Cambridge Analytica and the Bad Boys of Brexit on the Trump Campaign
This article covers the activities of the controversial British data and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, and the self-titled “Bad Boys of Brexit,” on the 2016 Trump Campaign. It is the fifth and final entry to the series “Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, and the Bad Boys of Brexit on the 2016 Trump Campaign.”
While it is not necessary to read earlier entries, it is recommended.
Part one describes the mysterious father company of Cambridge Analytica, Strategic Communications Laboratories.
Part two describes the role right wing activist Steve Bannon and hedge fund manager Robert Mercer played in founding Cambridge Analytica.
Part three describes Cambridge Analytica’s connections to Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia prior to its work for the Trump Campaign.
Part four describes the many connections the “Bad Boys of Brexit” had with Russia, Wikileaks, and Cambridge Analytica.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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While the Brexit furor was reaching a climax in the United Kingdom, Cambridge Analytica was, and had been for some time, very much in the thick of the American presidential campaign.
Back in July of 2014, an American election lawyer from Rudy Giuliani’s law firm Bracewell & Giuliani had sent a memo to Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer and Alexander Nix warned that in order to stay compliant with American election law Nix would have to recuse himself “from substantive management” from their American races.
The extent to which he failed to do so, and the number of foreign nationals Cambridge Analytica had in the race, raise questions as to whether the firm violated American election laws.
Cambridge Analytica started working on Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in the fall of 2014.
At the time, Cruz was considered an outsider, disruptive candidate on the American far right and that was exactly what billionaire hedge fund manager and conservative activist Robert Mercer was looking for.
Read my description of the arch-conservative American hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and his work with Steve Bannon to found Cambridge Analytica, in part two of the series.
Mercer’s thinking had been influenced by a former Democratic Party pollster and operative named Patrick Caddell. He was fascinated by Caddell’s polling research that suggested the American public, driven by anger and resentment towards elites, wanted an outsider, populist candidate to go to Washington and blow up the system.
Both Steve Bannon and Roger Stone were also intrigued by the data.
Mercer was bowled over by the depth of the discontent in the country that Caddell’s research seemed to indicate.
“It was stunning,” Mercer said of the data. “The country was on the verge of an uprising against its leaders. I just fell over!”
The first man Mercer thought might fill that role was Ted Cruz.
Three weeks prior to Cambridge Analytica signing on with the Cruz campaign, Vincent Tchenguiz sold his shares of SCL Group, raising the possibility that SCL or the Cambridge Analytica team didn’t want his past involvement in the complex corporate structure around Cambridge Analytica to become public knowledge.
Read about Vincent Tchenguiz, a shareholder in Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, and his connections to Russia and Israeli intelligence, here.
After hiring Cambridge Analytica, which it ultimately paid $5.8 million between July 2015 and June 2016, Mercer poured $11 million into the Cruz campaign.
Cruz campaign staffers, including his director of research, analytics and digital, later claimed that Cambridge Analytica oversold its capabilities and failed to fulfill its promises to the campaign. As it belonged to Cruz’s number one donor, however, nothing could be done.
At Cambridge Analytica, on the other hand, CEO Alexander Nix told a very different story, both belittling the candidates they worked for behind their back as well as playing up the services the firm had provided them.
“We hated this guy,” Nix said of Cruz in a recording that later leaked. “He’s far right wing, he’s like, you know, fascist.”
Nix then went on to say that Cambridge Analytica’s use of data and psychographics had turned Cruz from “the most hated man in US politics” into one of the front runners in the race.
In the same recording, when asked about Cambridge Analytica’s role in Brexit, Nix replied, “We don’t talk about that,” after which, CA sales lead Brittany Kaiser says, “Oops — we won!”
Their boasts to have won Brexit and turned Ted Cruz from a despised candidate to a frontrunner aside, there appeared to be no force on Earth that could stop Donald Trump’s rise in the Republican primaries.
When Cruz contracted Cambridge Analytica to work on his campaign, he didn’t have them sign a non-compete agreement, so Alexander Nix was free to pursue other opportunities in America.
One of those candidates was Trump.
Steve Bannon had been introduced to Donald Trump back in 2011 by David Bossie, the head of the conservative group Citizens United. At the time, Trump was promoting the birther conspiracy theory and was considering running against the sitting President in the 2012 election.
