Billionaire Trump backer's data firm under investigation for Russia connections

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/10/12/1706365/-Data-firm-owned-by-Robert-Mercer-under-investigation-for-Russia-connections
"the detailed data that drove the design of the Russian campaigns—information that included personal information on individual voters—may have come from elsewhere, such as a firm whose specialty is providing exactly this information. And the ties between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign go beyond just Mercer: Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, had holdings in Cambridge Analytica worth between $1 million and $5 million as recently as April of this year, Bloomberg reported. Bannon, now back as the chairman of the pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart, hasn’t been publicly mentioned as a potential witness for or target of Russia investigators. He previously sat on the board of Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica is an outgrowth of a British company, SCL Group, a behavioral research company that uses massive consumer databases to shape opinions for multiple purposes. … SCL Group, which provides governments, political groups and companies around the world with services ranging from military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting. The micro-targeted information from Cambridge helped Ted Cruz win the Iowa caucuses, but when Trump became the nominee, Mercer put both his funds and his data firm behind efforts to promote Trump. Jared Kushner took the controls of Trump’s data operations, and used Cambridge Analytica to mimick what they did in other countries."