webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

tom jones aaf oppo

see CPI

see AAF main Oppo Res hit man

see biden nom scalps

see benghazi BS

pow mofo achieved

===

nyt

no lnx

Right-Wing Group Publishes ‘D.E.I. Watch List’ Targeting Federal Workers

The American Accountability Foundation list included names and photos of more than 50 people, many in programs aimed at improving the health of people of color.

Thomas Jones, a political activist and former Capitol Hill aide to Republican senators who now runs the American Accountability Foundation, in Bardstown, Ky., last year.Credit...Timothy D.

By David A. FahrentholdSheryl Gay StolbergSharon LaFraniere and Christina Jewett

Reported from Washington

Feb. 5, 2025

A conservative nonprofit has posted the names and photos of more than 50 federal workers on what it is calling a “watch list” related to diversity, equity and inclusion, asking President Trump to fire them.

The group says the workers named in its “D.E.I. bureaucrat watch list” supported diversity, criticized Mr. Trump on social media or made donations to Democrats. Many of the targets are Black workers at health agencies.

The list was compiled by the American Accountability Foundation, a small right-wing nonprofit that was founded in 2020 to oppose Biden administration policies and nominees. Since Mr. Trump’s election, the group has stepped up its targeting of specific federal workers — some of them career employees with little power — that it believes oppose his agenda.

The list included “dossiers” about individual staff members, listing what it called their “D.E.I. offenses.”

For example, one 24-year-old C.D.C. staff member was singled out for a social media post she published on her 20th birthday about “the harsh truths of racism,” and for reposting a social media item about pain equity — an issue underpinned by research finding bias in how women, Black and Latino people are treated when in pain.

The foundation previously published “watch lists” of workers at the Defense, Education and Homeland Security Departments. This latest list, published on an affiliated website, includes workers from federal health agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many of them in programs aimed at improving the health of people of color and other vulnerable Americans.

The nonprofit called them “woke D.E.I. devotees in the federal government who need to be fired.” Supporters of federal workers said they worried that the workers could be targeted for harassment or violence.

The publication of the list was the latest sign of the far-reaching backlash against diversity programs since Mr. Trump took office. Mr. Trump and his allies have sought to do far more than eliminate federal diversity offices, which the president mandated in an executive order. They also are seeking to make the idea of pro-diversity programs toxic and taboo, in the private sector and in federal workers’ private lives.

Many of the purported offenses that got them on the list were common sentiments in former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration or represented government policies supported by decades of research showing adverse health outcomes and shorter life spans for minorities.

The nonprofit’s president, Thomas Jones, a longtime conservative activist, said in an interview that he wanted to single out people who had not already been suspended in Mr. Trump’s purge of federal diversity offices.

“We wanted to just make sure we’re not just going, ‘Hey, let’s look at the people in the D.E.I. offices,’” Mr. Jones said. “Let’s look at people who are advocates for the policy.”

He said that his group had identified them by looking at political donations to Democrats, and by looking at social media posts. He said he had not reached out to the workers to verify the information he published, or even to determine if they still worked for the government.

“I’m busy; I’ve got a lot of stuff to do,” Mr. Jones said.

When the American Accountability Foundation started, its mission was “getting up every morning and with the goal of making it as difficult as possible for the Biden administration and their allies on the Hill to implement their agenda,” Mr. Jones told Fox News in an interview.

The group has links to the America First Legal Foundation, founded by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who is now the White House deputy chief of staff. In 2022, Mr. Miller’s group listed itself in tax forms as the “direct controlling entity” of the American Accountability Foundation, and said it had given the group $25,000.

Mr. Jones said his group is now run independently. Mr. Miller did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday, including one sent through a White House spokeswoman.

The American Accountability Foundation received a $100,000 grant last year from the Heritage Foundation, the group behind the Project 2025 blueprint for a Republican presidency. The Heritage Foundation said the grant was intended to identify “anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state.”