Bannon met with Trump in Trump Tower to discuss a potential run against Obama. While Trump ultimately decided against it, he and Bannon stayed in contact and Breitbart provided Trump with positive coverage.
By the time Trump launched his campaign in June of 2015, Bannon noticed the remarkable energy Trump was generating and the vast, adoring crowds he attracted and began to wonder whether the reality television real estate magnate might be the one he and Mercer were waiting for.
Brittany Kaiser later told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Steve Bannon had pushed for Cambridge Analytica to meet with Trump and his team even before he announced his candidacy.
By May of 2015, there were internal discussions at Cambridge Analytica about the possibility of signing a commercial agreement with the Trump Organization to support its business interests.
In mid-September 2015, Alexander Nix and Brittany Kaiser traveled to Washington, DC to meet with Steve Bannon. During a meeting with Bannon at “the Embassy,” the nickname for the Robert Mercer-funded headquarters of Breitbart near Capitol Hill. During the meeting Bannon received a call from Donald Trump, who was then still in the early stages of his presidential run.
“When are you going to send me your English guys?” Trump asked Bannon.
A meeting was scheduled for Nix and Kaiser with then-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowky for the next morning.
In her memoir, Kaiser relates a remarkable interaction between herself and Alexander Nix on the train ride that evening frome Washington, DC to New York. According to Kaiser, Nix explained that Trump was only “technically” running for President, and what Trump was really doing was a promotional stunt to prepare the way for the launch of Trump TV.
“Alexander explained that of course the idea of Trump becoming president of the United States was ludicrous. The American people would never stand for it; the whole notion was as ridiculous as many people thought. Cruz or Rubio or someone else would likely win the nomination, and then lose to Hillary. Trump’s candidacy had always been a front for the enormous business venture, and CA was going to be there at the immaculate inception of that empire. We were going to be on the ground floor.”
Kaiser further claims Bannon had been involved in the conception of Trump TV and the funding was to come from the Mercer’s, all of whom hoped to use it to promote their unique brand of right wing politics.
Nix and Kaiser pitched Corey Lewandowsky at Trump Tower on the set of The Apprentice, which was then serving at the Trump campaign’s headquarters, the next morning, but it would still be months before Cambridge Analytica was officially hired by the campaign.
It was only in the Spring of 2016 that Cambridge Analytica began yet again to aggressively pursue work on behalf of the Trump campaign.
By this point, following Lewandowsky’s dismissal from the campaign, Nix was in discussions with Trump campaign leadership, including Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale.
In June of 2016, while he was making overtures to the Trump campaign, Alexander Nix reached out to Julian Assange, who had recently announced to the press that Wikileaks was in possession of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
When the news came out, Robert Mercer’s conservative activist daughter, Rebekah Mercer, held discussions about possibly trying to access the emails in Assange’s possession, though later claimed that she decided against it. Nonetheless Alexander Nix emailed Assange and offered to have Cambridge Analytica help Wikileaks organize and disseminate the Clinton emails.
Assange apparently never responded to Nix and, as far as is publicly known, their interactions ended there.
In the lead up to the Republican National Convention, Nix met with Paul Manafort to discuss working with the Trump campaign. According to Doug Watts, a senior staffer on Ben Carson’s campaign, which had hired Cambridge Analytica during his short lived run, Paul Manafort was skeptical of the data firm.
Read my description of Paul Manafort’s early life and career here, and his activities on the 2016 Trump campaign, here.
“What do you know about Cambridge Analytica?” Watts claims Manafort asked him. “They’re just full of shit, right?”
Watts further claims that Manafort said, “I don’t want em’ anywhere near the campaign.”
After they met, Manafort reportedly told Nix he wasn’t interested in retaining Cambridge Analytica’s services.
Manafort’s rejection upset Rebekah Mercer, but as with the Cruz campaign, the promise of the Mercer money was again too tempting to ignore. Manafort was overruled and Cambridge Analytica was hired onto the Trump campaign, with the first $100,000 of what would ultimately be $5.9 million being paid to the company on July 29th, 2016.
Cambridge Analtyica setup it’s Trump-project offices in New York and in San Antonio, Texas, where Brad Parscale, a local marketing entrepreneur who had done work for the Trump organization in the past setting up its websites, had established the Trump campaign’s digital headquarters.
