It’s a great advantage to
be able to treat opposition research as a tax-exempt charitable expense rather
than as, say, a campaign cost. On March 21st, Paul Teller, the executive
director of an advocacy group that serves as former Vice-President Mike Pence’s
political operation, gave a lecture to Christian pastors in which he said, of
the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!” Teller enthused, “They are just
taking it to every Biden-Harris nominee that comes across to
Congress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re fighting with the Supreme
Court nominee Jackson came from our friends at the American Accountability
Foundation.” He went on, “We’re partnering, we’re collaborating.” Teller’s
group is widely seen as promoting a potential Pence campaign for President in
2024.
When the A.A.F. applied
for its tax-exempt status, it portrayed itself, under penalty of perjury, as a
nonpartisan charity that would neither participate in political campaigns nor
try to influence legislation. As a tax-exempt nonprofit dark-money
organization, Jones’s group isn’t required to publicly disclose its donors, so
it’s impossible to know all the sources of its funding. Clearly, though, it has
big ambitions. In its I.R.S. filing, the A.A.F. submitted revenue projections
that predict its budget as six hundred thousand dollars in 2021, a million
dollars in 2022, and one and a half million dollars in 2023.
The Slime Machine
Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees
In an escalation of partisan warfare, a little-known dark-money
group is trying to thwart the President’s entire slate.
By Jane Mayer
April
16, 2022
The American Accountability Foundation has
undermined the likes of Ketanji Brown Jackson, but it’s also gone after
relatively obscure political appointees whose public profiles can be easily
distorted.
During the autos-da-fé
that now pass for Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, it’s
common for supporters of a nominee to dismiss attacks from the opposing party
as mere partisanship. But, during the recent hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson,
Andrew C. McCarthy—a Republican former federal prosecutor and a prominent legal
commentator at National Review—took the unusual step of denouncing
an attack from his own side. When Republican senators, including Josh Hawley
and Marsha Blackburn, began accusing Jackson of having been a
dangerously lenient judge toward sex offenders, McCarthy wrote a column calling
the charge “meritless to the point of demagoguery.”
He didn’t like Jackson’s judicial philosophy, but “the implication that she has
a soft spot for ‘sex offenders’ who ‘prey on children’ . . . is
a smear.”
In
the end, the attacks failed to diminish public support for Jackson, and her
poised responses to questioning helped secure her nomination, by a vote of
53–47. But the fierce campaign against her was concerning, in part because it
was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020:
the American Accountability Foundation. An explicit purpose of the A.A.F.—a
politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its
backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees.
While
the hearings were taking place, the A.A.F. publicly took credit for uncovering
a note in the Harvard Law Review in which, they claimed,
Jackson had “argued that America’s
judicial system is too hard on sexual offenders.” The group also tweeted that
she had a “soft-on-sex-offender” record during her eight years as a judge on
the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. As the Washington Post and
other outlets stated, Jackson’s sentencing history on such cases was well
within the judicial mainstream, and in line with a half-dozen judges appointed
by the Trump Administration. When Jackson defended herself on this point during
the hearings, the A.A.F. said, on Twitter, that she was “lying.” The group’s
allegation—reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy, which claims that liberal élites
are abusing and trafficking children—rippled through conservative circles.
Tucker Carlson repeated the accusation on his Fox News program while a chyron
declared “jackson lenient in child sex
cases.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist
representative from Georgia, called Jackson “pro-pedophile.”
Mudslinging
is hardly new to American politics. In 1800, a campaign surrogate for Thomas
Jefferson called Jefferson’s opponent, John Adams, “hermaphroditical”; Adams’s
supporters predicted that if Jefferson were elected President he would unleash
a reign of “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest.” Neither the Democratic
nor Republican Party is above reproach when it comes to engaging in calumny,
and since at least 1987, when President Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully nominated
Robert Bork to be a Justice, the fights over Supreme Court nominees have been
especially nasty. Yet the A.A.F.’s approach represents a new escalation in
partisan warfare, and underscores the growing role that secret spending has
played in deepening the polarization in Washington.
