Thread by @peterjukes

Back after a break at Court 13 of the Royal Courts of Justice in the case of Banks v Cadwalladr. William McCormick QC is cross questioning the Observer journalist for Banks

“The subject of Russian influence was obviously on my mind” but Cadwalladr but “there was no suggestion of direct Russian money into Brexit, so it was an odd thing to say. The question was answered without me raising it”

“It was a profile piece, trying to understand why Mr Banks had made statements in favour of Russia… trying to understand Mr Banks and the offshore structure of his companies. It was about opening things up,” she says of the first Banks interview

“I thought I elicit more information by indirect ways” when cross examined about her first interview with Banks “I was going to raise questions around his complex offshore structures, his wife’s peripheral involvement in a spy scandal, and this pro Russian statements.”

“I was interested in the general subject of Russian influence in Brexit, because the opening of an investigation into Russia in the US” Cadwalladr says, because of Banks’ direct connections to Trump.

McCormick says that “Russian funding of Brexit” was a matter of public discussion in March 2017. He refers to tweets about the Atlantic Council by Arron Banks which has four retweets and a few likes

“The Atlantic Council report did not say the Russians funded Brexit” Cadwalladr tells McCormick. “I was confused… Mr Banks’ denial struck me as odd. There was no debate of any illicit foreign funding of Brexit” back in March 2017

McCormick goes back to some Tweets in 2017, in which Arron Banks himself raised the issue of foreign funding of Brexit. But Cadwalladr says she doesn’t think that there was “any public debate of the foreign funding of Brexit”. A rare intervention by Gavin Millar QC

They go back to a Guardian article. Cadwalladr says she didn’t know that Banks was also suing CNN. McCormick refers back to another Banks Tweet about a “dark funding loophole” which he called untrue

The Tweet about dark money is by Maajid Nawaz. Cadwalladr says “it’s really curious. Because before we started our investigation in Observer, and @openDemocracy started their investigation into Dark money, this wasn’t a matter of public debate”

“It wasn’t a matter of widespread discussion…. This is an oddity” Cadwalladr says again of the Nawaz tweet about “dark money” - a term popularised by Janet Mayer but “in Feb 2017 it wasn’t a term in common usage at that time” about UK politics

Re Banks’ “Russian Money” Tweet, Cadwalladr explains she would have looked at Banks’ Twitter feed, but “there were more memorable tweets when he expressed his support for Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Crimea”

McCormick goes back to the Banks interview. She knew Banks had “threatened to sue on the basis he was a Russian actor”. Cadwalladr goes back to the Guardian article about the Atlantic council. (A lot of scrolling down ensues)

Cadwalladr says she knew Banks threatened to sue “allegations he was a Russian actor” but she didn’t know about the CNN story. She hadn’t seen the clip which referred to the Atlantic Council”

McCormick goes back to the discrepancy that Banks said in the book he had one boozy lunch with the Ambassador, but at the interview and in the car afterwards Banks admitted to two lunches with Alexander Yakovenko.

Clarification: after Banks admitted two boozy lunches with the Russian Embassy, she spoke to Wigmore on speakerphone in her car who said there was only one. She followed up with questions to Wigmore on Twitter on a couple of occasions

“It wasn’t a big deal. It was a curiosity until the ensuing period,” Cadwalladr says of the discrepancy about the two meetings in 2017. McCormick suggests it became a big deal when the cache of emails revealed “Undisclosed contacts at the embassy”

Cadwalladr says this “curiousity” mounted cumulatively and became a bigger deal when Arron Banks was investigated by the Electoral Commission and said there was only one boozy lunch with the Russian Embassy

She agrees Banks’ discrepancy became a “big deal” in June 2018 when she discovered more undisclosed contacts with the Russian Embassy

“I can do a search on Twitter and find the Tweet now” says Cadwalladr in reference to a Tweet to Wigmore. “That’s not how we do things” says Banks’ QC.

Cadwalladr explains that pursuing those particular questions was not a priority because she was focused for the rest of 2017 on the Cambridge Analytica investigation

Cadwalladr says that the issue of lunches with the Russian Embassy is still unclear because “he cannot recollect”. In November 2017 when the regulator opened an investigation Banks said only one lunch, and she took that as a matter of record

McCormick drills down on the definition of a meal and two boozy lunches.

‘The emails published show multiple contacts with the Russian embassy and Ambassador” said Cadwalladr.

McCormick says he expected Cadwalladr to say, as an investigative journalist, that there was no evidence that Banks lied in the interview. But Cadwalladr says she is referring to the public statement and the regulator

Asked whether by McCormick whether this is the explicitly lie she us referring to in the TED talks, she points to the evidence session in Parliament during which Damian Collins, chair of DCMS, called Banks a liar. She mentioned that 4 times in an Observer piece

“That article has received no legal challenge…. That is central to my understanding of the episode”: these allegations of lying by Banks formed the basis of her TED talks

The Observer scrupulously dealt with a subsequent legal letter, says Cadwalladr. But that article in which Cadwalladr said four times that Banks had lied was not a subject of a legal complaint.

McCormick suggests Cadwalladr relied “on a press release by an MP” about Banks’ lying. “The chair of the biggest inquiry in the world into fake news,” replies Cadwalladr in reference Damian Collins

Cadwalladr says she will sometimes ask people about their personal life. On Banks, she said we would in the case of Mike Hancock MP who had been identified by British Intelligence as a subject of Russian interference