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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
FIRST EDITION
© Brittany Kaiser 2019
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Cover photograph © Peter Dazeley/Getty Images
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Source ISBN: 9780008363895
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008363918
Version 2019-10-16
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To the Truth:
May it set us all free.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1 A Late Lunch
2 Crossing Over
3 Power in Nigeria
4 Davos
5 Terms and Conditions
6 Meetings and Reunions
7 The Face of Brexit
8 Facebook
9 Persuasion
10 Under the Influence
11 Brexit Brittany
12 Straitjacket
13 Postmortem
14 Bombs
15 Quake
16 Breakup
17 Inquiry
18 Restart
19 Of Truth and Consequences
20 The Road to Redemption
Epilogue
Picture Section
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Publisher
There’s nothing like a car ride with federal agents to make you question your life choices. That was exactly where I found myself the morning of July 18, 2018, winding through the streets of Washington, DC, heading toward an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.
My trip that morning consisted of riding in two cars, actually—the first took me to a coffee shop that the Department of Justice had randomly selected. This had been the driver’s instructions when I initially slid into the backseat: they had chosen a place unexpectedly, without planning it out or telling anyone beforehand. Then, once we were on our way, he was to radio in our destination. At the coffee shop, the second driver was waiting. Like the first driver, he was wearing a dark suit and dark glasses, but there was a second man with him as well. From the second car—outfitted like the first with tinted windows—I watched as the city’s gleaming monuments, bright and sudden and very white, flashed by us like camera bulbs.
When I was settled in the backseat between my two attorneys, it was hard not to consider just how I’d ended up here, on my way to talk to federal prosecutors about my role with the now-infamous political communications firm, Cambridge Analytica. How a situation that I’d entered with the best of intentions for me and my family had ended up so horribly and irrevocably twisted. How in the process of wanting to learn how to use data for good, and while helping my parents through a difficult financial moment, I’d ended up compromising my political and personal values. How a mixture of naïveté and ambition had landed me squarely and disturbingly on the wrong side of history.
