After Facebook data leak, NC Democrats to file elections complaint against Tillis, GOP

The North Carolina Democratic Party contends that Sen. Thom Tillis and the North Carolina Republican Party's actions during the 2014 campaign violated federal law and elections regulations.

Democrats filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday morning.

The complaint alleges that Tillis and the state Republicans "knowingly assisted Cambridge Analytica's foreign national employees in influencing" Tillis' 2014 campaign against incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan.

Further, the complaint says Tillis and the Republicans "accepted illegal and in-kind contributions" from John Bolton's super PAC through the use of Cambridge Analytica. The Tillis campaign, the NC GOP and the Bolton political action committee all hired Cambridge Analytica during the 2014 campaign.

The Democrats are asking the FEC to investigate and fine Tillis and state Republicans "the maximum amount permitted by law."

"Recent reports detailing how Senator Tillis’ 2014 campaign and the North Carolina Republican Party used foreign nationals in decision-making roles and illegally coordinated with an outside independent expenditure group are troubling and deserve to be investigated under the full authority of the law," state Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin said in a statement. "Protecting the sanctity of our elections is paramount and any violations must be rooted out and punished to curb future efforts to undermine our elections."

The Tillis campaign denied employing foreign workers or improperly coordinating with outside groups in a statement Wednesday morning.

"This is a frivolous and blatant, politically-motivated complaint that makes a mockery of the Federal Election Commission process. Of course, the Democratic Party doesn’t care about the facts, but they do care about scoring cheap political points, even if it means making up false attacks and propagating partisan conspiracy theories. The Tillis campaign never employed foreign workers or improperly coordinated with outside groups.," the campaign said in a statement.

North Carolina GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse, in an email, pointed to a series of recent legal moves by Democrats in the state, including having Republican Party leadership deposed under oath.

Much of the information in the Democrats' complaint comes from media reports about Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica is a data firm that is now banned by Facebook, after a whistleblower said the firm acquired more than 50 million users' data from a third-party vendor and used it to shape profiles of potential voters for clients in the United States. The firm touted its work on the Tillis campaign on its website.

Bolton is now President Donald Trump's national security adviser.

In a March statement, Tillis said Cambridge Analytica was one of "many vendors that provided limited services" to his campaign.

"My expectation is that all services provided to my campaign are lawful — regardless of who provides them, including third parties. If we were misled by a vendor, that would be deeply disturbing," he wrote at the time.

The Tillis campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $30,000 in 2014 an another $100,000 in 2015 — including post-election payments the campaign described as a "win bonus." The NC GOP paid Cambridge Analytica $150,000 in 2014 and another $65,000 in 2015. Bolton's super PAC, which supported several Republican candidates in the 2014 elections, paid the data firm more than $1.1 million in 2014 and 2015. The super PAC reported spending more than $1.3 million in support of Tillis, according to the FEC.

In a Senate hearing with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg about user privacy, Tillis said the Obama campaign in 2012 was the first to use Facebook data collected without users' knowledge.

"When you go back and do your research on Cambridge Analytica, I would personally appreciate it if you'd start back from the first known, high-profile national campaign that exploited Facebook data," Tillis said. "For anyone to pretend that Cambridge Analytica was the first person to exploit data clearly hasn't worked in the data analytics field."

"It would be very helpful so that we can take away the partisan rhetoric that's going on, like this is a Republican-only issue. It's a broad-based issue that needs to be fixed. And bad actors on either end of the political spectrum need to be held accountable and I trust that you all are going work on that."

FEC regulations prohibit foreign nationals — that is, citizens of another country — from "directing, dictating, controlling or directly or indirectly participating in the decision-making process ... with regard to any election-related activities."

The Democrats allege that Cambridge Analytica employee Tim Glister, a British citizen who spent time in North Carolina during the 2014 campaign, participated in decision-making for the campaign. Glister told Bloomberg in 2015 that he "was English enough to be an entertaining curiosity" during his time working in North Carolina for the state party on behalf of Tillis.

In the same article, Tillis campaign consultant Paul Shumaker said Cambridge Analytica's models allowed the Tillis campaign to identify a "cluster of voters" interested in foreign affairs. Tillis ramped up attacks on Hagan about foreign policy and the rise of the Islamic State group late in the campaign. Cambridge Analytica made similar claims on its website, suggesting that its help was one of the reasons Tillis won a close race against Hagan.

A former Cambridge Analytica staffer told NBC News that many foreign nationals worked on campaigns and that his team instructed the Tillis campaign "on the messaging."

"We crafted his messaging, we targeted his messaging," Chris Wylie told NBC.

The Democrats claim that "after providing campaign services to the Tillis campaign and the North Carolina Republican Party in the final months of 2014, Cambridge Analytica appears to have used the same information" for the John Bolton super PAC in support of Tillis. This, the complaint says, "constitutes coordination under the FEC's "common vendor" standard and thus makes the expenditures by the super PAC in favor of Tillis an "in-kind contribution" that exceeded the allowable amount.

The Campaign Legal Center previously filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that Bolton's super PAC made "illegal, excessive and unreported in-kind contributions" to Tillis' campaign through use of a common vendor, Cambridge Analytica.

The Bolton super PAC said in response to that complaint: “The allegations in the complaint are frivolous, and the John Bolton Super PAC expects to be fully vindicated. There was no coordination, direct or indirect, between the John Bolton Super PAC and the Tillis campaign, and the John Bolton Super PAC did not discuss any election-related, or any other topics, with the individuals named in the complaint. The John Bolton Super PAC acted independently of both federal and state campaigns, and any allegation to the contrary is baseless."

The Trump campaign paid nearly $6 million to Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 election.

Steve Bannon, who worked for Trump's campaign in 2016 and in the White House after the election, was Cambridge Analytica's vice president and secretary before that. He oversaw Cambridge Analytica's collection of Facebook data, a former employee told The Washington Post.

This story was originally published May 2, 2018 at 5:00 AM with the headline "After Facebook data leak, NC Democrats to file elections complaint against Tillis, GOP."