A couple of months ago, you may have read headlines making quite a stir about how some Bernie Sanders “alumni” expressed interest in working for Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 bid over Bernie’s.

What these reports likely have not told you about is how money — as it too often does — is potentially influencing at least some of these peculiar decisions.

Take, for instance, Kenneth Pennington, Hector Sigala and Elizabeth Bennett — co-founders of Middle Seat Consulting. One look at FEC records, and you quickly begin to realize why these “Bernie alumni” might be so keen to work for a member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition who even the Third Way saw fit to praise (“We are big Beto fans”).

This OpenSecrets list says it more plainly: in exchange for work in support of Beto’s 2018 Senate campaign, Middle Seat was paid a handsome sum of $18,133,750. The runner-up in money spent for Middle Seat’s services downright pales in comparison by at least a couple of orders of magnitude.

It doesn’t take a campaign finance expert to see Beto is good for Middle Seat’s business. $18 out of $20 million ain’t bad.

This is not to say just anyone who has purchased services from Middle Seat must, therefore, be questionable. After all, they do openly advertise themselves as former Bernie staffers committed to progressive causes. What honest progressive in need of such services wouldn’t get the warm-and-fuzzies about that?

However, one should ask why two open “partners” of Hillary Clinton’s latest organization, Onward Together — ColorOfChange and Indivisible — would see fit to purchase services from former Bernie staffers. Perhaps this is down to happenstance or coincidence, or these were transactions conducted in some spirit of “unity.”

Another coincidence? Pennington’s colleague from the Bernie days, who also happens to have followed him to work at Middle Seat — Aidan King.

Or, as Reddit once knew him by, vermonty_python.

You see, in addition to working for the Bernie campaign at the time, he was also a moderator of the SandersForPresident subreddit. And one day, in the middle of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, he happened to “panic” at a deluge of terrible comments entering a public online forum and closed the sub.

Evidently, Aidan was in such a panic over the flood of horrific comments that he responded to notorious, anti-Bernie subreddit “Enough_Sanders_Spam” tagging him with a plea to close SandersForPresident by asking them to “Stay Tuned,” closing the sub, then initially noting he included a “Cherney reference just for [them]” in the S4P closure post, but had “edited it out. Opted for professionalism instead.” He would later edit this post again — more than once — before all was over.

Needless to say, Aidan King is no longer a moderator of SandersForPresident.

Whether Middle Seat ultimately gets the chance to profit from Beto’s 2020 run as they did during his Senate race remains to be seen. Regardless, these past moneyed ties to the establishment that supports Beto, as well as past actions by some parties which seem to benefit the same establishment, leave some reason for pause and room to question how far back these relationships go.

This pause is particularly warranted when Onward Together co-founder Howard Dean also happens to be given a new job at the DNC — management of the party’s latest voter file database project.

No way could any of this possibly go wrong for a fair primary, having the guy who harbors hateful animus against Bernie AND Tulsi managing the voter file

But then, it manages to get just a little bit worse.

The new exchange will operate as an independent for-profit enterprise led initially by Democratic strategist Jen O’Malley Dillon, once a top adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

This is the same Jennifer who was just named campaign manager for Beto 2020.

Apparently, four years after Hillary Clinton bought out the DNC to “protect” it from bankruptcy at the hands of her friend, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, in exchange for control over it even during the primaries, I’m now supposed to believe a guy who hates Bernie and Tulsi and works with Hillary Clinton (who also still hates Bernie, let’s be honest) and Beto’s campaign manager would do nothing untoward or fishy with voter data or access to it. I’m supposed to believe people with this kind of bias are going to be impartial.

2016 called. It wants its script back.