http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-17/trump-s-new-team-brings-deep-ties-to-major-donor
"When Donald Trump shook up his presidential campaign this week, he deepened his ties to Robert Mercer, a wealthy hedge-fund manager and conservative donor with a taste for bucking the Republican establishment.
Trump's new top operatives—Stephen Bannon, the campaign's new chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager—are longtime advisers to the Long Island, New York-based investor and have aided his family on a web of interlocking projects. Even within a Republican Party that has battled Bill and Hillary Clinton for decades, the Mercers and their advisers stand out as among the Clintons' most dogged and long-standing critics.
Until recently, Trump was not the Mercers' favorite. During the Republican presidential primary, Mercer and his family put $13.5 million into a political action committee to support Senator Ted Cruz's bid for the party's nomination. They put Conway in charge of the spending.
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Mercer's ties to Bannon date to at least to 2011, when Bannon's conservative Breitbart News network was struggling financially, and Mercer made a $10 million equity investment, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The next year, Bannon founded an organization called the Government Accountability Institute to research cronyism in Washington, and Mercer's family foundation became a major supporter.
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Meanwhile, the Mercers' super-PAC has retooled from supporting Cruz to attacking Clinton. Succeeding Conway at the PAC is David Bossie, who has devoted much of his professional career to battling the Clintons, starting as an investigator for House Republicans in the 1990s. His effort to promote an anti-Clinton movie during the 2008 presidential campaign led to the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, opening up a flood of new political money from wealthy individuals like the Mercers.
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