Social Media and Influence Companies Related to the Trump Russia Story

Chart and highlights of companies reportedly involved with influence campaigns supporting Trump including SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Psy-Group, Black Cube, Data Propria and others.

Wendy Siegelman
19 min readJun 24, 2018

Note: please share the link to this page instead of a screenshot as the chart may be updated periodically. Also note that groupings in the chart indicate a common feature such as person or location, but entities within the group are not necessarily connected to each other, and not all entities worked for Trump. Please visit my website NewsTRACS where I will publish new content, to view past charts and articles, and to sign up for email notifications for new posts.

As new social media and influence companies supporting the Trump campaign and administration keep appearing out of the woodwork, this chart is likely to be updated. The chart and highlights below capture information from various news reports in a central location— a basic inventory that only begins to capture the complexity of key people and events behind the scenes. Below are highlights for each entity and information on common features among some of them.

SCL Group/Cambridge Analytica

SCL Group in the UK and the US-based Mercer-funded Cambridge Analytica subsidiary have been widely covered as a central part of Trump’s digital campaign managed at various levels by Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Brad Parscale. Despite an immense amount of media reporting and government investigations in the UK, US, Canada and elsewhere, it is still not clear what Cambridge Analytica did, who they worked with, and what results they obtained. One purpose of the chart is to show related companies and people who may help solve that puzzle.

Below are a few highlights on the known Trump campaign funding for SCL/CA and information about the remaining active companies. The full corporate structure of SCL and Cambridge Analytica as of May 2018 prior to the bankruptcy filings is here.

In the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica was paid $18,088,598, which included $5,805,551 from Ted Cruz, and smaller amounts from other candidates such as Ben Carson and John Bolton. The Donald J Trump For President PAC paid $5,912,500 and Make America Number 1, which supported both Cruz and Trump, paid $3,812,546. The full amount of direct financial investment in SCL and Cambridge Analytica by the Mercers or others is not known.

SCL Insight Limited

  • Nigel Oakes, who is the co-founder of SCL and currently resides in the United Arab Emirates, is the remaining director and owner of SCL Insight Limited. SCL Insight, Emerdata Limited and Firecrest Technologies, are the three known remaining active companies in the UK, along with Cambridge Analytica Holdings in the US.

Emerdata Limited

  • Created in August 2017 by Julian Wheatland and Alexander Nix, Emerdata Limited raised $19 million in January 2018, the same month the company added new board members Ahmed Al Khatib, Cheng Peng, and Johnson Chun Shun Ko, who is a business partner of Erik Prince at Frontier Services Group. Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer joined the board of Emerdata in March 2018 and they are overseeing the US bankruptcy filings of most Cambridge Analytica companies. Khatib, Peng, and Ko resigned their director roles in May, and in June Gary Ka Chun Tiu was appointed director. It appears that Tiu is an associate of Chun Shun Ko, Prince’s business partner— Gary Tiu has worked as General Counsel of Reorient Group and Yunfeng Financial — Johnson Chun Shun Ko is a director of Yunfeng and used to manage Reorient.

Firecrest Technology Limited

  • Firecrest Technologies Limited was established in March 2018 by Alexander Nix and Alexander Tayler. Both have resigned as directors, however, the company is still active and is owned by Emerdata Limited.

Cambridge Analytica Holdings

  • Cambridge Analytica Holdings, the only known US company that is not included in any bankruptcy proceeding, was reportedly funded by Robert Mercer and is represented by Jennifer Mercer. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have expressed ‘legitimate concern regarding the preservation of documents and other evidence’ by Cambridge Analytica Holdings.”

SCL and Cambridge Analytica Contractors

Global Science Research (GSR)

  • Global Science Research Limited (GSR) was established in 2014 by Alexander Kogan (who later changed his name to Alexander Spectre), Joseph Chancellor and Alexander Slinger. GSR was hired by Cambridge Analytica and, using an app developed by Kogan called thisisyourdigitallife, collected data on over 87 million Facebook users. In November 2015 Chancellor left GSR and was hired to work at Facebook.
  • While Alexander Kogan was harvesting Facebook data for Cambridge Analytica, he also worked as an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University, where he received “Russian government grants to fund other research into social media.”

