{"id":908,"date":"2018-04-10T10:02:24","date_gmt":"2018-04-10T14:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=908"},"modified":"2018-04-11T10:06:14","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T14:06:14","slug":"facebook-fallout-deals-blow-to-mercers-political-clout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=908","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Fallout Deals Blow to Mercers\u2019 Political Clout"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

By\u00a0NICHOLAS CONFESSORE<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0DAVID GELLES<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n
\n
Photo<\/span><\/p>\n
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>
The conservative donor Robert Mercer invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica, where his daughter Rebekah is a board member.<\/span>\u00a0Credit<\/span>Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last month, a friend of the wealthy conservative donor Rebekah Mercer arrived at Facebook\u2019s Silicon Valley headquarters. His task: Find out what \u2014 if anything \u2014 could repair relations between Facebook, the world\u2019s biggest social media company, and Cambridge Analytica, the voter-profiling firm co-founded by her father and used by the Trump campaign.<\/p>\n

The revelation last month that Cambridge Analytica improperly\u00a0acquired the private Facebook data of millions of users<\/a>\u00a0has set off government inquiries in Washington and London, plunging Facebook into crisis. But it has also battered the nascent political network overseen by Ms. Mercer, 44, and financed by her father, Robert Mercer, 71, a hard-line conservative billionaire.<\/p>\n

Ms. Mercer\u2019s standing in Mr. Trump\u2019s circle had already declined following the departure last year of Stephen K. Bannon, her family\u2019s former adviser and President Trump\u2019s former chief strategist, according to Republicans with close ties to the president\u2019s political operation. A pro-Trump advocacy group controlled by Ms. Mercer has gone silent following strategic disputes between her and other top donors. Plans to\u00a0wage a civil war against the Republican establishment<\/a>\u00a0in the 2018 midterms have been derailed.<\/p>\n

And last month, after reports on Cambridge in The New York Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian, Facebook banned the company from its platform, a major blow to any political or commercial targeting firm. Not a single American candidate or \u201csuper PAC\u201d committee has reported payments to the company since the 2016 campaign, according to federal records.<\/p>\n

Several Republicans in Ms. Mercer\u2019s orbit or with knowledge of Cambridge\u2019s business said that fallout from the Facebook scandal \u2014 combined with widespread doubts about the accuracy of Cambridge\u2019s psychological profiles of voters \u2014 had effectively crippled the firm\u2019s election work in the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

\u201cThey\u2019re selling magic in a bottle,\u201d said Matt Braynard, who worked alongside Cambridge on the Trump campaign, for which he served as the director of data and strategy, and now runs Look Ahead America, a group seeking to turn out disaffected rural and blue-collar voters. \u201cAnd they\u2019re becoming toxic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Mercers have made no public statements about Cambridge Analytica\u2019s troubles. Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Mercer declined to answer questions about her role in Mr. Trump\u2019s circle or the Facebook meeting about Cambridge Analytica.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
\n

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far<\/h2>\n

Revelations that consultants to the Trump campaign misused millions of Facebook users\u2019 data set off an international furor. This is how The Times covered it.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

But the effort by Ms. Mercer\u2019s friend to help mend fences with Facebook hints at both Cambridge\u2019s importance to her family\u2019s political ambitions and the perils posed by Facebook\u2019s ban.<\/p>\n

Although a Cambridge spokesman last month downplayed Ms. Mercer\u2019s role at the company \u2014 saying she had a \u201cbroad business oversight\u201d role and no involvement in its daily operations \u2014 she serves on the company\u2019s board and in the past has worked to drum up campaign business for Cambridge, according to Republicans who have worked with or competed against the firm. Former Cambridge employees said she was close to Alexander Nix, the company\u2019s chief executive, who was suspended last month after reports on Cambridge\u2019s harvesting of Facebook data.<\/p>\n

Ms. Mercer\u2019s intermediary with Facebook was Matthew Michelsen, a tech entrepreneur and investor based in San Diego, who lists his employer as GothamAlpha, a consulting firm.\u00a0According to his LinkedIn profile<\/a>, he has also advised major Silicon Valley companies, including Facebook and Palantir, a data-mining firm and intelligence contractor.<\/p>\n

Mr. Michelsen\u2019s meeting came on March 20, the day after\u00a0Facebook announced that Cambridge<\/a>\u00a0had agreed to let it audit the firm\u2019s computer servers. Mr. Michelsen met informally with a Facebook acquaintance who was accompanied by a Facebook lawyer, according to a person briefed on the meeting, and both Cambridge Analytica and the Mercers were discussed. The person discussed the meeting on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it publicly. No immediate actions were taken as a result of Mr. Michelsen\u2019s outreach.<\/p>\n