Mr. Jones’s group has also received more than $500,000 in donations from the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit stocked with former Trump staff members, and $50,000 from the 85 Fund, a nonprofit linked to conservative activist Leonard Leo.

Image

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has led a foundation that lists itself as the “direct controlling entity” of the American Accountability Foundation, and contributed $25,000 to the group in 2022.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

Mr. Jones, in his interview, said he was not concerned that the posts would put workers in danger.

One worker whose name and photo was posted on the list said she had already been put on administrative leave during the Trump administration’s purge of diversity offices. That was before the list was published.

“The current situation threatens my safety, the safety of my family and my ability to return to work or find other employment,” the worker said. She asked not to be named because of fears for her personal safety.

Another government worker singled out is a cancer biologist at the National Institutes of Health who trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and who re-tweeted a post about a Black journalist, noting that she had been tear-gassed at a peaceful demonstration near the White House in June of 2020 so President Trump could go through the area for a photo shoot.

“They are talking about these people who are conscientious civil servants who are committed to following the law, and they are talking about them as if they are criminals,” said Debra S. Katz, an employment attorney in Washington.

Health experts who reviewed the list said they were particularly troubled by its efforts to target federal offices within the C.D.C., the Food and Drug Administration and the N.I.H. that are aimed at improving the health of people in vulnerable communities, including people of color, low-income people and people who live in rural areas.

“People who are doing that kind of work are seeking to advance and protect the health of all Americans, including the people who are living in vulnerable communities,” said Dr. Reed Tuckson, a past senior vice president of the American Medical Association and former D.C. health official. “To imply that there is something wrong or malicious or devious about working hard to ensure that every American has the best opportunity for health outcomes is a fallacy.”

The C.D.C. and N.I.H., who employed the majority of the people on the list, declined to comment on Wednesday.

One of the few white people on the list is a physician and researcher who works on climate equity, an effort that recognizes people can be disproportionately impacted by climate disasters. That physician researcher, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, was singled out over prior employment at the Environmental Defense Fund, a group with “a long history of opposing conservative policies.”

Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called the list “reprehensible.” He said that the majority of the C.D.C. employees on the list are African American and were targeted for having “anything to do with trying to focus on underserved populations.”

“Everybody is aghast at this,” Dr. Benjamin said.

Michael C. Bender and Apoorva Mandavilli contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

David A. Fahrenthold is an investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades. More about David A. Fahrenthold

Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics. More about Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Sharon LaFraniere is an investigative reporter focusing on the Trump administration. More about Sharon LaFraniere

Christina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration, which means keeping a close eye on drugs, medical devices, food safety and tobacco policy. More about Christina Jewett

See more on: U.S. Politics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump

Share full article

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Trump-allied group wants J6 committee staffers blacklisted - POLITICO

2/23/2023

A conservative non-profit group allied with former President Donald Trump urged “Hill staffers and their colleagues” to cut off meetings with any former Jan. 6 committee staffers who have since joined firms that lobby.

In a letter sent to hundreds of recipients on the Hill, the dark money group American Accountability Foundation listed the names of the former committee staffers and their titles — along with their new employers and links to their firms’ clients — all of whom they urged to blacklist.

“AAF has put together a cheat-sheet below outlining their new firms and the firm’s clients so you can be sure you (and your staff) aren’t inadvertently taking a meeting with a company that hires staff that hates your boss,” says the memo sent by Thomas Jones, the group’s president and founder. In his letter, Jones noted recent reporting by POLITICO on the January 6 committee staffers being hired by law and lobbying shops.

“It is important to remember that even if one of these former J6 investigators is not listed as a lobbyist on this specific account, the billings brought in by the clients listed below benefit all staff at the J6 investigator’s new firm,” he added.

It remains to be seen how effective the gambit will be, as the letter was sent only this past Wednesday. K Street firms have a major presence on Capitol Hill and their hires include figures on all sides of the political spectrum. But the group’s play illustrates the intense desire that exists among some conservatives to exact political retribution for those staffers who helped unearth extraordinary evidence of Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.

