Thread by @carolecadwalla

If I was an investigative journalist, I think I’d be curious why Guido Fawkes picked me as his Main Character. Dozens, if not hundreds, of articles on crazy conspiracist Carole. It’s not for me to say it’s creepy & fucked up. But since no-one else will: it’s creepy & fucked up.

The entire British press & political establishment is afraid of Guido. He’s based offshore so doesn’t fear libel. He doesn’t give right to replies. He doesn’t belong to any press regulator. And he doesn’t correct. He embodies both power & fear. And he uses it for both good & ill.

I desperately tried to avoid Guido. I’d seen what he did to other people. Though by people, I mean “women”. Turns out, you don’t have a choice. Don’t know what @HackneyAbbott did to Guido but it’s just as well he didn’t disproportionately target a black female MP in plain sight?

Here’s what I know about online abuse: whatever happens to the rest of us happens to black women first. I didn’t speak up for @HackneyAbbott because it wasn’t my beat. Because I wasn’t a political reporter. Because. But fact is, I didn’t speak up. And then Guido came for me.

Much of Guido’s ‘material’ on me comes directly from Arron Banks. I’m not saying he’s Banks’s personal news service because Arron Banks doesn’t need a personal news service: he has Guido. Anyway yesterday he published a weird statement about his contacts with Russian officials

Inevitably he makes it all about me. And imputes various bits of nonsense. Below is what I actually said. His friendship with Sergei Nalobin, the Russian spy who ran an influence operation that targeted Conservative MPs & allies, that he wrote about y’day is one of those links

But his denials & threats are a little weird given it’s a matter of record that his company MessageSpace worked with the Russian Embassy. Guido - aka Paul Staines - had a contract with the Russia Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help ‘explain Russia’s foreign policy positions.’

In his statement yesterday, Guido said it was ‘untrue’ he had any relationship with the Russian Embassy 🤷‍♀️ He says it’s what explains his ‘animus’ toward me & his ‘sympathy’ for Arron Banks.

Some background: MessageSpace was co-founded by Guido & Jag Singh. Here’s Singh with Guido, now Sun, reporter Harry Cole in Moscow in 2011. Singh was another Conservative ‘friend of Russia’ who apparently went on Kremlin paid trips to Moscow. But his business ties go much deeper

This is Jag Singh - Guido’s business partner - explaining his business dealings with Russian govt.

‘A fluent Russian speaker, also began working with President Medvedev’s team on the Skolkovo initiative, which aimed to establish the suburb of Moscow as a new ‘Silicon Valley’.

And here’s a funny thing, shortly afterwards Singh & Guido join with a 3rd ‘friend of Russia’ the CEO of Vote Leave, Matthew Elliott, to set up a new data firm, WESS Digital ‘to help amass a trove of information ahead of the next general election’

They called it the ‘METIS’ database. Though hilariously I like to call it Guido Analytica. For a few different reasons..

Here’s one of them: the 4th WESS Digital partner, Andrew Whitehurst, ran another business with Thomas Borwick, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, who went on to become CTO of Vote Leave

So many questions. Not least what happened to happened to that treasure trove of highly valuable political campaigning data, the missing METIS database? 🤷‍♀️

Who knows? But it’s on record that Guido worked for Labour Leave providing ‘political consulting expertise & algorithms’. Which sounds weird. Until you learn, that this socialist grassroots Labour Leave campaign was, we now know, funded by Arron Banks

So I think that means that Arron Banks paid for Guido to work on an astroturfed ‘Labour’ Brexit campaign? Have I got that right? And there was a database belonging to a company that was 3/4 run by friends of Sergey Nalobin, a Russian spy?

And a few years earlier, Guido’s business partner worked with the ex-Russian president on the Kremlin’s answer to Silicon Valley. And he & Guido had a contract with the Russian Embassy to explain foreign policy.

sk.ru/news/dmitry-me…

And Guido now runs interference for Banks on me, some 200+ articles. But he wants it to be totally clear that’s just ‘animus’. And I guess the misogyny is just thrown in for free.

Anyway. I understand why it’s so hard to stand up to Guido. I also tried to avoid him but a target got stuck on my back anyway. Thank you @peterjukes & @adamboultonTABB who are the only journalists I know who call him out for the bully he is

Final postscript for a little bit of even weirder. This is where Cambridge Analytica washed up. In the offices of Griffin Law. Donal Blaney, a Conservative activist is a friend of Guido’s. And also his lawyer. And now he also acts for Rebekah Mercer & CA’s successor, Emerdata.

This is a write-up of a case Guido brought. Donal Blaney acted for him. And fascinatingly Matthew Richardson was the barrister. He’s UKIP’s ex general secretary & is another Mercer lawyer. To remind you, they funded both Cambridge Analytica & Trump

theguardian.com/technology/200…

And here bringing the gang together is, of course, the man himself: Nigel Farage. He’s with Matthew Richardson at Trump Tower. They’d just been to visit Trump & the transition team when who should they bump into? Robert Mercer.

Robert Mercer’s money & influence & the Kremlin money both flooded through the US 2016 campaign. The full extent of it has still not been unravelled despite a multi-year FBI inquiry. Were there any links to Britain? It’s hard to know.

I guess we’ll just keep adding these to this thread. Yesterday Guido said it was false & defamatory to suggest he had a Kremlin links…so it’s lucky that he’s the one confirming to @RhonddaBryant here that he’s being paid by the Russian state.

(Also I left @mrjamesob out of my (very short) list of journalists who stand up to Guido. And the long-standing efforts of @zelo_street & @bloggerheads 🙏)