AggregateIQ (AIQ)

  • According to former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower Christopher Wylie, the firm AggregateIQ was set up in Canada after Wylie emailed his former boss Jeff Silvester in 2013, who set up the firm with Zack Massingham. Massingham’s phone number had been listed on a website as SCL Canada, but he and Silverster denied that AIQ had been part of SCL.
  • In May 2017 the Observer reported that AggregateIQ had an intellectual property license agreement with SCL Elections, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. AIQ created and managed the Ripon platform used by Cambridge Analytica and AIQ was hired as a contractor by Vote Leave in the UK.

Archimedes

  • Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL group, conducted a surveillance operation in Yemen on behalf of Archimedes, a US-based military contractor. The contractor Archimedes does not have any known connection to the Trump campaign or administration, however, a few people who have worked with Archimedes have also worked with SCL, and one of them now works in the Trump White House.
  • Kirsten Fontenrose, who joined the joined the Trump White House in March 2018 as the National Security Council senior director for Gulf Affairs, previously worked at SCL when it obtained a $490K contract with the State Department, and in 2007 Fontenrose had worked at Archimedes.
  • In May 2010 a workshop was held with members of the US Department of Defense, State Department, Rand Corp and others that was summarized in a report called “Defining a Strategic Campaign for Working with Partners to Counter and Delegitimize Violent Extremism.” Alexis Everington, whose name is cited with SCL extensively in the report discussing Yemen, had listed both SCL and Archimedes on his LinkedIn profile.

Sam Patten

  • Journalist Nafeez Ahmed reported that Sam Patten worked for Cambridge Analytica in 2014 at the Oregon office of SCL Group, “when the firm was actively fine-tuning its methodologies in 2014 before the presidential campaign.” Carole Cadwalladr reported that Patten also worked with Cambridge Analytica on their work in Nigeria in 2015. Transcripts of interviews conducted by Emma Briant with Sam Patten describe work he did in Kosovo for Cambridge Analytica: “And they said: ‘Can you be ready in one day if this happens?’ I said yes, without even… I assumed it was the dirty bad guys, the mafia guys. You know, the gangsters?”
  • In 2015 Sam Patten created a company called Begemot Ventures with Konstantin Kilimnik, Paul Manafort’s business associate and a suspected Russian intelligence agent, who was recently indicted by Special Counsel Mueller and charged with “conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice.” Kilimnik had worked for Patten at the International Republican Institute in Moscow from 2001 to 2003. The mission of their company, Begemot Ventures, was to “build the right arguments before domestic and international audiences,” however little is known about their work or clients.

Project Associates

  • In October 2017 SCL Social Limited was hired by UK PR firm Project Associates for approximately $330,000 to implement a social media campaign for the UAE against Qatar, featuring the theme #BoycottQatar. Project Associates had been hired by the UAE National Media Council to do their global PR work. The anti-Qatar campaign sub-contracted to SCL Social by Project Associates in October 2017 aligned closely to anti-Qatar sentiment expressed by Trump and many of his associates including Steve Bannon and Elliot Broidy, who all supported the June 2017 blockade against Qatar led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. However, there is no known connection between Project Associates and Trump or his associates.
  • Project Associates has other interesting clients, including the son of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. A May 2017 Quartz article described work London-based PR Firm Project Associates did on behalf of Andrey Yakunin, the son of Vladimir Yakunin, a Russian oligarch and associate of Putin who ran Russian Railways, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2014 for involvement in Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Companies with Ex-SCL/CA Employees/Contractors

Philometrics

  • According to the UK Companies House filings Philometrics was created in October 2017 by Alexander Kogan/Spectre. The website is no longer active, but can be viewed on the Wayback Machine, and describes “Survey Software with AI Superpowers.” According to company filings Philometrics is still active. An old description of Philometrics on Crunchbase displayed Alexander Slinger, who co-founded GSR with Kogan, as the founder of Philometrics in 2015, two years before the UK Companies House date.

Data Propria

  • In February 2018 Matt Oczkowski, former Head of Product at Cambridge Analytica, launched Data Propria which specializes in voter and consumer targeting similar to work done by Cambridge Analytica. Data Propria is wholly owned by CloudCommerce, the company that paid $9 million for Brad Parscale’s web marketing company, and where Parscale is now a director and shareholder. At least four former Cambridge Analytica employees are affiliated with Data Propria, which is working for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Genus AI

  • Tadas Jucikas and Brent Clickard, two associates who had worked with Christopher Wylie at SCL Elections to create the tool used by Cambridge Analytica, founded Genus AI in May 2016 as an artificial intelligence company that “integrates 3rd party as well as 1st party data sources and applies proprietary insights and algorithms to unlock the value hidden in data.”