Jones confirmed the authenticity of the memo in an email to POLITICO. He railed against the January 6 committee’s use of investigative power, claiming that the committee and the F.B.I. forced some to “spend tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars defending themselves from an overreaching and weaponized government.” He argued that conservatives should not be taking meetings with these lobbyists’ clients.

“My email was just a short list of people and companies they should stop working with,” he said.

“Until conservatives are willing to fight back against the swamp — in this case cutting off the lifeblood of lobbyist access — the swamp will never be drained,” he contended.

:{Among those listed on the memo include Casey Lucier, former investigative counsel for the committee, who was hired at McGuireWoods, a firm that represents Hertz Global, Perdue Foods, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and others.

:{Other names listed were Kevin Elliker, another former investigative counsel, who was hired by Hunton Andrews Kurth. That firm represents Koch Companies Public Sector, NCTA – The Internet & Television Association, and Southern Company Services.

Former committee staffers Marcus Childress, Heather Connelly, and Michelle Kallen had all been hired by Jenner & Block, the email noted, which represents T-Mobile and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

In his message, Jones also noted that the memo’s recipients were free to send over additional names.

Led by Jones, an alumnus of Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) presidential campaign, and Matt Buckham, a veteran of the Trump White House, the American Accountability Foundation has taken on controversial tactics to undermine Biden’s nominees. The New Yorker reported links between the American Accountability Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute, which has been affiliated with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and attorney Cleta Mitchell. Notably, Meadows’ attorney George Terwilliger works for McGuireWoods, one of the firms listed in the memo.

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those who paid jcn 15 17m$ ads kavanagh acb, gorsuch, what biz before scotus disclose act

American Accountability Foundation

219 subscribers

534 views  Apr 4, 2022

“The other thing we hear a lot is about how this judge is going to be dangerous for children. And once again we turn to a right wing dark money front group as the source for that concern. On the day of her announcement, February 25th,  a group called the American Accountability Foundation came out with an investigative report.”

“Founder Tom Jones said, after calling her a radical leftist – they figured that out the very first day she was announced – Americans want our judicial system to protect children and citizens from sexual predators.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-fY97DsDUo

channel  https://www.youtube.com/@americanaccountabilityfoun2471

just the news real am voice davis brody water cooler

dems fight dirty, gop plays nice, senate collegial getalong go along; radical noms

425 views  Apr 27, 2021  WASHINGTON

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) encourages individuals with information about or documents showing the illegal, fraudulent, or unethical operations of our government to share that information with AAF so we can publicize it. As Justice Brandaeis pointed out, sunlight is the best of disinfectants. If you do not let us know about the corruption in government or how bureaucrats and politicians are using the mechanisms of government to destroy the traditional values we all hold dear, then we will have to watch the nation we love slowly destroyed.

biden got more thru than trump b/c our guys not fighting, no party discipline, ni leadership

AOC utopia, xavier cecesrra no rxbkgd, pro abortion, exposed PP for selling baby parts

xian clark  artl cops = kkk shot cop in face live from eath row college;  , vanita gupta...

harry reid simple maj

AAF will protect your anonymity. Send us an email at: AmericanAccountabilityFoundation@protonmail.com.

As a news gathering and publishing organization we will never reveal our sources and will refuse to turn them over to government bureaucrats.

tom Jones from the American Accountability Foundation on The Watercooler with David Brody

425 views

2 years ago

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) encourages individuals with information about or documents showing the illegal, fraudulent, or unethical operations of our government to share that information with AAF so we can publicize it. As Justice Brandaeis pointed out, sunlight is the best of disinfectants. If you do not let us know about the corruption in government or how bureaucrats and politicians are using the

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random 7 23

BREAKING! Biden nominee WITHDRAWN after AAF effort

Biden is pulling the nomination of Ann Carlson to lead the National Highway Transportation Administration (NHTSA)

MAY 30, 2023

After weeks of exposing Biden nominee Ann Carlson’sradical statements and questions over her finances, AAF is thrilled that her nomination is now being pulled!