Rather
than attack a single candidate or nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire
Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s
legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web
site, bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of
Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies.
And the A.A.F. hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the
kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well
defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political
appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little
entrenched support. The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has
particularly focussed on blocking women and people of color. As of last month,
more than a third of the twenty-nine candidates it had publicly attacked were
people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.
Among
the nominees the group boasts of having successfully derailed are Saule
Omarova, a nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Biden named to be the
vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board. David Chipman, whom
the President wanted to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives, and David Weil, Biden’s choice for the Wage and Hour Division of
the Department of Labor, both saw their nominations founder in the wake of
A.A.F. attacks. Currently, the group is waging a negative campaign against Lisa
Cook, who, if confirmed, would become the first Black woman to serve on the
Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
Tom
Jones, the A.A.F.’s founder and executive director, is a longtime Beltway
operative specializing in opposition research. Records show that over the years
he has worked for several of the most conservative Republicans to have served
in the Senate, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim
DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was
briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research
effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an
interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, “Ms.
Meyers . . . Go pound sand.” Citing an article that I had written debunking
attacks on Bloom Raskin from moneyed interests, including the A.A.F., he said,
“You are a liberal hack masquerading as an investigative journalist—and not a
very good one.” Jones subsequently posted this comment on his group’s Twitter
account, along with my e-mail address and cell-phone number.
A
decade ago, Bill Dauster, a Democrat who is now the chief counsel to the Senate
Budget Committee, helped Jones organize a bipartisan Torah study group for
Jewish congressional staffers. Dauster recalls him as “soft-spoken and
cordial,” and finds it hard to reconcile the man he knew with Jones’s current
persona. “I find what he appears to have done quite distasteful,” he said.
In
interviews with right-wing media outlets, Jones hasn’t been shy about his
intentions. Last April, he told Fox News, which called A.A.F.’s tactics
“controversial,” that his group wants to “take a big handful of sand and throw
it in the gears of the Biden Administration,” making it “as difficult as
possible” for the President and his allies on Capitol Hill “to implement their
agenda.” When asked why his group was bothering to attack sub-Cabinet-level
appointees, he explained that people in “that second tier are really the folks
who are going to do the day-to-day work implementing the agenda.”
Last
year, an A.A.F. member infiltrated a Zoom training session for congressional
staffers about the ethics rules surrounding earmarks—pet spending projects that
lawmakers write into the federal budget. The infiltrator asked leading
questions during the meeting and then posted a recording of it online. The
attempted sting backfired: nothing incriminating was said, and the A.A.F.’s
underhanded tactics became the story. Evan Hollander, then the spokesman for
the House Appropriations Committee, told The Hill that, “for a
group that purports to concern itself with ethics, using fake identities, misrepresenting
themselves as Congressional staff and surreptitiously recording meetings is
hypocritical in the extreme.”
Jones
made no apologies. He told Fox News, “I’m never doing anything illegal. But
just because it’s impolite to log into an earmark-training
seminar and offend the morals of Capitol Hill staff, that’s not going to stop me
from doing it.” He added, “If I’ve got to trail someone on the ground to find
out what they’re doing, I’m totally going to do it. Because people who are
making decisions need to have this information—they need to understand who they
are trusting with the reins of government. And sometimes that means we will use
unorthodox methods.”
Liberal
and conservative political groups habitually scrutinize a prominent nominee’s
record or personal life in search of disqualifying faults. But the A.A.F. has
taken the practice to extremes, repeatedly spinning negligible tidbits or
dubious hearsay into damning narratives. The group recently deployed its
unorthodox methods, Politico has reported, while “desperately pursuing dirt”
on Lisa Cook, the nominee for the Federal Reserve. Cook, who has been a tenured
professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University
since 2013, has attracted bipartisan support. Glenn Hubbard, the chair of the
Council of Economic Advisers during the George W. Bush Administration, has
said, “Cook’s talents as an economic researcher and teacher make her a good
nominee for the Fed, adding to diversity of perspectives about policy.” In
college, Cook won a Marshall Scholarship. She subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in
economics from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government, and served as a staff economist on President
Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also held appointments at the
National Bureau of Economic Research and at various regional Federal Reserve
banks. The A.A.F., though, has portrayed her as unqualified, and suggested that
her tenure at Michigan State is undeserved.
