GOP operative details Cambridge Analytica meetings
Block said he met Mercers in 2013; they later invested $15 million
A veteran Wisconsin Republican operative is providing new details on how he brought together the controversial data-mining company Cambridge Analytica with its billionaire financial supporters and ex-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
GOP politico Mark Block described the key event as taking place in 2013 when he and Cambridge Analytica boss Alexander Nix thought they were to meet billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah at a “grungy sports bar” on the Hudson River, according to Mother Jones magazine.
“We’re going like, ‘What the (expletive)?’ ” Block told the magazine.
The story continues: “Bekah texted to say she and her father would soon arrive. Moments later, Sea Owl, the Mercer family’s 203-foot superyacht, pulled up to the dock behind the sports bar.”
Aboard the $75 million luxury craft were Bannon, then the head of far-right Breitbart News, and the Mercers.
“Whatever Nix told the Mercers that day in 2013, it worked,” Mother Jones reported in its May/June issue. “They agreed to invest a reported $15 million in a new company.”
That company would be named Cambridge Analytica, and it was part of the British-based SCL Group. Bannon was given a seat on its board and named vice president of Cambridge Analytica. The politically active Mercers would become its biggest financial supporters. The company, which worked for President Donald Trump’s campaign, is facing an international uproar following reports that it tried to influence the 2016 presidential election with data taken from more than 50 million Facebook users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to testify in a congressional hearing over the social network’s handling of personal information taken from users, according to The New York Times.
Cambridge Analytica has suspended Nix, its CEO,
after he was recorded in an undercover television show offering to assist a potential client by using prostitutes and bribery to entrap political candidates.
Block, who’s been active in Wisconsin politics for more than 40 years, did not return calls from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He previously ran the ill-fated 2012 presidential campaign for GOP candidate Herman Cain.
Federal election records show Cambridge Analytica has on at least two occasions listed a New Berlin P.O. box associated with Block.
The 2013 gathering aboard the Mercers’ yacht was made possible by another Block encounter earlier that year— a chance meeting on an airplane. Block sat next to a cyberwarfare expert for the U.S. Air Force who told him about election work from Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, according to The Guardian.
After talking to the contractor on the plane, Block then met for more than six hours with Nix to talk about his firm’s work at a hotel near the White House. The mark for social media use in an election had been originally set by President Barack Obama’s two campaigns.
“By the time he was done, I’m going like, ‘Holy (expletive),’ ” Block told the magazine. “I had been aware of what Obama had done. … But this seemed to be light-years ahead.”
Another meeting followed — this time with Rebekah Mercer. After listening to Nix’s pitch during a lunch in Manhattan, she reportedly said, “I really want you to tell this to my dad.”
Along with pumping $15 million into Cambridge Analytica, the Mercers had been a primary financial supporter of Breitbart under Bannon’s leadership. But they have since cut ties with Bannon over his comments about Trump and his family in the book “Fire and Fury” and his involvement in an Alabama Senate race.
Block isn’t the only Wisconsin connection to Cambridge Analytica.
Several former campaign staffers for Republican Gov. Scott Walker went on to work for the company.
Emily Cornell, who served as deputy campaign manager for Walker’s shortlived presidential campaign, went on to become Cambridge’s senior vice president of political affairs.
Matt Oczkowski, who worked on Walker’s 2014 re-election bid and his 2016 presidential run, became head of product of Cambridge Analytica, working out of San Antonio.
Oczkowski declined to discuss his work for the firm.
And former Walker campaign staffer Molly Schweickert is now serving as vice president of global media for the company.