Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum

After the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum on the UK leaving the EU ("Brexit"), Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that Russia "might be happy" with a positive Brexit vote. The official Remain campaign accused the Kremlin of secretly backing a positive Brexit vote.[3]

• 2014 July 22, Laurence Levy, a lawyer with the U.S. law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, advises U.S. heiress Rebekah Mercer, American media executive Steve Bannon, and British businessman Alexander Nix on the legality of their company, Cambridge Analytica, being involved in U.S. elections. He advises that Nix and any foreign nationals without a green card working for the company not be involved in any decisions about work the company performs for any clients related to U.S. elections. He further advises Nix to recuse himself from any involvement with the company's U.S. election work because he is not a U.S. citizen.[4][5]
• 2015 September 26–27, during the UKIP annual conference at the Doncaster Racecourse, British political activist Andy Wigmore meets Alexander Udod, a Russian diplomat and suspected Russian intelligence officer, who in 2018 was to be expelled from the U.K. in retaliation for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. In October, Udod arranges a November lunch for Wigmore, British businessman Arron Banks, and the Russian ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko.[6][7][8]
• 24 October 2015, Arron Banks sends an email to Steve Bannon and others to request help from Cambridge Analytica, where Bannon is a VP, with fundraising in the U.S. for the Leave.EU campaign. Foreign contributions to British political campaigns are illegal. Banks comes under criminal investigation in 2018 in part over questions about Leave.EU's funding sources.[9][10]
• 6 November 2015, Wigmore and Banks have lunch with Yakovenko at the ambassador's residence in London; they brief him on Brexit. In a June 2018 interview, Wigmore tells The Washington Post his goal for the meeting was to discuss finding a buyer for a banana plantation in Belize.[6][7]
• 17 November 2015, Andy Wigmore, Banks, and Cambridge Analytica executive Brittany Kaiser launch the Leave.EU campaign.[11][12] Yakovenko introduces Wigmore and Banks to Russian oligarch Siman Povarenkin and documents related to the meeting suggest Banks was offered business deals, per The Guardian reports from 2018.[11]
• 2016 March, Philip Hammond, the former Secretary for Defence and Foreign Secretary (later the Chancellor of the Exchequer) stated in a speech "the only country who would like us to leave the EU is Russia".[13]

• 2016 July 21, Wigmore and Nigel Farage encounter staffers for Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant at the bar in the Hilton Hotel. A staffer invites Wigmore and Farage to Mississippi.[6]
• 2016 November 12, Banks, Farage and Wigmore visit Trump Tower unannounced and are invited inside by Bannon. They have a long meeting with Trump. Wigmore asks Trump's receptionist for the Trump transition team's contact information.[14][6][7]
• December 2016, Ben Bradshaw MP claimed in Parliament that Russia had interfered in the Brexit referendum campaign.[15] In February 2017, Bradshaw called on the British intelligence service, Government Communications Headquarters, then under Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary, to reveal any information it had on Russian interference.[16]
• 26 February 2017, Andy Wigmore tells The Guardian that Robert Mercer donated Cambridge Analytica's services to the Leave.EU campaign. The U.K. Electoral Commission says the donation was not declared.[17]
• 16 March 2017, The American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) gives an "International Consultant of the Year" award to Nigel Farage and Leave.EU in Huntington Beach, California.[18]
• 17–25 March 2017, While in Orange County, California, Farage and Arron Banks attend GOP gatherings at Scott Baugh's invitation. Splitting California into two states is discussed at two of the gatherings. Afterwards The Washington Times and The Sunday Times, London reports that Baugh and Gerry Gunster are hiring Farage and Banks to help fundraise in California for a campaign to split the state in two.[19][20] Baugh denies the story saying he only, "asked Farage if he would be interested in talking to some of the county’s GOP movers and shakers.".[21]
• 2017 October, Members of Parliament in the Culture, Media and Sport Committee demanded that Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media corporations disclose all adverts and details of payments by Russia in the Brexit campaign.[22]
• November 2017, it became public knowledge that Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of Vote Leave, was a founding member of Conservative Friends of Russia, and had been a target asset by someone known to be a Russian spy.[23]
• 12 December 2017, members of the US Congress Ruben Gallego, Eric Swalwell and Gerry Connolly wrote to the Director of National Intelligence requesting information on Russian interference in the Brexit vote.[24] On 13 December 2017, Facebook stated that it found no significant Russian activity during Brexit, but this was immediately rejected by the committee chair, Damian Collins, as being information that was already public after US investigations into Russian interference.[25]
• 2018 January, a US Senate minority report suggested possible ways Russia may have influenced the Brexit campaign.[26] It stated,[27]

The Russian government has sought to influence democracy in the United Kingdom through disinformation, cyber hacking, and corruption. While a complete picture of the scope and nature of Kremlin interference in the UK's June 2016 referendum is still emerging, Prime Minister Theresa May and the UK government have condemned the Kremlin’s active measures, and various UK government entities, including the Electoral Commission and parliamentarians, have launched investigations into different aspects of possible Russian government meddling.