Begemot Ventures

  • In 2015 Sam Patten created a company called Begemot Ventures with Konstantin Kilimnik, Paul Manafort’s business associate and a suspected Russian intelligence agent, who was recently indicted by Special Counsel Mueller and charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice. Kilimnik had worked for Patten at the International Republican Institute in Moscow from 2001 to 2003. The mission of their company, Begemot Ventures, was to “build the right arguments before domestic and international audiences,” however little is known about their work or clients. Begemot Ventures, which is registered in Washington DC, is still active.

Brad Parscale-Related Entities

While the media has reported heavily on SCL and Cambridge Analytica, it should be noted that the majority of funding during the Trump campaign was paid to Giles Parscale — a whopping $93 million. FEC reporting does not require Giles Parscale to disclose where those funds were spent. One of the purposes of the chart is to show companies that can be researched further to find out if they may have been Giles Parscale sub-contractors, and to better understand the inter-relationship among these companies.

Giles Parscale

  • Brad Parscale met the Trumps in 2011; he formed a friendship with Eric Trump and worked on various Trump Organization website over the years. Parscale hit the jackpot with the US election, and according to Open Secrets, his company Giles Parscale was paid $93,915,031 for the 2016 campaign — $87,838,376 from Donald J Trump For President, $3,702,533 from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, and $2,374,122 from the Republican National Committee.

Harris Media

  • According to a Politico article, Vincent Harris at Harris Media was a sub-contractor hired by Parscale, but the nature and duration of the work is not clear. Harris tweeted out that his firm “was engaged as subcontractor to do various project work for Trump’s digital agency of record. Nothing more or less.” Harris has also worked for Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, the Likud Party in Israel, and has developed anti-Islam ads for Germany’s far-right Afd party.

Cloud Commerce

  • In August 2017 Brad Parscale sold his political and digital operations to CloudCommerce for a deal valued at $9 million and received shares in the company as well as a seat on the board. A February 2018 AP story described CloudCommerce as a penny-stock firm “with a questionable history that includes longstanding ties to a convicted fraudster.” A week after CloudCommerce bought Parscale’s company, he tweeted that the stock price had increased by 500%.

America First Policies

  • In January 2017 after Trump’s inauguration, several of his top campaign team members started a non-profit — America First Policies — to promote his agenda from outside the White House. In addition to Brad Parscale, the founding group included Manafort’s deputy campaign manager Rick Gates and two campaign advisers to Pence, Nick Ayers and Marty Obst, as well as Katrina Pierson and Bannon colleague David Bossie.

Trump 2020

  • In March 2018 Trump announced that Brad Parscale would run his 2020 campaign.

Israel Entities

Black Cube

  • Black Cube was founded in 2011 by Dan Zorella, a former IDF military intelligence officer based in London, and by Dr. Avi Yanus. Their website describes a “select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units that specialises in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges.”
  • Black Cube surfaced in the news late last year when Ronan Farrow published a story about Harvey Weinstein hiring Black Cube to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose sexual harassment and assault allegations against him. In May 2018, The Observer reported that the Trump team had hired a spy firm to gather information to discredit several Obama officials involved with negotiating the Iran arms deal. A day later Farrow confirmed that the company allegedly hired by the Trump administration was Black Cube.
  • The contract for Black Cube’s work for Harvey Weinstein was personally signed by lawyer David Boies. In 2012, David Boies represented the former president of Blackwater, Gary Jackson, on charges related to falsifying ownership papers for Blackwater guns that were presented in 2005 to Jordan’s King Abdullah.
  • In another court case the city of Almaty Kazakhstan is suing Mukhtar Ablyazov and Ilyas and Viktor Kharpunovs — former business associates of Felix Sater who had worked for the Trump Organization — for stealing billions of dollars from BTA Bank and Almaty. The Khrapunovs submitted a letter to the judge in the Southern District of New York asking if Boies Schiller, which was representing BTA/Almaty and had also represented Harvey Weinstein, had hired Black Cube as part of the BTA/Almaty case.
  • Black Cube’s first known work was for Vincent Tchenguiz, after he was raided by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office in 2011 for bank fraud. Black Cube helped build the successful challenge to the SFO raids, which were declared unlawful. However, in subsequent years, Tchenguiz had a falling out with Black Cube and allegedly spied on his own spies, who were based out of his London office. During the years Tchenguiz worked with Black Cube, he was also the largest shareholder from 2005 until 2015 in SCL Group, the owner of Trump’s election data company Cambridge Analytica.