On
April 13th, Jones sent out the latest of at least three e-mail blasts from the
A.A.F. to about fifty of Cook’s colleagues at Michigan State. In the most
recent of these messages, which were obtained by The New Yorker, Jones
said that Cook “did not warrant” tenure. Through a Freedom of Information Act
request, the A.A.F. obtained records showing that the school’s provost had
granted Cook full professorship in 2020, overruling a decision not to give her
that title the previous year. Jones sent these personnel records to dozens of
Cook’s colleagues, and asked, “Are any of you concerned
that . . . she’s not good enough to sit on the Federal Reserve
Board?” He urged any detractors to “not hesitate to” contact him. Meanwhile, Jones
fished for further information by posting a message on an anonymous online
gossip forum, Economics Job Market Rumors, which has been decried by one
prominent economist as “a cesspool of misogyny.”
Some
of the A.A.F.’s attacks on Cook carried racial overtones. Cook had made
donations to bail funds for impoverished criminal defendants, including
racial-justice protesters who had been arrested; she was following a tradition
of activist lawyers in her family, and considered it a form of charity. The
A.A.F. argued on Twitter
that she had made “racist comments” and “even bailed out rioters who burned
down American cities.” Cook’s reputation was sullied enough that the Senate
Banking Committee vote on her nomination resulted in a tie, with no Republicans
supporting her. Cook’s nomination can still proceed to the Senate floor, but
her confirmation remains in limbo, as one conservative news outlet after
another repeats the A.A.F.’s talking points. A writer for the Daily Caller,
Chris Brunet, said in a Substack column that Cook is a “random economist at
Michigan State University who has shamelessly leveraged her skin color and
genitalia into gaining the backing of several key White House officials.”
Brunet tweeted proudly that his critique had been promoted on Fox News by
Tucker Carlson.
The
A.A.F.’s treatment of Cook has been mild compared with what several other Biden
nominees have gone through. Late last year, Saule Omarova—a leading academic in
the field of financial regulation, who is a law professor at Cornell and holds
doctorates in law and political science—withdrew her name from consideration as
Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency. She did so, she told me, because an
opposition-research campaign against her, which the A.A.F. took credit for,
had, among other things, falsely portrayed her as a secret communist.
Born
in Kazakhstan, in what was then the Soviet Union, Omarova received an
undergraduate degree from Moscow State University, but she became a naturalized
American citizen in 2005. Yet, during her confirmation hearing, in a moment
reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Republican Senator John Kennedy, of
Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her “professor or comrade.” Omarova replied,
“Senator, I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could
not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hardly anti-capitalist: she
worked at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served
in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department.
Omarova
told me, “There were so many accusations. A.A.F. was at the
forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult.” The group
discovered that Omarova, after she’d read an article in The Economist about
potatoes, had tweeted fondly about a time she helped farmers harvest potatoes
outside Moscow. The A.A.F. proclaimed that the Biden Administration had
“nominated a woman who waxes nostalgic for the good ole days of poverty,
hunger, and forced labor in communist Russia.” Conservative outlets pounced on
similar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she
told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make America into the Soviet Union.’ It was
a complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said,
‘Go back to the Soviet Union!’ ”
Digging
into a person’s past—especially someone who isn’t that well known—takes time
and money. “Somebody must have paid them a lot,” Omarova said, of the A.A.F.