The Trump campaign digital operation referred to itself as “Project Alamo.”
According to Kaiser, when the Cambridge Analytica staff arrived in San Antonio, they found Parscale’s data operation in a state of disarray, with no voter models of his own, without a functioning marketing apparatus and five separate pollsters working at cross purposes.
After negative press about Manafort’s activities in Ukraine roiled an already chaotic campaign, Rebekah Mercer had her revenge on Manafort for his initial rejection of Cambridge Analytica. She called Trump personally and arranged for Manafort to be replaced by Steve Bannon as the head of the campaign. With Bannon and the Mercer’s now firmly ensconced at the top of the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica’s position was now secure.
Despite the fact that Cambridge Analytica had amassed a vast trove of data about American voters, much of which came from Facebook, the data they used on the Trump campaign initially came from the Republican National Committee’s database. Nor was its much vaunted psychographic modeling used, as it was deemed to take too long. Instead, Cambridge Analytica data scientists focused on modeling qualities like “propensity to donate.”
The CA team augmented the RNC data with data from a company called BridgeTree, which claimed to possess large data sets from Facebook and LinkedIn.
Curiously, one of the data sets BridgeTree held was almost exactly in the same format that CA data scientist Aleksandr Kogan had illegally retrieved from Facebook: 570 data points on thirty million Americans.
Cambridge Analytica then paid for telephone and online surveys to be conducted in sixteen swing states, using the data to divide the voters into various pro-Trump and pro-Clinton segments of voters.
A major category within the Clinton segment of voters were labeled under the deterrence. These were Clinton supporters who Cambridge Analytica and the Trump Campaign believed could be dissuaded from voting. In this way, the Trump campaign’s tactics dovetailed perfectly with those of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.
“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official told Bloomberg in the final days of the Campaign.
The three groups targeted were idealistic white liberals, young women and, at the top of the list, African Americans.
The Trump campaign trumpeted the Wikileaks emails and the Trans-Pacific Partnership to turn Bernie Sanders supporters away from Clinton.
It used Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties, both real and invented, to target women.
Finally, it hammered away at Hillary Clinton’s comments in the 1990s about “Super Predators,” which would later be interpreted as an attack on young black men, to hurt her standing in the African American community.
A massive leak of the data used by Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign to Channel 4 News in the UK later revealed that 3.5 million African Americans were categorized under deterrence.
In this way, the Trump campaign wasn’t so different from campaigns Cambridge Analytica SCL had run in places like Trinidad and Tobago.
Read about the history of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), and its voter suppression activities, here.
Meetings and Money Laundering: The Bad Boys of Brexit at the 2016 Republican National Convention
While Cambridge Analytica was working to improve the Trump campaign’s data operation, the now infamous “Bad Boys of Brexit” were busily taking a victory lap following the stunning outcome of the Brexit referendum that took them to the United States during the heated final months of the election.
On the eve of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Nigel Farage, Andy Wigore and a young Farage advisor and head of fundraising for the pro-Brexit United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) named George Cottrell flew to the convention from London.
Farage’s first class ticket had been purchased by Arron Banks, Brexit’s number one financial backer whose numerous connections to Russia were described in the previous article.
Banks further paid an American lobbying firm £64,064 to arrange for a “Nigel Farage Brexit Policy Luncheon” to be held at the RNC, which also covered the £11,305.41 that was paid to Fox News Tucker Carlson to interview Farage at the event.
Banks intended to attend the RNC but was prevented by illness.
One evening during the Convention, Roger Stone arranged to have dinner with Farage and Wigmore, along with Alex Jones, the notorious American conspiracist and host of InfoWars.
Read my series of articles on Roger Stone, his history of division and corruption, and his long standing relationship with Donald Trump, here.
At the time, Stone was being trailed by a group of documentary filmmakers working on a film called Get Me Roger Stone, which was released on Netflix in 2017. One of the filmmakers, Daniel DiMauro, later told Carole Cadwalladr that a Farage aide insisted they not film the dinner.
