Key employees of the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica—a Steve Bannon-backed firm that stole data from nearly 90 million Facebook users in 2016—have made a stealthy transition to working on Donald Trump's 2020 re-election. The AP writes:
... at least four former Cambridge Analytica employees are affiliated with Data Propria, a new company specializing in voter and consumer targeting work similar to Cambridge Analytica's efforts before its collapse. The company's former head of product, Matt Oczkowski, leads the new firm, which also includes Cambridge Analytica's former chief data scientist.
Oczkowski denied a link to the Trump campaign, but acknowledged that his new firm has agreed to do 2018 campaign work for the Republican National Committee.
The AP learned of Data Propria's role in Trump's re-election effort as a result of conversations held with political contacts and prospective clients in recent weeks by Oczkowski and Trump's 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale. [...] Both Oczkowski and Parscale told the AP that no Trump re-election work by Data Propria had been planned, but confirmed that Parscale had helped Data Propria line up a successful bid on 2018 midterm polling-related work for the RNC, awarded earlier this week.
Parscale is also a partial owner of the firm's parent company.
Even though Parscale is not directly receiving money from Data Propria work, he owns a stake equivalent to 22 percent of the company's current equity and Cloud Commerce is obligated to pay him roughly two million dollars in special dividends and debt payments related to the purchase of his old business.
Just like everyone in Trump's world, Parscale is using his connections to line his own pockets. That's exactly what major GOP donors the Mercers did after providing a bunch of seed money to the original Cambridge Analytica—they then virtually required that candidates they gave money to use the firm for their campaigns.
But it sounds like the story of Cambridge Analytica, which is under scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller, is far from over. It seems to have simply gone through a re-branding effort.