“They went through all my public speeches and academic writings to find any kind
of phrase they could use against me.” She’d been featured, along with other
professors, in an obscure 2019 documentary based on “Assholes: A Theory,” a
whimsical treatise by Aaron James, a philosophy professor at the University of
California, Irvine. The A.A.F., without acknowledging the film’s satirical
tone, promoted a snippet of Omarova calling the financial-services industry
“the quintessential asshole industry.” She told me, “They didn’t cite the film.
It made me sound unhinged, nasty, and, like, a rude person.” A compilation of
clips from the documentary had been taken off YouTube owing to copyright
violations; during the pre-hearing process for Omarova’s nomination, Republican
staffers insinuated that she’d personally concealed the footage. “I don’t know
what kind of relationship those senators had with A.A.F.,” she told me. “But clearly
they knew of that clip.”
Omarova told me that
someone went to Moscow to “try to dig up” an undergraduate paper that she’d
written on Karl Marx. Opponents also circulated an elementary-school photograph
of her wearing the obligatory red kerchief of the Young Pioneers. “They used it
to say ‘Look at her, she’s such a devout Communist!’ They were going through my
whole life, looking for anything they could smear or frighten me with.”
Omarova
disclosed reams of personal information to the Senate, including her
compensation as a law professor. Jones then e-mailed her colleagues at Cornell
about what he portrayed as her annual salary—but the figure he cited
represented nearly two years of pay. In the e-mail, which was obtained by The
New Yorker, Jones asks, “Do you think it is appropriate for the university
to provide such a large salary to Dr. Omarova?” He invited her colleagues “to
share” their “thoughts” with him.
While
the hearings were ongoing, the A.A.F. trumpeted a dismissed shoplifting charge
against Omarova—omitting the fact that she’d disclosed it herself. She told me
that the incident, which came about from a misunderstanding with a security
guard, had occurred not long after she had emigrated from Russia—and had led
her to become a lawyer. The A.A.F. also accused her of belonging to a Marxist
group on Facebook that she was unaware of and had never participated in, and
misleadingly edited a comment she’d made about the need to insure economic
security for laid-off fossil-fuel workers so that it sounded like an attack on
those workers and the industry. “They were saying that I wanted to kill
oil-and-gas workers,” she told me. “That’s exactly the opposite of what I was
saying.”
Omarova
had suggested that it would be good for the environment if America transitioned
away from fossil fuels, even if some companies ended up going out of business.
She had also called for tougher regulations on banks. These two points likely
constituted the true motivation for the opposition she encountered from the
Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee. Omarova was soon opposed by every
Republican senator, and also five Democrats—led by Jon Tester, of Montana, who
has been a major recipient of banking-industry donations. Her nomination was
doomed. The A.A.F.’s Web site celebrated the news with the headline “a.a.f. research tanks saule omarova.”
Omarova
described the confirmation experience as “soul-crushing.” She went on, “You
feel stripped down. You feel your house has been destroyed, and you are
standing there in front of everyone looking at you, and they have distorted and
twisted everything.” She expressed surprise that, in the United States,
spurious controversies could be so easily “manufactured out of nothing.” She
added, “I’m a naturalized citizen. I put so much effort to be here, and I
embraced this country with all my heart. I came from a place that didn’t have
freedom of speech or thought. But this made so personally clear to me how
fragile our democracy is.”
Three
months after Omarova withdrew her nomination, Sarah Bloom Raskin endured a
similar character assassination. Bloom Raskin, a law professor at Duke
University, was not a new or untested figure. After graduating from Harvard Law
School, she worked as a staffer on the Senate Banking Committee, and she twice
won confirmation from the Senate to top economic positions: between 2010 and
2014, she was a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and during
the Obama Administration she served as the Deputy Secretary of the
Treasury—becoming, at the time, the highest-ranking woman in the department’s
history. Her husband, Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, is a
progressive firebrand, but Bloom Raskin is regarded as a moderate in business
circles, and has wide support from the banking industry. But, like Omarova,
Bloom Raskin offended fossil-fuel companies—in her case, by suggesting that
climate change posed a potential economic risk that the Federal Reserve needed
to consider.
