Free Republic

President Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination on May 3, 2016, when he crushed a final “Never Trump” effort to stop him in the Indiana primary. At the GOP Data Trust, a voter outreach organization based in Washington, the mood was bleak. It was clear Trump was heading for a blowout victory. When Trump had delivered his victory speech shortly after 9 p.m., Data Trust staffer Courtney Mullen invited her colleagues to attend an “end of the world” happy hour to mark Trump’s triumph, which the party establishment had watched in horror.

A file containing personal information on millions of Texas voters was found on an unsecured online server, Techcrunch reported Thursday. An estimated 14.8 million records were found on the server, representing files on the majority of Texas’s 15.2 million registered voters. It is unknown who owns the server, but analysis suggests the data was likely aggregated by the GOP data analytics firm Data Trust, according to Techcrunch.

The Republican National Committee has chosen a Karl Rove-linked voter data project called Liberty Works to help it compete with Democrats in the digital arena. Liberty Works will team up with Data Trust, whose chairman of the board is former RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski confirmed to POLITICO. “Basically, RNC is going to provide the data, and then Liberty Works will build the platform, and Data Trust will manage it all,” Kukowski said. “This is kind of in the beginning stages. There are legal issues that we’re going to iron out.”