7 May 23rd-May 29th, 2024 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | Yeezy Money Meet the Arizona man who tried to make Kanye West president — and got sued. BY STEPHEN LEMONS I n 20-plus years in politics, Nathan Sproul has seen a thing or two. As the founder and managing director of the Tempe-based political consulting firm Lincoln Strategy Group, Sproul has worked for five Republican presiden- tial campaigns, including Trump’s 2016 White House run. Each provided thrills and brushes with history. And then there was the time Sproul sat in another room while Kanye West filmed himself urinating on one of his Grammy awards. It was September 2020, and Sproul was at West’s home in Calabasas, California, to advise the then-billionaire rapper as he ran an ill-fated presidential campaign. “We had just gotten there,” Sproul recalled recently, “and Kanye had taken the Grammy to the bathroom.” One of West’s associates warned Sproul that his client might be about to make a little news. That was putting it lightly. After authoring a Twitter rant criticizing Universal Music Group, the parent company of West’s label Def Jam Recordings, West posted the infamous video, treating his followers to a stream of urine hitting a gold Grammy statuette in a toilet bowl. “I thought it was a joke,” Sproul said. “Sure enough, five minutes later it’s on Twitter, and we’re all sitting at his kitchen table watching the video.” Sproul, who’ll be 52 in June, dresses like a banker and speaks in rapid staccato bursts akin to a Thompson submachine gun. He looks like the last guy in the world who would be kicking it with Yeezy. Yet there he was, tabbed to advise the rapper’s campaign after West’s initial political consultant foundered. The campaign would founder, too, but even for a political operative long acquainted with Arizona’s wacky politics, it amounted to a one-of-a-kind political ride. “If I’d had a recording going on in the couple of days I spent in all-day meetings with him, just with the stuff I could have had on the recording and sold to TMZ,” Sproul said with a laugh, “I could have retired.” ‘I really liked him’ On July 4, 2020, West announced via Twitter that he was a candidate for the nation’s highest office. Sproul said he began working for Kanye 2020 a few weeks later, advising the campaign on ballot access, marketing and merchan- dising. Sproul met with West in Calabasas and in Atlanta, where West was born. He did not advise West on the pee video, which resulted in the suspension of West’s Twitter account — though some reports state that the suspension was due to West’s doxing of Forbes magazine editor-in-chief Randall Lane. Sproul did witness the immediate fallout. The video was quickly taken down — by whom, it is unclear — but not before it went viral and was reproduced on multiple platforms. The saga culminated in a call from West to Jack Dorsey, then the CEO of Twitter. (In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, renaming it X.) The resulting conversation played out on speakerphone. “(West’s) basic point was, there’s no nudity, there’s no reason this should be censored,” Sproul said. “And, obviously, Jack doesn’t know anything about it. So he’s like, ‘Let me get in touch with my people.’ Within two to three hours, a repre- sentative from Twitter was out to talk to him and told him his account was going to go back up.” The incident was bizarre, but Sproul was fond of West nonetheless. “I really liked him as a person,” Sproul said. “He’s got a big heart, and obviously, he’s one of the most famous people on the planet.” Sproul also agreed with most of West’s 10-point presidential platform, which was posted to the campaign’s website. “It was criminal justice reform, elevating faith and family and society, all types of things that I’ve found to be very noble and worth pursuing,” he said. The main hurdle was how seriously West was interested in pursuing those positions — and how seriously his campaign was to be taken. An on-again, off-again supporter of former President Donald Trump, West first publicly declared his intention to run for president during a rambling speech at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. He later visited Trump at Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago and the White House, donning a red MAGA hat during the latter. During the 2020 campaign, a supposed policy-related meeting between West and senior White House advisor Jared Kushner lent oxygen to theories that West’s candidacy was a ruse to siphon votes away from eventual winner Joe Biden. A December 2021 exposé in the Daily Beast reported that Kanye 2020 was “secretly run by GOP elites,” with Sproul being one of them. West was supposedly a “GOP plant” whose entire purpose as a candidate was to secure Trump’s reelection. If so, the plot was an abysmal failure. West entered the race too late to secure a spot on the ballot in many states, ultimately registering as a candidate in only 12. According to Ballotpedia, West garnered a total of 67,906 votes. Biden won by a narrow margin in many swing states, but handily in the Electoral College and in the overall popular vote. “I never really accepted that as a viable theory,” Sproul said of the claim that West was meant to be a spoiler. Sproul got involved, he said, because he thought West had “a good message that I agree with that should be out there. “If he would’ve put more effort into it, I think he could have elevated that message a lot,” Sproul added. “But I think as the campaign wore on, he lost interest.” SeedX lawsuit West’s campaign is long over, but Sproul’s entanglement with it lingers in the court system. The longtime consultant sat for an interview with Phoenix New Times in part to discuss a lawsuit brought against him by the digital marketing firm SeedX. The suit alleges that SeedX was never paid by Sproul or the Kanye 2020 campaign for design, marketing and e-commerce work the company did on the campaign’s behalf. The suit has been meandering through various federal courts for three years. A judge in Texas tossed the claim in 2021 for lack of jurisdiction. In April, a judge in Wyoming, where West owns two ranches, dismissed the suit against Kanye 2020, sending the claim against Sproul to Arizona for jurisdictional reasons. In the Texas version of the lawsuit, court records state that SeedX’s owners were seeking $2 million in compensation for work done for Kanye 2020. Sproul, who enlisted SeedX’s efforts, offered them $20,000, according to court documents. Sproul seemed unperturbed by SeedX’s claims, alleging that SeedX’s owners were “trying to make a fortune” off West. “They’re embellishing what they did on the campaign and what the value was that they brought to the campaign, which is greatly, greatly exaggerated to say the least,” Sproul said. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, Kanye 2020 paid $4.8 million to Sproul’s Fortified Consulting — a separate but related company to Sproul’s Lincoln Strategy — for work done on the campaign, which included getting West on the ballot as an independent candidate in 12 states. SeedX’s lawyer, Earl Landers Vickery, figures some of that money belongs to his clients. Vickery said SeedX built, designed and maintained the e-commerce website for Kanye 2020, through which the campaign sold expensive hats, T-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with the campaign’s logo, “Kanye 2020 Vision.” Vickery said SeedX employed eight to 10 people to handle the high volume of orders — raising what Vickery claimed was a $1 million in merchandise sales the day the site went live. “This was a massive undertaking,” said Vickery, whose clients had an oral contract with Sproul regarding work done for Kanye 2020 but nothing on paper. “But then add onto it that it’s a presidential campaign where you have to be aware of the campaign laws, and it’s for a hip-hop celebrity who already has a very, very well- established brand. It was this unbelievably complex exercise to run this whole thing. And then, in the end, to not get paid. I mean, it almost tanked the business.” Vickery disagreed with the Kanye West’s professed admiration of Donald Trump led to speculation that West was running a spoiler campaign to siphon votes from Joe Biden. (Photo by The Trump White House Archived via Picryl.com) | NEWS | | NEWS | >> p 11