What Stone, Jones and Farage discussed that evening is not known. The fact that the dinner took place mere days before Wikileaks leaked the hacked DNC emails on July 22nd, the day after the RNC ended, and that Roger Stone stone later claimed to be in contact with Assange via an intermediary, and that Nigel Farage was known to have associated with Assange in the past, led to speculation that Wikileaks and Assange were topics of conversation.
“What was so noticeable,” DiMauro later told Cadwalladr, “was how Alex Jones was so pumped up afterwards about the leaks that were coming. He was saying it openly on his show. And then days later, the DNC leaks dropped and blew apart the Democratic National Convention.”
Over the course of the 2016 election, Stone was in communication with both Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0, an online avatar operated by Russian military intelligence.
Read my article on Stone’s communications with Wikileaks and Russian military intelligence here.
Stone later told The Washington Post that a day after meeting Farage he called Paul Manafort, who was still serving in his capacity as campaign chairman, and suggested that Trump meet with Farage.
Manfort reportedly told Stone, “I’ll put the good word in.”
Farage’s connection to Trump ultimately came from an altogether different source. On the final night of the Republican Convention, Farage and Wigmore went for a late night drink at the bar of the Hilton Hotel where they had a chance encounter with a group of staffers for the Republican governor of Mississippi Phil Bryant, who had been an avid Brexit supporter from afar.
“They were incredibly drunk. And the assistant to the governor said, ‘Look, if we invite you to Mississippi, would you come?’” Andy Wigmore later recalled. “Of course, we said, ‘Yes, of course,’ not thinking it would be followed up. But it was.”
The next day a formal invitation from Governor Bryant for Farage to visit Mississippi was emailed to his staff.
While Farage and his entourage were on their way back to London from the convention, something remarkable happened. Farage’s chief of staff and UKIP’s deputy treasurer, an aristocratic 22-year old named George Cottrell, was arrested at Chicago O’Hare on charges of blackmail and money laundering.
“Posh George,” as Farage and Banks called him, hailed from a wealthy family well-connected to the highest levels of British society. His mother, Fiona Cottrell, had once been romantically linked to Prince Charles and had posed nude for Penthouse. His uncle, Lord Hesketh, was a former Conservative Party treasurer who left the party and joined UKIP in 2011.
George Cottrell’s arrest in Chicago was due to events that took place in 2014. At that time, Cottrell had been in contact with undercover IRS agents on a Tor network black-market website. Posing as drug traffickers, the undercover agents got Cottrell to agree to launder between $50–150,000 per month by transferring it to offshore accounts.
Cottrell later blamed his crimes on a gambling addiction, and had indeed been kicked out of Malvern College for gambling.
At the age of 19, he helped set up a multi-billion dollar private office in Mayfair for a well-known “international family,” as described by The Telegraph, the identity of which remains non-public information.
The job taught him about the world of shadow banking, offshore accounts and the construction of elaborate corporate and financial structures using secrecy jurisdictions such as Switzerland, Panama and Andorra.
Cottrell went on to become what The Telegraph described as “a London-based banker for an offshore private bank (which was under investigation by the US authorities as a ‘foreign financial institution of primary money-laundering concern’).”
While the paper didn’t name the “offshore private bank,” Nico Hines at The Daily Beast found that, among others, George Cottrell listed Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA) amid his “Interests” on LinkedIn.
In March of 2015, the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), listed BPA as a primary money laundering concern.
It further claimed that the bank was laundering money on behalf of Russian and Chinese organized crime.
“As part of the notice of its finding,” a press release regarding the FinCEN designation read, “FinCEN’s action describes a high–level manager at BPA in Andorra who provided substantial assistance to Andrei Petrov, a third-party money launderer working for Russian criminal organizations engaged in corruption. In February 2013, Spanish law enforcement arrested Petrov for money laundering. Petrov is also suspected to have links to Semion Mogilevich, one of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” fugitives.”
Read my description of Semyon Mogilevich and his involvement in money laundering and sophisticated financial crimes here.
At the time Nico Hines studied Cottrell’s LinkedIn profile, he was one of only 71 people to list an interest in Moldindconbank, a Moldovan-based financial institution which had been involved in a multi-billion dollar laundering scheme labelled the “Russian Laundromat” by the OCCRP.
