Donald Trump’s digital guru has stonewalled questions about Kremlin
election interference, Democrats say, even as he launches Trump’s
reelection campaign.
Brad Parscale was a virtual unknown before he joined Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, as digital director.
Even
as digital media guru Brad Parscale takes over President Donald Trump’s
reelection campaign, federal investigators have mounting questions
about the high-tech “secret weapon” Parscale says was instrumental to
Trump’s 2016 victory — including whether it might have played a role in
Russian election meddling.
But Parscale isn’t talking.
That’s
despite the fact that Democrats on at least three different
congressional committees say they want to hear more from Parscale about
potential data sharing between the campaign and Russian entities.
Democrats say evidence of such collaboration — or even Russian
manipulation of Trump campaign software that may have been unknown to
Trump aides — would be highly explosive given its potentially direct
impact on the election’s outcome and legitimacy.
While
Republicans seem content with Parscale’s insistence he knows nothing
about the Russian scheme, more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and
staffers interviewed by POLITICO say that no investigation into Moscow’s
election interference can be complete without a full accounting from
Trump’s 2016 digital campaign director — especially given that special
counsel Robert Mueller has recently focused on Kremlin-linked efforts to
manipulate election-related social media.
Over the weekend,
several Democrats said they were extremely concerned about recent media
reports that Cambridge Analytica, the conservative data analytics firm
Parscale hired for the campaign, had improperly collected information on
more than 50 million Facebook users and likely used it in the
voter-targeting operation. The new reporting, in The New York Times and
the Observer of London, also suggested that Cambridge Analytica has
previously undisclosed connections to Russia.
A full accounting
from Parscale is especially important now, the Democrats say, given his
central role in both Trump’s 2020 campaign and, through that
organization, in supporting Republican candidates in the 2018
congressional midterm elections.
Yet Parscale stonewalled
lawmakers during his July testimony before the House Intelligence
Committee, Democratic sources familiar with it tell POLITICO, in an
account of his appearance that has not been reported before.
During
his testimony, Parscale was unresponsive to some questions and referred
most others to Alexander Nix, the chief executive officer of Cambridge
Analytica, and to campaign senior adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared
Kushner, who hired Parscale and worked closely with him on the targeting
operation, according to several officials present.
“We got nothing,” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) recalls. “Tapioca.”
More
recently, Parscale has declined to cooperate with a January request for
information and documents from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the
ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who also asked him to
voluntarily testify.
Parscale has denied any wrongdoing and insists that he has been cooperative. Before his House appearance, he
tweeted
that he was “unaware of any Russian involvement in the digital and data
operations” of the campaign, and that he looked forward to “sharing
with them everything I know.”
That hasn’t satisfied Democrats
who say that, even if Parscale and his colleagues did nothing wrong, it
is vital to understand whether and how the Russians might have exploited
the Trump campaign’s online political machine — especially given U.S.
concerns that Russia is already gearing up to meddle with the midterms.
“They
still need to fully answer the question of where they got their
information, and what they did with it,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro
(D-Texas), a House Intelligence Committee member. "There is still a big
cloud hanging over the digital operation.”
Added Rep. Adam
Schiff, the intelligence committee’s ranking Democrat, “There are still a
number of important questions about the Trump campaign’s digital
operation that remain under investigation, the most significant of which
is whether the Russian covert social-media effort was completely
independent.”
Last Monday, Republicans on the intelligence
committee announced they were ending their investigation of Russian
election interference and declared they had found no evidence that
members of Trump’s campaign team cooperated with the Russian scheme.
In
response, Schiff released an “investigative status update” from
committee Democrats that said the Trump campaign’s digital operation
requires further investigation, including witness testimony and
documents, “to determine whether the campaign coordinated in any way
with Russia in its digital program.”
The document cites Nix and
Cambridge Analytica, as well as two of Parscale’s campaign aides. One of
them is Avi Berkowitz, a Harvard Law School graduate and Kushner
protégé who served as assistant director of data analytics on the 2016
campaign and is now a special assistant to Trump at the White House. The
committee Democrats said they had reason to believe Kushner “may have
dispatched Mr. Berkowitz to meet with Russian Ambassador [Sergey]
Kislyak in December 2016.”
The Democrats did not indicate what
the purpose of the meeting might have been. Kushner himself is known to
have met with Kislyak in December 2016 and reportedly discussed with the
Russian the possibility of opening a secret communications back channel
to Moscow.
Trump named Parscale to run his 2020 campaign in
late February. "Brad was essential in bringing a disciplined technology
and data-driven approach to how the 2016 campaign was run," Kushner said
in a statement.
Report: Trump-linked firm exploited data on 50 million Facebook users By
STEVEN OVERLY Parscale
was a virtual unknown before he joined Trump’s 2016 campaign. He had
been a struggling digital entrepreneur when he bid on building the Trump
Organization’s website in 2010, and did similar work for the family
until joining Trump’s 2016 campaign, where Parscale became a digital
jack-of-all-trades — overseeing data collection, online advertising and
messaging from a San Antonio bunker known as Project Alamo.
His
most powerful tool, by far, was the sophisticated data-crunching effort
known as microtargeting, which churned out tens of thousands of
constantly changing Facebook ads every hour, all of them computerized
and individually tailored to distinct demographic clusters of potential
Trump voters throughout the country.
“I understood early that
Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” Parscale said in a CBS
“60 Minutes” profile of him last October. “Facebook was the method — it
was the highway in which his car drove on.”
The data operation
underpinning Parscale’s targeting effort, he has said, also provided the
campaign with the kind of surgically precise, real-time information it
needed down the stretch to focus precious resources on swing states like
Michigan and Wisconsin, while Hillary Clinton focused elsewhere.
