Republicans who have worked with the political data firm Cambridge Analytica say they are now being unfairly dragged into the unfolding scandal over how the company used private information from millions of Facebook users. And, they say, the company’s work wasn’t that useful anyway.

"We're the victims here," said a top former staffer from a US campaign that used the firm, who said there were never any legal or ethical concerns at the time about how Cambridge was acquiring data. They were in the dark, the staffer said, like the Facebook users whose data was stolen.

Cambridge broke onto the political scene in a big way in 2016, working on the presidential campaigns of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, and eventually, for Donald Trump and the outside groups backing his candidacy. But the firm, which has deep ties to the GOP mega-donor Mercer family and to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, did work on behalf of at least five US House and Senate campaigns, a state party committee, and two outside groups under the radar during 2014’s elections.

Now, the firm's former clients are finding themselves entangled in a web of complicated allegations that have opened them up to attacks. Most also say that the work the firm did for them — which, for some, was four years ago — wasn't good enough to worth dealing with the blowback and insinuations they are now facing.

“A campaign would have to be a special kind of stupid to knowingly and willingly engage a vendor that had a hint of impropriety. And that’s clearly not the case with these campaigns,” said the former top staffer, who spoke on the condition of not being named to avoid further pulling his former campaign into the current Cambridge news.

Cambridge billed itself to US clients as an unconventional political data firm that had “psychographic” analyses of voters that campaigns could then use for messaging to a targeted group. The firm is now under investigation in both the US and the UK for its data-mining practices.

The staffer said Cambridge was hired because it was fairly cheap at the time and a largely unknown quantity with a different pitch. But the firm didn't ultimately help the campaign much. "My recollection is that for our campaign, services that they provided to us were fine but nothing spectacular."

Dallas Woodhouse, executive director for the North Carolina Republican Party, which paid Cambridge $150,000 in 2014, said he's not sure how the firm began working for the party, but the party used the firm’s data — along with that of other vendors — to help with its direct mail program. “We don't use any single source of data ever ... They were just one piece of the puzzle,” he said.

The Democratic Party in the state is now raising questions about Republicans’ ties to Cambridge and Russian meddling in the 2016 election, saying the state “was the guinea pig for what we saw in 2016.”

"It's the bizzarest thing I've ever seen in politics," Woodhouse said of the allegations. "At its core, this dispute is between two companies and has nothing to do with us. We have no control over what Facebook's internal rules are and how they manage rules with the many, many people that buy data from them."

"We have nothing to be ashamed of. We did nothing wrong."

A former Barack Obama campaign staffer’s admission that Democrats used similar data-mining efforts as those employed by Cambridge have added to these Republicans’ complaints that they are being unfairly scrutinized.