Another bank involved in the vast laundering scheme was the Latvian-based Trasta Komercbanka, which was co-owned by Serhiy Lyovochkin. Lyvochkin was one of Paul Manafort’s top clients in Ukraine and an associate of Dymtro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who allegedly served as a front for Semyon Mogilevich in the Ukrainian natural gas industry.
Yet another Russian-linked Interest of Cottrell’s Hines found on LinkedIn was the bank FBME, a Tanzanian-registered entity with offices in Cyprus and Russia that was linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program, the Russian government and major figures within international organized crime.
Other Russian financial institutions listed among Cottrell’s interests included VTB and Alfa Bank.
Cottrell pleaded guilty in December of 2016 and spent eight months in American prison before being released and returning to the UK.
Shortly thereafter, on August 19th, 2016, Aaron Banks and Andy Wigmore again visited Russia’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Alexander Yakovenko, at his London residence.
Read about Yakevenko’s alleged Russian intelligence background and his extensive interactions with top Brexit financial backer Arron Banks, here.
Yakovenko had been busy, three weeks earlier on July 28th he had been photographed attending a polo match with Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix.
Yakovenko, Banks, and Wigmore had much to discuss. Banks’ and Nigel Farage’s friend Steve Bannon had just been installed as CEO of the Trump campaign. Over a lunch of wild halibut and Russian white wine, the three talked about the Trump campaign and the fact that Banks and Wigmore would be travelling to Mississippi in the coming days with Nigel Farage, where in all likelihood they would be meeting with Donald Trump.
While the full content of their discussions is unknown. However, it does appear that George Cottrell was a topic of conversation. The next day, August 20th, Wigmore sent an email with subject “Fw Cottrell Docs — Eyes Only,” to Sergey Fedichkin, the third secretary at the Russian Embassy, with the message, “Have fun with this.”
The email contained six attachments of legal documents related to Cottrell’s case in Arizona, where he had appeared in Federal court only one day earlier, the same day Banks and Wigmore had lunch with Yakovenko.
Why Banks and Wigmore would share such documents with the Russian embassy remains unknown.
The Bad Boys of Brexit and the Trump Campaign: Before and After the Election
Two days later, Banks, Wigmore and Farage were on their way to Mississippi to meet Donald Trump. After three “filthy cappuccino martini’s” each and four bottles of wine drunk in transit, the three Brits arrived in Jackson.
Farage was first scheduled to speak at a fundraiser dinner. Trump sought Farage out at a cocktail reception before their speeches.
“Donald says a few words,” Farage later recalled to The New Yorker. “And he says, ‘Where’s that? Where’s Nigel? Where’s the Brexit guy?’ So I go up. He gives me a big hug, and he says, ‘This guy is smart. This guy is smart. We’ve got to do what he does.’”
Later in the trip, Trump introduced Farage at a rally before 15,000 supporters. Farage, who had discussed his planned remarks with Steve Bannon before making them, electrified the crowd by thundering, “If I was an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me. In fact, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if SHE paid me!”
He then hammered away at the populist message he and Bannon had delivered to the British electorate to devastating effect.
“Folks, the message is clear, the parallels are there. . . . Remember, anything is possible if enough decent people are prepared to stand up against the establishment.”
Farage’s speech went down so well that he made several other stops on the campaign, attending the Presidential Debates between Trump and Clinton in St. Louis and Las Vegas and another Trump rally in Michigan.
Farage’s lodging and travel expenses were covered by Banks, who accompanied him to the debate in Las Vegas where both stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel.
“We are in daily contact with the Trump campaign — Brexit playbook!” Banks wrote in a Twitter direct message (DM).
He used the opportunity to lobby the Trump team on behalf of Belize Bank, an offshore financial institution owned by the British Conservative Party Lord Ashcroft, stripped of its partnership with Bank of America and Commerzbank in an Obama-era crackdown on tax evasion that made it more expensive to have a correspondent banking relationship with Belizean banking institutions.
On the night of the election, Banks, Wigmore and Farage stayed at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, again on Banks’ dime, to watch the returns come in.
That evening, Brittany Kaiser, Alexander Nix and Robert and Rebekah Mercer of Cambridge Analytica huddled together at the Trump campaign party in New York.
In her memoir, Kaiser claims that she and Nix were convinced Trump would lose. At 2am, she tapped Rebekah on the shoulder to show her a television monitor reporting that The Washington Post had called the election for Trump.
