— A report from NBC News claims foreign nationals employed by Cambridge Analytica were embedded in North Carolina in 2014, working on the U.S. Senate campaign of Thom Tillis.

The Tillis campaign says the report is untrue.

NBC cites two former Cambridge Analytica employees, one unnamed, who claim direct knowledge of the matter. Its main source is Christopher Wylie, an early employee of Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, military contractor SCL.

Wylie, a Canadian, has been prominent in recent reports that SCL and Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained the private personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge. The data, according to Wylie, was used for "psychographic profiling" for political campaigns.

North Carolina's 2014 Senate race was one of the first U.S. contests Cambridge Analytica worked on.

Involvement by non-citizens in U.S. campaigns is a gray area in elections law, depending on the extent to which the individuals influenced decisions about campaign expenditures.

The role of the alleged campaign workers in Tillis' campaign is not entirely clear in the report. However, Wylie claims he was instrumental in designing and targeting the messaging for the candidate.

According to the NBC story, Wylie said he "couldn't recall any American Cambridge employees working on the Tillis campaign."

"There were three or four full-time CA staffers embedded in Tillis's campaign on the ground in Raleigh," Wylie said. "All of them were foreign nationals."

In a statement Saturday afternoon to WRAL News, the Tillis campaign denied the report.

"This is an embarrassingly sloppy and factually false article by NBC News, which apparently doesn’t understand that a candidate’s campaign and a state party are not the same things. The Tillis campaign committee was based in and operated out of Cornelius, not Raleigh. Contrary to the false ‘reporting’ by NBC News, Cambridge Analytica staffers were not embedded in the Tillis campaign," the statement said. "Had NBC News bothered to do basic fact checking beforehand, they would have avoided the embarrassment of putting out this misinformation.”

According to NBC, a second former Cambridge Analytica senior employee confirmed Wylie's version of events.

Cambridge Analytica's website highlights its work for the Tillis campaign as a success story. Federal campaign finance records show the Tillis campaign paid the firm $30,000 in 2014 and another $100,000 in 2015 for "micro-targeting."

On Tuesday, Tillis told WRAL News that the firm's role in his campaign was "limited" and said it would be "deeply disturbing" if the firm had misled his campaign about the legality of its services.

The network story cites an unnamed North Carolina Republican Party spokesman as saying the Cambridge Analytica contractors in North Carolina were working for the party, not directly for the Tillis campaign.

The spokesman also told NBC that the data-mining firm "is not accused of breaking any law or FEC rules during its work in North Carolina in 2014," adding that neither the party nor Tillis has been accused of doing anything "wrong, unethical, or unlawful."

Federal campaign finance records show the state party paid Cambridge Analytica $215,000 in 2014 and 2015. The party was the firm's fourth-largest client in 2014.

In an interview with WRAL News, NCGOP director Dallas Woodhouse, who was not with the party in 2014, could neither confirm nor deny that any Cambridge Analytica personnel were working for the party on the ground in North Carolina in 2014.

"I don’t know whether that’s true or not or whether they had a foreign nationality," Woodhouse told WRAL News. "If they did, we would have no way of knowing. And if they did, it doesn’t appear it would be illegal, because they didn’t make any decisions about the campaign. They would not be in a decision-making role. They provided data analytics.

"We would tell a vendor they had to act openly and ethically and within the law, and if they don’t, that would prevent them from future work," Woodhouse added. "We don’t have any plans to work with them anyway and haven’t in four years. One of the reasons is because the [Republican National Committee] data is so good, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper."

Woodhouse also cast doubt on claims that Cambridge Analytica's alleged improper possession of private data may have affected the outcome of the 2014 race.

"We don’t rely on any single-source data provider," he said. "If one company’s wrong, then you’re really screwed."

In 2014, Woodhouse recollected, "We used I-360, we used RNC data, we used Cambridge, we used [voter records from the North Carolina] Board of Elections – all of that goes into an aggregate data file that we control and decide what to do with."