Rather
than debating the merits of such views, the A.A.F. questioned Bloom Raskin’s
probity. In February, it filed a complaint to the Office of Congressional
Ethics against Jamie Raskin, accusing him of being late in filing a financial
report disclosing one and a half million dollars in income that he and his wife
had received from her sale of stock. In 2017, Bloom Raskin had been granted
stock in a small Colorado trust company founded by a friend; she served on its
board after leaving the Obama Administration. Three years later, after Bloom
Raskin had left the board, she sold her stock at market price.
Congressional
rules require such sales to be disclosed within thirty to forty-five days. The
Raskins took eight months. Nonetheless, they had voluntarily disclosed the
transaction months before Biden nominated Bloom Raskin to the Fed. And they had
explained that in December, 2020, two weeks after the stock sale, their son had
died, by suicide. “We were comatose, barely functioning, so of course Jamie
didn’t remember to file,” Bloom Raskin told me. “I don’t ask for special
treatment, but do these people have no heart?”
Bloom
Raskin was taken aback by an A.A.F. statement that cast her and her husband as
“career politicians who have used the system to enrich themselves” with “shady”
deals. She told me, “When these smears started, they seemed so inconsequential.
It didn’t occur to me they’d start manufacturing things.” But, Bloom Raskin
said, “I began to get calls from people saying, ‘Someone named Tom Jones, who
represented himself as working for a good-government group, was clearly looking
for dirt.’ ” A source knowledgeable about the A.A.F.’s outreach, who asked
not to be identified, told me Jones was pushing the baseless narrative that
Bloom Raskin had abused her access as a former Fed governor to obtain a special
“master account” for the Colorado trust company. The source debunked the claim:
all trusts in Colorado that meet certain criteria are eligible for master
accounts, which enable speedier financial transactions. “While it’s often true
that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, in this case there was an arsonist,”
the source told me. Dennis Gingold, a lawyer who co-founded the Colorado trust
company, agreed. He called the attacks on Bloom Raskin’s ethics “a pretext,”
adding, “It’s one thing to oppose Sarah. It’s another thing to slander her. But
they didn’t care.”
The
A.A.F. had pipelines to the Republicans on the Banking Committee, and also to
conservative media outlets, where attacks on Bloom Raskin began to appear.
Senator Pat Toomey, the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, demanded
that she answer more than a hundred questions in writing, many of them about
whether she’d made a phone call to Fed officials to push for the “master
account” for the Colorado trust company. If she had made such a call, it would
have been mundane, but she couldn’t remember if she had, and said so. Toomey
proclaimed that her answer was “evasive.” Bloom Raskin told me, “I was telling
the truth at all times. I could have lied and said that I did—the call wouldn’t
have been anything wrong. But I just couldn’t remember.” (Though Toomey’s
attacks echoed A.A.F. research, a spokesperson for the senator said that any
suggestion of coördination was “paranoid conjecture.”)
Bloom
Raskin offered to sit down with the Republicans on the Banking Committee, so
that she could defuse any outstanding questions. The Democrats also offered to
bring in banking regulators who had dealt with the Colorado trust, to clear up
any misconceptions. But the Republicans refused to meet with her or the banking
regulators. “They wouldn’t let me explain,” Bloom Raskin said. “I realized
they wanted me to seem evasive.” At that point, the
Republicans had staged a boycott of committee meetings, so that there could be
no votes on Bloom Raskin or on Biden’s other nominees to the Fed—including its
chair, Jerome Powell—leaving vacancies at the top of the most powerful central
bank in the world.
Just
as the Democrats on the Banking Committee were preparing to confront the A.A.F.’s
claims about Bloom Raskin, West Virginia’s Democratic senator, Joe Manchin,
announced that he, too, would not vote for her, effectively capsizing her
nomination. In a phone call, Manchin—who has grown rich from the coal industry, and who
during the current election cycle has taken more donations from fossil-fuel
interests than any other senator—admitted to Bloom Raskin that her position on
climate change had turned him against her. She recalls Manchin telling her,
“Don’t take it personally—it’s the industry.” (A spokesperson for Manchin
declined to comment on the senator’s “private discussions.”) President Biden
called Bloom Raskin, too, and described the attacks on her as unfair.
