The claims and investigations have left JEDI shrouded in uncertainty. The project might not survive in its current form, according to people knowledgeable about the DOD, but there’s little doubt that the agency will move its computing to the cloud in one form or another.

As for Donnelly, she left government again last year. A going-away party was thrown for her at the Pentagon. Jared Kushner and former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn attended. Today, Cohn is the chairman of the advisory board of a new firm that Donnelly has opened, Pallas Advisors, which she founded along with Tony DeMartino, the former DOD political appointee and ex-strategy consultant for SBD.

Pallas describes itself as a “strategic advisory firm” that provides “insight into how governments think and operate.” According to a person familiar with the matter, one of Pallas’ staffers, Robert Daigle — who had previously worked on the JEDI project at the DOD — turned up in early August in the offices of at least one U.S. senator. Daigle was accompanied by Chris Lynch, who has left the DOD and founded a company, Rebellion Defense, that is seeking defense contracts relating to artificial intelligence. (Rebellion’s board members include Eric Schmidt.)

Lynch and Daigle were pushing a familiar agenda from a new vantage point: They wanted to explain why a single-cloud makes sense for the Defense Department. And if their own companies got some new opportunities as a result, it went without saying, that would be just fine with them.