” Matt Oczkowski, Cambridge’s head of product, said at a postelection panel hosted by Google in December.
The firm’s claims about its client base have also shifted. As recently as October, the firm said it had 50 clients in the 2016 elections. But a company spokesman said federal elections records showing just a dozen were correct.
The spokesman also said neither Cambridge nor SCL had done any work, paid or unpaid, with the pro-“Brexit” Leave.eu campaign last year, although Mr. Nix once claimed that Cambridge had helped “supercharge” Leave.eu’s social media campaign. British authorities are now investigating the company’s exact role with Leave.eu and whether Cambridge’s techniques violated British and European privacy laws.
At a conference in Munich last month, Alexander Tayler, Cambridge’s chief data officer, dodged a question about whether Cambridge would work with far-right parties in European elections this year. He also played down the role of psychological profiling in the company’s work, much of which, Mr. Tayler suggested, is still based on traditional data analytics and marketing.
“It’s not about being sinister,” Mr. Tayler said. “It’s not about tricking people into voting for a candidate who they wouldn’t otherwise support. It’s just about making marketing more efficient.”

Looking to Expand

Even before the election, according to one former employee, Cambridge employees attended sessions about soliciting government business in the United States — where Mr. Trump now oversees the federal bureaucracy and Mr. Bannon is arguably the White House’s most powerful staff member. According to documents obtained by The Times, SCL is pursuing work for at least a dozen federal agencies, including the Commerce Department and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Mr. Bannon’s spokeswoman said he stepped down from the Cambridge board in August, when he joined the Trump campaign, and “has no financial involvement” with the firm currently. She declined to say whether Mr. Bannon previously held equity in the firm.
Late last month, SCL executives met with Pentagon officials who advise the Joint Chiefs of Staff on information warfare. A reference document submitted in advance of that meeting indicates that the company has worked as a subcontractor on roughly a dozen Pentagon projects, many of them “counter-radicalization” assessments in Pakistan and Yemen.
Such intelligence work is the bread and butter of SCL’s government contracting in other countries. And the firm’s experience in trying to influence Muslim sentiment abroad dovetails with Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon’s focus on combating the Islamic State.
The Washington Post reported last month that SCL had secured a contract for a similar program at the State Department and was seeking military and Homeland Security work.
In an email, a Joint Chiefs spokesman confirmed that the Pentagon meeting, first reported by BuzzFeed, had occurred, but said he could not elaborate on the discussions “in order to avoid any undue influence or unintended consequences.”
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At the moment, according to former employees, Cambridge has relatively few well-known corporate clients in the United States. Among them are ECI New York, a clothing company, and Goldline, which sells gold coins and markets heavily to listeners of conservative talk radio.
A spokesman for MasterCard declined to say if it would do business with Cambridge. The Yankees did not sign on.
But Mr. Nix appears to have bigger ambitions. “I think were are on the cusp of something enormous,” he said.
Data science is about to reshape marketing, Mr. Nix maintained, and the big advertising conglomerates would survive only by developing their own targeting technology — or acquiring companies like Cambridge.
“Those agencies that don’t adapt will die,” Mr. Nix said.
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