Thread by @MotherJones

1/ Let’s talk about Brad Parscale.

2/ Parscale, Donald Trump’s campaign manager and technology guru, has a plan for 2020: re-elect Trump and make money. But maybe not in that order.

Here’s the backstory… bit.ly/2USn5IH

3/ Parscale first entered the Trump family’s orbit by building websites for the Trump Organization and the Trump 2016 campaign, eventually becoming the campaign’s digital director. By the time Trump won, Parscale was practically part of the family.

4/ In 2016, Parscale pushed the campaign to place a big and successful bet on Facebook—and to route much of the spending via his own company. Overall, documents and interviews show, he put more than $90 million of campaign money through his business.

5/ After Trump won, Parscale reportedly capitalized on the attention by buying targeted ads directing people to a website advertising his services. Shortly after, he set up a PAC—illegally, according to federal complaints—to support the new administration.

6/ After Trump’s inauguration, Parscale became a governing director of a company called CloudCommerce, which purchased another company, Data Propria, formed by former employees of Cambridge Analytica.

7/ (Cambridge Analytica, lest we forget, was the infamous firm co-founded by onetime senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and hired by his 2016 campaign, that went bankrupt after the @guardian and @nytimes revealed it had a massive trove of shadily acquired Facebook user data.)

8/ The president of Data Propria has denied that it was created to help the Trump campaign, but in 2018, @AP reporters overheard him woo clients by boasting that he and Parscale were “doing the president’s work for 2020.”

9/ The situation raises the possibility that Cambridge Analytica’s controversial data could be used in Trump’s reelection.

When members of Congress wrote to the president of Data Propria to confirm he no longer had it, he never responded.

10/ Public records show that since 2017, the Trump campaign, the RNC, and the pro-Trump PAC Parscale set up have poured about $35 million into a firm owned by Parscale called Parscale Strategy. Some of that money came with commissions for Parscale.

11/ In 2018, Parscale purchased real estate in Fort Lauderdale, an hour south of Mar-a-Lago. According to property records uncovered by the @DailyMail, Parscale and his wife, Candice, spent millions on two condos and a waterside home, with expensive cars to go with.

12/ In August, @CNN discovered that Parscale was the owner of Red State Data and Digital, a vendor registered in Delaware under Candice’s name that since 2017 has received $1.7 million—from an organization co-founded by Parscale.

13/ Parscale’s abilities are particularly critical now that the coronavirus has reshaped the political landscape and pushed campaigning online. But whether or not he can adapt and pull Trump over the finish line this November, Parscale will have gotten rich and famous trying.

14/ As Parscale told the @DailyMail in 2019, “The president is an excellent businessman, and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family.”

15/15 Read @pemalevy’s full feature story on Brad Parscale: bit.ly/2USn5IH