Sam Patten

W. Samuel Patten is an American political consultant and lobbyist who received international attention in spring 2018 in relation to the Special Counsel investigation led by former FBI director Robert Mueller.

[2] In summer 2018, attention intensified due to Patten's emergence as a subject of the investigation in his own right, followed by his guilty plea, after being charged in August 2018 with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act for failing to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department when he represented the Opposition Bloc, a Ukrainian political party, from 2014 through 2018.

[10][11][12] Patten Jr. moved to Maine, where he published a small-town weekly newspaper in Camden and became a prison minister.

[15][14] In 2014, Patten was a senior consultant for SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, working at their Oregon office to help them fine-tune their models for the 2014 U.S. mid-term elections.

[2][6] He also helped SCL Group with their work on the 2015 Nigeria elections, including hiring Israeli hackers to find kompromat on presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari.

[1] Based in Washington, D.C.,[1] BVI is "a strategic and political advisory firm"[16] that Patten claims only has clients outside the United States.