Psy-Group

  • Psy-Group is an Israeli-based company headquartered in Cyprus, that describes itself in a marketing brochure as “Leaders in Intelligence and Infuence” and “proprietary methods of intelligence collection form the cornerstone to all of our operational activities.” The firm is “managed by an elite group of high-ranking officers from one of the world’s most renowned intelligence agencies.”
  • In August 2016 Erik Prince arranged a meeting to introduce Psy-Group founder Joel Zamel to Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower. George Nader, who had once worked for Prince at Blackwater, attended the meeting along with Stephen Miller. Nader told Don Jr that “the princes who led Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eager to help his father win election as president.” Joel Zamel presented a multimillion-dollar proposal for a social media manipulation effort to help Trump, and after the election a source said Nader paid Zamel up to $2 million.
  • Psy-Group formed a partnership with Cambridge Analytica after the 2016 election to try to win business from the U.S. government and other clients. In February 2018 Special Counsel Mueller subpoenaed bank records for payments made to the Psy-Group’s Cyprus bank accounts. Shortly afterwards, Psy-Group informed employees that it was closing down.
  • WhiteKnight: the New York Times reported that Joel Zamel was affiliated with an internet company based in the Philippines called WhiteKnight, which George Nader worked with to purchase a presentation that showed the impact of social media campaigns on Trump’s electoral victory.

Psy-Group and Black Cube

  • Psy-Group and Black Cube are both defendants in a Canadian lawsuit that is exposing some of the tactics used by both firms. West Face Capital alleged that business rival Catalyst Capital Group hired Psy-Group and Black Cube to defame West Face using shady methods, including sting operations and online disinformation campaigns, after West Face won a 2014 bid for telecomm company Wind Mobile. Black Cube and Psy-Group were accused of targeting a judge who had ruled against Catalyst in a dispute with West Face. It is not clear if Black Cube and Psy-Group worked together or if they worked separately on behalf of Catalyst.
  • On a side note, in the 2014 deal which triggered the lawsuit, Wind Mobile was sold to West Face by a subsidiary of VimpleCom, which was sued unsuccessfully by Catalyst for Canadian $1.3 billion. VimpleCom, renamed Veon, is owned by Mikhail Fridman, the co-founder of Alfa Bank in Russia.

Wikistrat

  • The WSJ reported in April 2018 that Mueller’s team was investigating Wikistrat, a company founded in Israel in 2010 described as a “crowdsourced consulting firm,” and its co-founders Joel Zamel and Daniel Green. Wikistrat had been contracted by the UAE in 2015 to conduct war game scenarios on Islamist political movements in Yemen. According to a source Zamel had met with Mueller who asked about George Nader, a former employee of Erik Prince at Blackwater, and recently an adviser to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.
  • Attorney Marc Mukasey (a former partner of Giuliani) said that his clients Zamel and Green were not a focus of the probe. Mueller also asked Zamel “questions about his work, including for certain clients.” Per reporting on Psy-Group’s August 2016 meeting arranged by Erik Prince with Donald Trump Jr., one of Joel Zamel’s prospective clients was Donald Trump.
  • According to a June 2018 Daily Beast article, Joel Zamel “wanted former national security adviser Michael Flynn to be a member of the firm’s (Wikistrat’s) advisory board.” Adam Lovinger, a Pentagon strategist who had been named to the National Security Council by Flynn and was reportedly associated with Flynn Intel Group, introduced Joel Zamel to various Pentagon officials. Per a source Zamel had been introduced to Flynn by Bijan Kian, Flynn Intel Group’s former vice chairman of its board of directors, however Zamel’s attorney Mukasey denied Zamel and Flynn met. It appeared in 2017 that Wikistrat had ceased operations.