• 19 March 2018, Channel 4 broadcasts its investigative documentary on Cambridge Analytica.[28]
• June 2018, The Guardian suggested that Arron Banks, the biggest donor to the campaign for leaving, and co-organiser of Leave.EU received the offer of a Russian gold mine, and had had a series of meetings with the Russian Ambassador. On 14 June 2018, Banks appeared before Parliamentary committee hearing, where he appeared to admit to having lied about his engagements with Russians, and later walked out refusing to answer further questions by citing a luncheon appointment with the Democratic Unionist Party.[29]
• July 2018, the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, released an interim report on 'Disinformation and ‘fake news’', stating that Russia had engaged in "unconventional warfare" through Twitter and other social media against the United Kingdom, designed to amplify support for a "leave" vote in Brexit.[30]
• 20 September, AggregateIQ, a Canadian political consultancy and analytics company, receives the first General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) notice issued by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for using people's data "for purposes which they would not have expected." Various pro-Brexit campaigns paid the company £3.5 million to target ads at prospective voters. While its Brexit work was before the GDPR went into effect, it was fined because it retained and continued to use the data after the GDPR came into full force. The company is affiliated with SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica, and Cambridge Analytica employees sometimes call AggregateIQ "our Canadian office."[31]
• 1 November 2018, The British National Crime Agency opens a criminal investigation into Arron Banks upon referral from the Electoral Commission and concluded "we have reasonable grounds to suspect that: Mr Banks was not the true source of the £8m reported as loans" and "Various criminal offences may have been committed."[32] The commission believes Banks facilitated a loan from Rock Holdings to his Leave.EU campaign. Rock Holdings is barred from funding campaigns in the U.K. under British election law because it is on the Isle of Man, which is a possession of the British Crown but not part of the United Kingdom.[33]
• 2019 February, The Guardian reports that Brittany Kaiser, former business development director of SCL Group, was subpoenaed by Robert Mueller. Her spokesman said she was cooperating fully with his investigation. She is the first person with links to both Brexit and the Trump campaign known to have been questioned by Mueller.[34]
• 17 October 2019, the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament passes a completed report on allegations that Russian government-sponsored activities had an effect on the outcome of the referendum to Downing Street.[35]
• 4 November 2019, Downing Street comments that the report received on 17 October will not be published prior to the 2019 UK General Election.[35]

According to a US senate report, Russian state media channel RT covered the referendum campaign extensively and offered "systematically one-sided coverage".[39][40] A parliamentary inquiry into disinformation and 'fake news' cited research estimating the value of anti-EU Russian state media during the EU referendum campaign at between £1.4 and 4.14 million.[37]

Data released by Twitter in 2018 identified 3,841 accounts of Russian origin affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, as well as 770 potentially from Iran, which collectively sent over 10 million Tweets in "an effort to spread disinformation and discord", according to The Telegraph, with a "day-long blitz" on the day of the referendum.[41][42] One study, with a sample of 1.5 million tweets containing hashtags relating to the referendum, found that almost a third of all tweets had been generated by just 1% of the 300,000 sampled accounts. They found that both pro-Leave and pro-Remain bots existed but that "the family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominates", with pro-Leave bots tweeting more than three times as often.[43][44]

In November 2017, The Times reported that researchers from Swansea University and UC Berkeley had identified around 150,000 accounts with links to Russia that tweeted about Brexit in the run-up to the referendum.[45][46] Others at City, University of London had previously documented a network of 13,493 accounts that tweeted about the referendum, “only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot”.[47] A working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research claims the influence of Twitter bots may have been significant enough to impact the result, roughly calculating that automated accounts may have ultimately been responsible for around 1.76 percentage points of the 'Leave' vote share.[48][49]

An analysis by cybersecurity firm F-Secure indicated that "suspicious activity" relating to Brexit-related posts on Twitter has continued after the referendum and into 2019, with Professor Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter commenting that the observed patterns of activity are consistent with tactics used by Russian troll farms.[50][51]