Bloom Raskin told me,
“When something like this first happens, you wonder, Did I do something wrong?
And then you realize, Of course, you didn’t. But you wonder, Do other people
think I did? It’s so disgusting.” She continued, “I think they were afraid I could
be effective. I definitely was going to hit the ground running. I knew what I
was doing.”
The
A.A.F. also claims to have sabotaged the nomination of David Chipman, Biden’s
choice to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In the face
of strong opposition from gun-rights activists, he withdrew his nomination last
September, leaving the agency that regulates guns without a director. (The
position has been unfilled for all but two years since 2006, when Senate
confirmation for the position became a requirement.) The A.A.F. compiled for
the Senate a twenty-four-page dossier that incoherently accused Chipman, a
twenty-five-year veteran of the A.T.F., of being both a racist and a
radical social-justice warrior consumed by “wokeness.” The allegations came
from anonymous sources. According to Jones, an unidentified A.T.F. agent had
reported hearing Chipman say that so many Black candidates had passed an A.T.F.
exam that they must have cheated. Ted Cruz—Jones’s former boss—took up the campaign
against Chipman. He and the A.A.F. demanded to see two complaints that had been
filed against Chipman with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, even
though both had been resolved without disciplinary action. At the same time,
the A.A.F.’s dossier contained anonymous allegations claiming that Chipman was
a radical “anti-racist” who favored destroying Confederate memorials and wanted
to “use fighter jets to bomb” Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain “into rubble,”
because they offended people of color. The A.A.F. even contacted Chipman’s
ex-wife in search of evidence against him, but she declined to coöperate.
Chipman
told me that the A.A.F.’s modus operandi is to make claims that are “adjacent”
to the facts and then “turn them around completely.” Although he had once
accused a Black candidate of cheating on an A.T.F. exam that he had proctored,
Chipman raised no questions about several other Black candidates who’d passed
the same exam. The two dismissed E.E.O.C. complaints were the only ones that
had ever been filed against him, he said, and in both cases he’d merely
insisted that two subordinates be present for their regular work hours. He did
say, on Facebook, that he opposed naming Army bases after Confederate soldiers,
and he believes that monuments celebrating them are inappropriate and racially
insensitive. But “it was characterized as if I was calling for violence,” he
told me, adding, “I never advocated violence or called for anyone to blow up
anything. I spent twenty-five years investigating bombings!”
Chipman said, “The racial things they used were hugely ugly,” and noted that
“the facts don’t matter to these people—they’re just used as weapons.” A
protester appeared outside his house; on Twitter, users called for his death.
Chipman’s wife, who had worked at the A.T.F. for decades, felt so unsafe at her
job that she quit.
Race
is also a theme of attacks that the A.A.F. has directed at Carlton Waterhouse,
a Black environmental lawyer whom Biden has nominated to become an assistant
administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency, overseeing
environmental-justice efforts for underserved communities. Waterhouse’s résumé
is strong: he studied engineering at Penn State, and has a doctorate in ethics
from Emory and a law degree from Howard University, where he helped develop the
school’s Environmental Justice Center. On Fox News, however, Jones dismissed
Waterhouse as “a racist” who is “obsessed with pushing racially divisive
rhetoric and policies into every aspect of public life.” A dossier that the
A.A.F. compiled on Waterhouse states that he “wants to resegregate America’s
schools . . . by establishing schools explicitly for Black
students.” Yet, in an article the dossier cites as evidence, Waterhouse
actually writes that such schools should be “open to all children.” The
A.A.F.’s dossier also claims that Waterhouse was “so radical he opposes the
Civil Rights Legislation of the 1960’s and 1970’s.” Waterhouse told me that
this was a distortion “intended to stir up disapproval.” His criticism of the civil-rights
movement was only that it hadn’t gone far enough to establish a framework for
reparations. “It’s hateful, and a gross misrepresentation,” he said. Waterhouse
has yet to be confirmed, leaving a top environmental-justice job at the agency
vacant. The blocking of so many Biden nominees has made it significantly harder
for the President and his Administration to enact policies that they were
elected to implement. Waterhouse said that he was hopeful and excited about the
prospect of getting to work, but added that the A.A.F.’s campaigns were having
a chilling effect: “People won’t want to serve, because your name will be
dragged through the mud.”