Inspiration

  • An article in Haaretz describes how Ben Carson personally presented Trump with a plan from Israeli-based company Inspiration, run by former IDF intelligence officers. The plan was for voter manipulation in swing states using information Inspiration collected from a Super PAC, “which it then used to compose strategies and slogans that would elevate Trump and ‘float all kinds of things’ about Hillary Clinton.”
  • The original report from Walla describes Ronen Cohen, a former Central Command intelligence officer who founded Inspiration in 2012. The article says Inspiration was not directly hired by the Trump campaign but was introduced by Ben Carson and funded by a PAC and hired three months prior to the election. Inspiration received voter data from the PAC and analyzed the data with another unnamed Israeli company. The messaging created by Inspiration was then passed to an American counterpart for review, revision, or distribution.

Russia Entities

Concord Management & Consulting

  • Yevgeny Prigozhin, one of thirteen Russian nationals indicted by Special Counsel Mueller in February 2018, is a powerful businessman with a colorful past. Prigozhin was a former champion cross-country skier, who later spent nine years in prison in the 1980s for fraud and robbery, according to Russian media reports. He became a caterer for Putin and was referred to as Putin’s “Personal Chef,” and over the years built up his business empire.
  • Concord Management and Consulting is Prigozhin’s main company which owns several restaurants and his catering business, Concord Catering (also included in the indictment). According to Mueller’s indictment, both Concord businesses oversaw and funded the Internet Research Agency.
  • In addition to being indicted in the Mueller investigation, Prigozhin was sanctioned by the US State Department in 2016 for defense work related to the conflict in Ukraine. Prigozhin is also affiliated with a Moscow-registered company, Evro Polis, that reportedly was a front company for Wagner, a private military contractor operating in Syria.

Internet Research Agency (IRA)

  • The Internet Research Agency, aka the Troll Factory, was created in 2013 and pursued “information warfare against the United States.” A 2015 New York Times profile described the Agency housed in a St. Petersburg office building where hundreds of employees posted pro-Kremlin propaganda anonymously on social media sites in Russia and around the world. By the summer of 2016 the IRA was spending $1.2 million a month.
  • In February 2018 the Special Counsel’s office announced an indictment “against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities accused of violating U.S. criminal laws in order to interfere with U.S. elections and political processes. The indictment charges all of the defendants with conspiracy to defraud the United States, three defendants with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and five defendants with aggravated identity theft.”
  • One of the outstanding questions in the Mueller investigation is how the Internet Research Agency coordinated with other co-conspirators, and the identity of those co-conspirators.

St. Petersburg State University

  • While Alexander Kogan was working at GSR and harvesting Facebook data for Cambridge Analytica, he also worked as an associate professor at St Petersburg State University, where he received “Russian government grants to fund other research into social media.” Little is known about Kogan’s work with the university and he has denied that the Russian project had any connection to his work for Cambridge Analytica.

Lukoil

  • Cambridge Analytica gave a presentation to Russian energy company Lukoil in 2014 that included information on voter suppression in Nigeria and “micro-targeting” individuals on social media during elections. Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix was involved in various emails related to Lukoil, but there is no indication the companies pursued a deal together.

Michael Flynn-related entities

Michael Flynn has barely been in the news recently, especially since he pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI at the end of 2017. However, as one of the earliest members of Trump’s campaign, and one of the most senior members of Trump’s administration for a short time, Flynn was involved with many people and companies that did social media and influence work on behalf of Trump.

  • In August 2017 Flynn amended his financial disclosure form to show he had agreed to work with SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, to help win new US government contracts. However, a source reported that Flynn did not receive compensation or perform any work.
  • In the US, Cambridge Analytica hired Josh Weerasinghe, who had worked at defense company BAE Systems and had previously worked with Flynn at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to focus on winning US government contracts.
  • In April 2018, Senator Bob Menendez on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent two letters to the State Department and SCL Group requesting information on the $490K State Department contract awarded to SCL “when Michael Flynn was serving as an advisor for the company and on President Trump’s transition team.” The letters requested a detailed description of the work that Michael Flynn performed as an advisor for SCL Group.
  • As reported earlier, Flynn allegedly had interactions with Joel Zamel, the founder of Psy-Group and Wikistrat, who wanted Flynn to join the advisory board of Wikistrat.

