Rudy Giuliani’s law firm warned Cambridge Analytica, which worked with the Trump campaign, in 2014 that foreign citizens could not play “substantive management” roles in the running of U.S. election campaigns unless they were permanent residents, according to a report.
Lawyers from the firm formerly known as Bracewell & Giuliani, of which the former New York mayor and Trump campaign surrogate was a named partner, detailed their advice in a memo dated July 22, 2014, per MSNBC’s Ari Melber on Friday.
The document was addressed to Trump mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica’s suspended head, Alexander Nix, Melber said.
“This is not some low level paper work, this is from the law firm of one of Donald Trump’s earliest allies, Rudy Giuliani, addressing one of Trump’s biggest donors and his future campaign manager and the now suspended CEO of this controversial firm and let me show you what we got,” Melber added, holding up the memo on his show, “The Beat.“
“He warned them, this firm, not to do something that the whistleblower told us they went on to do,” he continued, referring to comments from Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, on Thursday alluding to the existence of the document.
New: We obtained the secret memo from Rudy Giuliani’s law firm directly warning one of Trump’s biggest donors, Rebekah Mercer, Steve Bannon and Trump data firm CEO Alexander Nix about breaking U.S. law. pic.twitter.com/WVLJg5xueZ
— TheBeat w/Ari Melber (@TheBeatWithAri) March 23, 2018
In the memo, legal counsel wrote Nix, a British foreign national, “would first have to be recused from substantive management of any such clients involved in U.S. elections.”
“Final analysis of said data should be conducted by U.S. citizens,” the document further stated.
Wylie has also suggested that Cambridge Analytica had as many as 20 foreign operatives embedded in GOP congressional races, Melber added.
The memo was drafted before Trump announced his candidacy for president in June 2015. His campaign later hired Cambridge Analytica to help it target voters and place ads.
Cambridge Analytica faces several investigations after Facebook accused the firm last week of obtaining personal information from 50 million Facebook users during the 2016 election cycle without their permission under the guise of an academic study by Cambridge University psychologist Aleksandr Kogan.
Cambridge Analytica, which suspended Nix on Tuesday amid the controversy, has denied any wrongdoing.
