re: Reports of donors conducting search

No one except those in the know actually knows what's going on.

For all we know, it's organized chaos. The PTB have option A and option B lined up, but don't want either to know that they aren't the sole target. So when option B asks "let's move these contract negotisations along and start putting pen to paper," the PTB can have plausible reasons why they aren't ready to do that yet, like "Since we just lost our AD, we need to take a couple days to meet and get ourselves organized..." A few days later that turns into, "to make sure we do our due diligence, we are consulting an outside firm. Don't worry, you're still our guy, we just need to check all the boxes..."

Maybe it is just a complete cluster, but that's not the only possibility.