Flynn Intel Group

  • Flynn started his company, Flynn Intel Group, in 2014 and closed it at the end of 2016 before he joined the Trump administration. Flynn partnered with Bijan Kian and Philip Oakley, and according to company records, Flynn Intel Group was “a premier private intelligence and cybersecurity advisory firm.” Flynn received small payments from Russian firms Kaspersky Labs and Volga-Dnepr Airlines. And according to the NYT Flynn joined the advisory board of OSY Technologies, part of the NSO Group, a secretive cyberweapons dealer founded by former Israeli intelligence officials.
  • Bijan Kian introduced Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin to Flynn Intel Group to do PR and lobbying work against Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric and someone Erdogan considered an enemy, who was living in Pennsylvania. Alptekin paid Flynn Intel Group $530K through his Netherlands-based company Inovo BV and Alptekin said funding also came from Ratio Oil Exploration, an Israeli natural gas company — although the firm denied any connection to Alptekin.
  • FIG Cyber: Tim Newberry, who co-founded White Canvas and VizSense with Jon Iadonisis, listed on his LinkedIn profile that in August 2016 he was chief executive of FIG Cyber, a unit of Flynn Intel Group.

White Canvas and VizSense

  • White Canvas was founded by Jon Iadonisi, a former Navy SEAL, and Tim Newberry, and is described as a technology company with expertise in cyber operations, digital influence, social media, and other areas. Iadonisi was close to Michael Flynn and had served with him in Iraq, and reportedly Flynn Intel Group had rented office space from White Canvas. White Canvas received $150,000 in 2016 from the Navy for “deep and dark web capability and gap analysis.”
  • VizSense was created by Jon Iadonisi and Tim Newberry as a spinoff from White Canvas. Michael Flynn’s companies as well as those run by Iadonisi and Newberry overlap in many ways. For example, in Flynn’s contract with Inovo BV, it appeared that Tim Newberry worked for Flynn Intel group as the head of their “Special Operations Cyber Force.”
  • In May 2017 the Washington Post reported that Flynn’s friend and business associate Jon Iadonisi was doing work to help Flynn on behalf of the Turkish government and Ioadonisi was also doing social media work on behalf of Trump. FEC filings showed that the Trump campaign paid $200,000 for “data management services” to Colt Ventures, which was an investor in Iadonisi’s social media company VizSense. The payment was for “a ­social-media project that involved video-content creation and “millennial engagement” in the campaign’s final month.”

Colt Ventures

  • Colt Ventures was founded by Darren Blanton who served as an adviser to Trump’s transition. Blanton met frequently with Steve Bannon and reported to him on work done for the campaign, according to a source.
  • A May 2018 Bloomberg story described efforts to win Black voters for Trump, and how a Breitbart writer, along with Steve Bannon, recruited Bruce Carter to target three areas, Florida, Philadelphia, and North Carolina. Bannon introduced Carter to Darren Blanton and Jon Iadonisi to help provide funding and social media support for Carter’s efforts, although it’s not clear if funding was provided. In October 2016, during the final presidential debate in Las Vegas, Blanton introduced Carter to Erik Prince and Michael Flynn, and then later to Rebekah Mercer.
  • Based on the Bloomberg story, it appears that Darren Blanton, who ran Colt Ventures which was a part owner of Jon Iodonisi and Tim Newberry’s firm VizSense, also knew Erik Prince, Steve Bannon, and Rebekah Mercer. This raises a bigger question about whether or not the companies Flynn was indirectly connected to — VizSense, White Canvas, and Colt Ventures — had any business involvement with SCL or Cambridge Analytica?

Additional Entities Not Included in Chart

Data sources reportedly affiliated with campaign:

  • Facebook
  • RNC
  • Palantir
  • Experian
  • Acxiom
  • InfoGroup

Others:

  • NRA
  • Various PACs
  • Secure America Now
  • Gunster Strategies (formerly Goddard Gunster) — Brexit
  • Big Data Dolphins — Brexit
  • Eldon Insurance — Brexit
  • Young America’s Foundation (YAF) — Brexit

Article updated 6/24: to add information about WhiteKnight (information HT @SlatsHenry).

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Wendy Siegelman

Freelance journalist. All new work is now published on my new site https://newstracs.com/ (you can subscribe there for email updates)