As
Jones has portrayed it, his group is merely catching up with the sleazy tactics
of progressive dark-money groups—which, he claims, went to great lengths to try
to block Cabinet nominees during the Trump Administration, not to mention
conservative Supreme Court nominees such as Clarence Thomas and Brett
Kavanaugh. Of course, neither Thomas nor Kavanaugh were felled by anonymous
slurs during their nomination hearings; they were credibly and directly
confronted by female victims who accused them, in sworn testimony, of sexual
misconduct. Nan Aron, the former head of Alliance for Justice, a progressive
group that led the charge against both Thomas and Kavanaugh, acknowledged that,
over the years, her group had scoured the records, finances, and personal lives
of nominees it opposed. The crucial difference, she said, was that “it wasn’t
the groups that were manufacturing” the scandals which plagued the nominees. As
she put it, “None of the groups were looking for Christine
Blasey Ford—no one made phone calls to find her.”
Ford,
who maintains that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high
school, reached out directly to Democrats in Congress. The ranking member of
the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, Dianne Feinstein, sent an emissary
to evaluate Ford’s claims and declined to make them public, but by then Ford
had voiced her complaints to enough people that the word spread to reporters,
including to me and Ronan Farrow, another writer at this magazine. Some
conservatives have tried to establish a false equivalence between conventional
reporting and the mudslinging directed at Ketanji Brown Jackson. But Ford
testified in Congress against Kavanaugh. A second woman who accused him of sexual misconduct on the
record, Deborah Ramirez, offered to speak to the F.B.I. (Kavanaugh strongly
denied the allegations against him during his own congressional testimony.)
Notably, the A.A.F.’s campaigns against Biden nominees have produced no
witnesses or alleged victims who have testified before Congress. And some of
the group’s accusations have been summarily rejected by outside authorities.
The New York Attorney Grievance Committees curtly declined a demand by the
A.A.F. that they investigate Biden’s nominee for general counsel of the Navy,
John P. (Sean) Coffey, whom the A.A.F. had accused of engaging in “an unethical
pay-to-play scheme” when his law firm represented pension funds. In a
four-paragraph response to Jones, obtained by The New Yorker, the
chief attorney for the legal group declined to take action, noting, “You
provide no evidence.”
Brian
Fallon, the co-founder and executive director of Demand Justice—a progressive
nonprofit dark-money group that has become a target of conservative critics,
because it scrutinizes the records of right-leaning judicial nominees—told me,
“It sounds as if this group is reverse-engineering the process. It’s almost
like they’re trying to create the story line as opposed to finding a dry
fact”—and then “trying to get people to give voice to the narrative.” His group
conducts opposition research, too, but he said that it was “ham-fisted and
sloppy” to post requests for dirt on anonymous message boards or to send mass
e-mails to a nominee’s colleagues. “Most opposition researchers on our side
would worry about using such tactics,” he said. “Because people are so
quick to play the victim, they’d worry about becoming the story.”
Fallon
said that crumbs of negative information about high-profile nominees can always
be found, but unless the facts pass “the smell test of being in good faith,”
and can hold up under the scrutiny of experts and the press, they aren’t worth
much. During the closely watched confirmation hearings of Jackson, he argued,
the mud stained mainly those who threw it; the senators who lobbed the
sex-offender accusations “oozed bad faith, and were lambasted” to the point
that the critique “wasn’t adopted by the Republican Party at large.” In the
end, Jackson secured three Republican votes and “emerged from the hearings with
higher approval ratings.” He said, of the A.A.F., “They may be taking a victory
lap, but their opposition research backfired.” The A.A.F.’s strategy, however,
has proved more damaging when deployed on nominees whose hearings receive less
attention. Such people are easier to smear because charges against them are
often not properly scrutinized.