The Mercer’s were now the arguably most powerful and influential political donors in the United States.
One man who doesn’t appear to have been surprised by Trump’s victory was Vincent Tchnguiz, a former shareholder of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL, who collected £1.2 million after betting that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States.
Following Trump’s victory, Banks boasted of their access to the incoming administration in a message to Lord Ashcroft. “Don’t know if you’ve caught up with [A]ndy [Wigmore] but we intend to tackle the bank correspondent issue -the team we know & Bannon all headed off to the White House so fab access. We will be having a party at the inauguration with [N]igel and hopefully you can make it.”
“Nigel and Donald love each other,” Banks wrote in another Twitter DM soon after Trump won the election. “The media don’t really get how deep the links go.”
On November 12th, four days after the election, Banks, Wigmore and Farage made an impromptu visit to Trump Tower to see the President-Elect of the United States. Farage called Bannon, who immediately invited them up to the campaign offices.
After catching up with Bannon, they met with Kellyanne Conway.
According to The Washington Post, the Brits became the first foreign visitors hosted by Trump during the transition. The meeting lasted for over an hour. Banks described Trump as very un-Trump-like” and “very relaxed, open-neck shirt . . . very reflective.”
He reportedly asked Farage what it felt like after winning Brexit.
You’re British,” a Trump aide interjected at some point during the meeting. “Do you have a number for Number 10?”
In fact, Banks did have a number for the British Prime Minister and provided it to the Trump team. In return, they received a telephone number that led directly to the Trump transition office, perhaps the most sought after phone number on Earth at the time.
Before they left, Bannon asked Banks about a £40 thousand outstanding payment to Cambridge Analytica for the work it did on the Brexit campaign for Leave.EU.
“Steve Bannon actually chased us at trump tower and we said duck off,” later wrote in a Twitter DM.
Three days later, on November 15th, Banks and Wigmore joined Ambassador Yakovenko in London for yet another lunch. Wigmore provided Yakovenko with the number to Trump’s transition office.
“The ambassador was obviously keen to know how our meeting [with Trump] went,” later told The Sunday Times.
As with their other meetings with Yakovenko, the full content of their discussions is unknown.
In an attempt to gain an insight into, and establish contacts with, the incoming Trump administration, then-British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson met with Alexander Nix in December of 2016.
SCL/Cambridge Analytica itself was making moves to capitalize on its connection to the new President. Just before the election in November, SCL Group hired Michael Flynn, soon to be Trump’s short lived National Security Advisor, as a consultant.
On December 14th, Cambridge Analytica signed a memorandum of understanding with Joel Zamel’s Israel-based Psy Group in which the two companies agreed to jointly pursue business with the new Trump administration on a case-by-case basis.
As the storm clouds of investigation gathered around the incoming Trump administration and whispers of Russian interference and collusion filled the air, Nigel Farage used his pedestal to defend Trump.
“Julian Assange,” Farage loudly declared on his LBC radio show, “is absolutely clear that all the information he has got is not from Russian sources.”
Remarkably, in February of 2017 Brittany Kaiser met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. Kaiser had a previous relationship with one of Assange’s lawyers and she claims at the time to have not believed in the assessment made by the American Intelligence Community that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election through Wikileaks.
“The one who didn’t have blood on his hands won the election,” Kaiser later recalled Assange telling her.
On February 24th, 2017, Nigel Farage was back in the United States to make an address before the conservative conference CPAC. The next evening he had dinner with Trump at the Trump Hotel, tweeting a picture of himself enjoying the company of the new American President into the wee hours of the morning. The content of their conversation is unknown.
Eleven days later, Farage was seen by BuzzFeed News leaving the Ecuadorian embassy after a meeting with Julian Assange. When asked by a waiting BuzzFeed reporter what he was doing at the Embassy just as he stepped out of it, Farage claimed that he couldn’t remember.
Later that day, Wikileaks announced that Assange would be hosting a press conference about their most recent leak called “Vault 7,” in which they released documents related to secret CIA hacking tools in what turned out to be the largest leak in the history of the agency.
“I had a drink with nigel,” Aaron Banks wrote in a Twitter dm the next day. “He had an interesting time with wiki leaks.”
Banks elaborated no further.