Bolton's Cambridge Analytica Connection

News  |  Mar 23, 2018

Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, President Trump's incoming national security advisor, hired Cambridge Analytica in August 2014 to work for his political committee called the The John Bolton Super PAC.

The New York Times

In the two years that followed, Mr. Bolton’s super PAC spent nearly $1.2 million primarily for “survey research,” which is a term that campaigns use for polling, according to campaign finance records.

But the contract between the political action committee and Cambridge, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, offers more detail on just what Mr. Bolton was buying. The contract broadly describes the services to be delivered by Cambridge as “behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging.”

To do that work, Cambridge used Facebook data, according to the documents and two former employees familiar with the work.

“The data and modeling Bolton’s PAC received was derived from the Facebook data,” said Christopher Wylie, a data expert who was part of the team that founded Cambridge Analytica. “We definitely told them about how we were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings.”

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“The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues,” Mr. Wylie said.

“That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview,” he added. “That’s what they said they wanted, anyway.”

Using the psychographic models, Cambridge helped design concepts for advertisements for candidates supported by Mr. Bolton’s PAC, including the 2014 campaign of Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, according to Mr. Wylie and another former employee ... 

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Cambridge Analytica, which grew out of the London-based SCL Group, was founded in 2014 with a $15 million investment from Mr. Mercer, whose daughter Rebekah sits on the firm’s board of directors. Stephen K. Bannon was also a co-founder.

At the same time, Mr. Mercer was financially supporting Mr. Bolton’s PAC, donating $5 million between April 2014 and September 2016, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

USA Today:

Mercer ... gave Bolton's super PAC $1 million during the 2018 election cycle alone, according to the FEC. That's more than one-quarter of the nearly $3.9 million the PAC has raised so far in this cycle. 

The New York Times obtained the agenda of a July 2014 meeting between Cambridge Analytica and another Bolton PAC contractor which describes the kind of work being done. 

The firm took the psychographic profiles it was building off the Facebook data at the time and combined them with voter databases and other sets of data.

The profiles would be used to “identify the personality traits of individuals” in states to be targeted by the Bolton PAC, said the agenda ... “Individuals can be targeted with the right message,” it said.

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Months later, the relationship between Cambridge and the Bolton PAC had grown so close that the firm was writing up talking points for Mr. Bolton.

Cambridge staff sent Bolton an email on Oct. 1, 2014 email telling him what to say about the data firm's work.

The subject line of the email: “Did Bannon come back to you on this?”

The Guardian reveals Bolton also collaborated with Cambridge Analytica "on an experiment to target YouTube videos to different 'psychographic' profiles of US voters."

The project, to explore how different types of political campaign ads would resonate with an electorate divided into different personality types, involved Bolton appearing on-screen endorsing candidates in New Hampshire, North Carolina and Arkansas in the run-up to the 2014 midterms.

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In an email about the 2014 collaboration with the John Bolton Super Pac, Robert Murtfeld, a Cambridge Analytica executive who left earlier this year, described the video project as having “used our psychographic data to create ads targeting people based on their personalities”.

Bolton, a national security hawk, adopts significantly different tones in the videos, depending on the personalities of the voters the videos were targeted at. The voters were partitioned according to personality analysis conducted by Cambridge Analytica.

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The video project appears to have been part of a wider service provided to Bolton’s Super Pac, which paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1.1m since 2014 for “research” and “survey research,” according to Center for Public Integrity analysis of campaign finance filings.

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Garrett Marquis, a spokesperson for Bolton commented: “With respect to any allegations of impropriety, the John Bolton Super Pac was completely unaware of anything Cambridge Analytica did until recent press reports. Furthermore, the John Bolton Super Pac hasn’t worked with Cambridge Analytica on any independent-expenditure effort since 2016.”

Watch the videos here and here

 

Read More: Trump adviser John Bolton worked with Cambridge Analytica on YouTube voter experiment (The Guardian)

Bolton Was Early Beneficiary of Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Data (NYT)

John Bolton's super PAC paid more than $800,000 to Cambridge Analytica (USA Today)