Mr. Michelsen acknowledged in an interview on Thursday that he visited the company but he would not discuss the purpose of the trip, citing nondisclosure agreements Facebook required him to sign. Ms. Mercer declined to say whether she and Mr. Michelsen had discussed the purpose of the meeting or whether he had briefed her on it afterward.<\/p>\n

Cambridge also mounted a more formal effort to assuage Facebook, the person said, sending its own lawyers to meet with Facebook on the same day Mr. Michelsen was there. The Cambridge lawyers asked Facebook officials whether the firm could be reinstated on the platform. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook\u2019s chief executive,\u00a0acknowledged that meeting<\/a>\u00a0in an interview with The Times last month, saying that his company had not decided whether to lift the ban.<\/p>\n

A Cambridge spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. In\u00a0a lengthy public statement<\/a>\u00a0on Monday, the company stated that \u201cthe vast majority of our business is commercial rather than political, contrary to the way some of the media has portrayed us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photo<\/span><\/p>\n
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>
Stephen K. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, White House advisers, with Ms. Mercer at the 2017 inauguration. The firm helped the Trump campaign target voters.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In recent years, the Mercers have become among the most prominent and highly scrutinized political donors in the United States. In the early years of the Obama administration, they began doling out tens of millions of dollars to an eclectic array of conservative groups \u2014 many of them outside Washington\u2019s mainline Republican establishment. Mr. Mercer invested $10 million in Breitbart News, the nationalist website, bringing on Mr. Bannon as chairman, while Ms. Mercer joined the boards of leading conservative think tanks.<\/p>\n

The Mercers were critical of the Republican Party\u2019s existing data apparatus, which was controlled by the party officials and consultants they hoped to disempower. Mr. Mercer bankrolled Cambridge Analytica in 2014, and Ms. Mercer encouraged candidates and PACs that took the family\u2019s money to also hire the family\u2019s data firm. Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, the Mercers backed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, putting millions of dollars \u2014 and Cambridge Analytica \u2014 behind him.<\/p>\n

But after Mr. Trump prevailed in the primaries, the Mercers switched candidates. In summer 2016, Ms. Mercer helped orchestrate a shake-up that put Mr. Bannon at the head of the Trump campaign. After Mr. Trump won the presidential election, he attended a costume ball at the Mercer estate on Long Island.<\/p>\n

Ms. Mercer secured a slot on his transition team and prime seats at his inauguration. As Mr. Trump took office, she sought to take a leading role in America First Policies, a nonprofit formed to back the president\u2019s agenda. Last spring, Ms. Mercer and her father\u00a0attended the Time 100 black-tie gala<\/a>, where she was feted as\u00a0one of the country\u2019s most influential people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But her insistence on using Cambridge to provide the Trump group with voter data, and other clashes over strategy, alienated other donors and Trump allies, according to other Republicans. Ms. Mercer formed her own group, Making America Great, and hired Emily Cornell, a Cambridge executive, to run it.<\/p>\n

Yet after an initial splash of spending in 2017 to promote Mr. Trump\u2019s policies on environmental deregulation and other issues, Making America Great appears to have gone quiet. Ms. Cornell said she was no longer affiliated with Making America Great and could not comment on the group.<\/p>\n

In November, Mr. Mercer\u00a0stepped down<\/a>\u00a0from the helm of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world\u2019s most successful hedge funds, as some investors began expressing dismay over his alliance with Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n

Photo<\/span><\/p>\n
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>
Donald J. Trump arriving for a party at the home of Mr. Mercer, one of his biggest campaign donors, in December 2016.<\/span>\u00a0Credit<\/span>Evan Vucci\/Associated Press<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The family is likely to retain significant influence in broader conservative circles thanks to its vast fortune, which finances donations that many political organizations and candidates are eager to accept. The family foundation handed out about $20 million to more than two dozen conservative think tanks, charter school groups, watchdog outfits and other nonprofit organizations in 2016, according to its most recent tax return.<\/p>\n

Ms. Mercer remains a trustee of the Heritage Foundation, a prominent Washington think tank that has\u00a0provided the Trump administration with grist<\/a>\u00a0for a range of initiatives. The foreign policy hawk John R. Bolton, whose super PAC the Mercers lavished with cash and whom Ms. Mercer once lobbied the White House to make secretary of state, was recently tapped to become Mr. Trump\u2019s national security adviser.<\/p>\n

The family has also donated $4.5 million to Republican candidates and super PACs during the 2018 election cycle, putting the Mercers among the top 20 donors in the country. And the father-daughter duo still inspire fear: Virtually no Republicans were willing to speak on the record about the family\u2019s troubles.<\/p>\n