The
A.A.F. describes itself as a champion of transparency, but it declines to
reveal the sources of its funding. Its official mailing address is a handsome
historic building a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. But when I stopped by
there recently, to ask for the group’s basic financial records—which all
tax-exempt nonprofits are legally required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s
front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the building
is occupied by a different nonprofit group: the Conservative Partnership
Institute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loyalists in exile.
It has become the employer of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and of
Trump’s former ad-hoc legal adviser Cleta Mitchell, both of whom are fighting
subpoenas from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S.
Capitol.
Cameron
Seward, the general counsel of the Conservative Partnership Institute, appeared
in the lobby and assured me that there was no relationship between his group
and the A.A.F. Yet documents that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to
secure its tax-exempt status, describe the group as existing “in care of”
C.P.I. Moreover, C.P.I.’s 2021 annual report notes that it launched the A.A.F.
because “conservatives didn’t have a group performing research on Biden’s woke
nominees—even though plenty of liberal groups were digging up (or
manufacturing) dirt on our side.” The groups have several overlapping
directors, including Jones, who sits on both boards. The A.A.F. told the I.R.S.
that its mission is to conduct nonpartisan research, but it is curious that the
largest contribution by far to its parent group, C.P.I., is a million-dollar
“charitable contribution” from Save America—Trump’s political-action committee.
Trump reportedly raised much of the pac’s
money from supporters after his 2020 defeat, and his campaign has called the
group an “election defense fund.”
Save
America made its contribution to C.P.I. a few months after Meadows joined the
group. Meadow’s son, Blake, an associate attorney at the Georgia law firm
Foster, Foster, & Smith, appears to be involved with C.P.I., too: his name
appears in a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of the A.A.F. against the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security. Matthew Buckham, the A.A.F. co-founder, also
has a Trump connection: he worked at the White House during his Administration,
in the personnel office. (His father, Ed Buckham, is chief of staff to Marjorie
Taylor Greene.)
It’s
a great advantage to be able to treat opposition research as a tax-exempt
charitable expense rather than as, say, a campaign cost. On March 21st, Paul
Teller, the executive director of an advocacy group that serves as former
Vice-President Mike Pence’s political operation, gave a lecture to Christian
pastors in which he said, of the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!”
Teller enthused, “They are just taking it to every Biden-Harris
nominee that comes across to Congress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re
fighting with the Supreme Court nominee Jackson came from our friends at the
American Accountability Foundation.” He went on, “We’re partnering, we’re
collaborating.” Teller’s group is widely seen as promoting a potential Pence
campaign for President in 2024.
When
the A.A.F. applied for its tax-exempt status, it portrayed itself, under
penalty of perjury, as a nonpartisan charity that would neither participate in
political campaigns nor try to influence legislation. As a tax-exempt nonprofit
dark-money organization, Jones’s group isn’t required to publicly disclose its
donors, so it’s impossible to know all the sources of its funding. Clearly,
though, it has big ambitions. In its I.R.S. filing, the A.A.F. submitted
revenue projections that predict its budget as six hundred thousand dollars in
2021, a million dollars in 2022, and one and a half million dollars in 2023.
Norman
Ornstein, a political scientist and Trump critic at the American Enterprise
Institute, a right-leaning think tank, believes that the A.A.F. is doing
“frightening, sleazy stuff” with serious implications. Not only is the group
creating needless vacancies in important Administration positions; it is
intimidating well-qualified people from wanting to undergo the nomination process.
“It’s tough enough to get top-flight people in government,” Ornstein said.
“But, if you also have to go through a well-funded, well-oiled slime machine,
it’s really an attack on government.”
