They aren't just scumbags they are snake oil salesmen. No one in the political world thinks of them as anything but snake oil salesmen. Their company is about tricking people into buying their service and never delivering any results. Look at their track record. A lot of people will point to them and say "see, this is how Trump won the election" but that's just not even remotely close to the truth, and honestly just melds their marketing of snake oil with their shadiness. Many political people have paid them and subsequently dropped them because they didn't deliver. This was no different.

The abuse of Facebook's API/Graph is much less of a story about a secret genius agency (far from the truth) and more about how Facebook policies are lax on privacy of users. Facebook knew about this for a while, and sat on it. Facebook also acknowledge it was not a "breach" it was just exploiting things Facebook had already allowed through their shifting privacy policies and permissions.