Report: US consultant leaked ‘dirt’ on Buhari to international media in 2015 presidential poll

Sam Patten, a former official of the US state department, has been revealed to be behind the leaked documents containing ‘dirt’ on President Muhammadu Buhari in the run-up to the 2015 presidential election.

An investigation by a team of newspapers, including the Guardian and Observer that revealed the identity of the Israeli hacker involved with Cambridge Analytica in a plot to manipulate the 2015 presidential election in Nigeria, said Patten was instrumental in using the hacked information to influence the election.

The Israeli hacker named Tal Hanan, a “hacking and disinformation specialist”, was tasked with obtaining information, including the medical and financial records of Buhari, from the then-opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Meanwhile, Patten, who was the consultant that managed Cambridge Analytica’s campaign on the ground in Nigeria at the time, was “responsible for exploiting the material provided by Hanan”.

“In January 2015, Patten found himself parachuted into Abuja, Nigeria, to lead a last-minute $1.8m “ghost” campaign for SCL (Cambridge Analytica) in support of President Jonathan and against Buhari. Kaiser had helped land the contract in her first weeks with the company,” the report reads.

The materials gotten from the opposition were said to have been leaked to BuzzFeed and the Washington Free Beacon by Patten, who admitted to New York magazine in 2019, that his work for Cambridge Analytica “was analysis, speechwriting, ads and attempts to sway the media”.

The report suggested that there was no evidence that Patten knew about the nefarious methods through which the material on the Nigerian then-opposition party was obtained by the Israeli hackers.

“We continue to analyse the information that we received from Jorge (Hanan) to see if there is anything that would ignite the international press. If we find something, then we will push it,” an employee of Cambridge Analytica was quoted to have told a representative of the “rich supporter” of Goodluck Jonathan, the former president of Nigeria.

‘PATTEN & INTERNATIONAL MEDIA’

In an email discovered by the Guardian, Patten was said to have fed international media with information that Buhari’s campaign was run by AKPD Message and Media, the political consultancy founded by David Axelrod, a former chief strategist to Barack Obama.

“Did anyone come up with anything that could be of interest? My overall read is that, while a good insight into campaign thinking, there are few silver bullets or smoking guns,” the report quoted Patten to have said.

“Use the AKPD bits. What are our media pitch angles? B’s [Buhari’s] actual positions are obscured by a slick ‘change’ campaign steered by well-heeled American consultants,” Patten said in another email.

Shortly after the last email, BuzzFeed, a news company based in New York, published an article with the headline: “Firm founded by David Axelrod worked in Nigerian election as recently as December”.

On the same day, Washington Feed Beacon had an article titled “David Axelrod’s Political Consulting Firm Far More Involved in Nigeria Election than Previously Disclosed”.