“I
took every nickel and dime I could out of anywhere else. And I moved it
to Michigan and Wisconsin. And I started buying advertising, digital,
TV,” Parscale told “60 Minutes,“ which described him, and his targeting
operation, as the campaign's “secret weapon.”
His “secret
weapon” wasn’t any proprietary software or algorithm, but the way in
which Parscale marshaled various resources, including data provided by
Cambridge Analytica and Facebook itself, to determine which versions of
ads worked best when microtargeting voters. Parscale told “60 Minutes”
he embraced an offer by Facebook — declined by the Clinton campaign — to
send ideologically like-minded staffers to work in-house at the Trump
campaign and teach him “every, single secret button, click, technology”
available for microtargeting.
Some have criticized Parscale for
using Cambridge Analytica and its controversial technology known as
psychographics, in which huge troves of data are collected to
microtarget potential voters based on personality traits, as divined
from their social media profiles, rather than typical categories like
race or age. Mueller has reportedly been examining Cambridge Analytica’s
campaign role.
On Friday night, Facebook announced that it was
suspending Cambridge Analytica and parent company Strategic
Communication Laboratories Group after learning that Cambridge misled
the social media giant and improperly kept user data for years in
violation of policy. Hours later, reports in the New York Times and
Observer suggested the violations were far more serious than what
Facebook announced, and that they were tied directly to Cambridge's work
for the Trump campaign and its alleged entanglements with Russia.
The
Times said Cambridge Analytica — whose board members included former
Trump political strategist Steve Bannon and which was funded by the
Trump-friendly GOP megadonor Robert Mercer — used the harvested
information to turbocharge its microtargeting operation and sway voters
on Facebook and other popular digital platforms.
Another Times
report
said Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, had contact in
2014 and 2015 with executives from Lukoil, the Russian oil giant. Lukoil
was interested in how data was used to target American voters, the
Times said, adding that SCL and Lukoil denied that the talks were
political in nature.
The Times also reported that Cambridge
Analytica included extensive questions about Russian President Vladimir
Putin in surveys that it was conducting using American focus groups in
2014, though it said it was not clear why, or for which client.
The Trump campaign and Trump himself have denied colluding with the Kremlin, which denies meddling in the election altogether.
But
Democratic lawmakers have focused on potential collusion in the
microtargeting effort as one of their top priorities since launching
their investigations, especially given what several called striking
similarities between Trump campaign messaging and that of Russian
operatives.
Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Schiff called
for congressional testimony from “numerous Cambridge Analytica
personnel who may have knowledge of this and other issues” but who have
so far refused to cooperate. Schiff also said that Cambridge Analytica’s
ties to Russian entities and to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange need
to be investigated, and that committee Republicans who have blocked such
efforts, including subpoenas, need to approve them.
“People
have been circling this since the beginning, because it doesn’t pass the
smell test. Something is missing,” adds a former U.S. intelligence
official who has spoken extensively to congressional investigators.
“How
did it all happen? It’s what directly links Kushner to Parscale to
Cambridge Analytica — and potentially to the Russians,” the former
intelligence official said, adding that Parscale and Kushner brought in
Cambridge Analytica over the objections of “everybody else” in the
campaign.
Compounding lawmakers’ concerns is the fact that
Russian hackers were able to penetrate at least 20 state election
systems, perhaps double that amount. Initially, investigators were
comforted by the fact that the Russians did not manipulate any voting
results. But now they fear the real Russian objective could have been to
steal voter information for microtargeting.
Democrats in
Congress got nowhere when they tried to get answers about that from
Parscale, as well as from Kushner and Nix, when they agreed,
reluctantly, to testify before the House intelligence committee, several
Democratic congressional officials told POLITICO.
“They were
basically playing dumb,” said one congressional official who, like
several others, was present but spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss classified committee matters. That official described the
interviews of Parscale, Kushner and Nix as one giant exercise in
circular finger pointing, in which they each referred questions to the
others. “I can’t say we got details.”
In the past, Parscale has
dismissed such accusations of collusion. “I think it's a joke. Like, at
least for my part in it,” he told “60 Minutes.“ But he also acknowledged
that even his wife jokes that it was as though he “was thrown into the
Super Bowl, never played a game — and won.”
That lack of
experience has also drawn the attention of some investigators, who say
they are also mystified by Parscale’s rapid trajectory from low-profile
web developer to leader of a U.S. presidential campaign in just a few
short years.
At a March 2017 hearing, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)
said that in some key precincts in swing states like Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania and Michigan, “there was so much misinformation coming
talking about Hillary Clinton's illnesses or Hillary Clinton stealing
money from the State Department or other [that it] completely blanked
out any of the back and forth that was actually going on in the
campaign.”
“Would the Russians on their own have that level of
sophisticated knowledge about the American political system if they
didn't at least get some advice from someone in America?" Warner added.
Feinstein’s
letter to Parscale suggested a similar interest. The California senator
asked Parscale to provide any information involving Russian efforts “to
identify voters or potential voters for targeted advertising, marketing
or social media contact in support of the Trump campaign or other
efforts to elect Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.”
She
also asked for any campaign documents and communications concerning
Russia, WikiLeaks, various shadowy intermediaries in the meddling
effort, and hacked Democratic Party emails and data.
Two months
later, however, Feinstein is still waiting for Parscale to appear, a
congressional source said, and he has refused to turn over any of the
wide array of documents Feinstein requested about the campaign and any
connections to Russia, WikiLeaks or other entities suspected of being
involved in the interference effort.