We successfully blocked the appointments of Gigi Sohn and Phil Washington, and are proud to add Carlson to the list!

[twt cruz complain green car mandates]

Carlson shamelessly called for California-style leadership, regulations on Americans’ appliances, more activist lawsuits against energy companies, and demanded higher gas prices for everyday Americans while literally being invested in oil and gas. AAF was proud to show the American people who she really is.

Here were some of our top headlines:

FOX NEWS: Biden climate warrior nominee who argued for higher energy prices has stake in oil and gas firm

FOX BUSINESS: Biden highway safety nominee once praised'scheme' to 'raise energy prices'

Daily Caller: Biden’s Highway Safety Pick Has A Long History Of Pushing To Crack Down On Americans’ Appliances

AAF exists to educate the publicon issues related to personnel, policy, and spending in government but we cannot do it alone! Click below to join our efforts to keep government honest and working for you.

DONATE

For questions and press inquiries please email yitz@americanaccountabilityfoundation.com

Comments

VIDEO: AAF reveals SHOCKING statements by Biden top military pick

Biden nominee to be the new Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff has an obsession with race-based promoting

JUN 28

BOMBSHELL: DeSantis’s fight with Disney is being SABOTAGED by “Glass Lewis”

Bob Iger's election to the board was supported by Florida itself

MAY 9

BREAKING: MLB linked text line sends users to 'sexually perverse' youth LGBTQ chat room

WARNING: Extremely Disturbing Content

JUN 9

off bs

apple comp

aAF is led by Tom Jones. Tom has two decades of political, policy, research, and investigations experience serving in senior legislative and investigatory positions on Capitol Hill as a Senate staffer and as an opposition researcher for campaigns at the local, state-wide, and presidential level.

While on Capitol Hill he served as the Legislative Director for Senator Ron Johnson, ran the opposition research program for Cruz for President, and previously as a Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Jim DeMint. During his time with Senator DeMint, he was part of the oversight team that helped Senator DeMint and his colleagues successfully ban Congressional earmarks. As a subcommittee staff director, he conducted on-going agency oversight and regularly investigated waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government.His research was crucial in helping Senators defeat flawed presidential nominees and kill wasteful government programs.

The team at AAF is comprised of researchers, analysts, and former legislative and campaign staffers with decades of experience holding policymakers accountable for their actions.Each AAF team member is dedicated to using their professional skills and experiences to promote transparency in governmenton behalf of the American people.

===

https://thedemlabs.org/2022/04/19/republican-dark-money-group-smears-reputations-of-women-nominees-of-color/

no lnx pix

Republican group smears reputations of women nominees of color: Follow the dark money.

DEMLABS BLOG

April 19, 2022

Republican Slime Machine targets Biden Nominees - especially women of color.

"The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees" - Jane Mayer, New Yorker

"The American Accountability Foundation (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."

Who are the people running the 'slime machine'? Who funds them? How is the AAF treated as a nonprofit? Follow the dark money behind the smear campaign with this network map.

Republican group smears reputations of women nominees of color: Follow the dark money.

Share this Power Map freely with this link or as a GIF

Racist, misogynist attacks

"When Ketanji Jackson Brown 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.” - New Yorker

Desperately pursuing dirt

"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, andsuggested that her tenure at Michigan State is undeserved." - New Yorker

Politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity

"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. When Ketanji Jackson Brown 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.” - New Yorker

Follow the dark money - Relationship map: https://embed.kumu.io/be295fbf0ae354739c97174ddb255144#untitled-map/political-character-assassination

All in the family

"Meadows’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.) New Yorker

Russian connection

"Ed Buckham, the recently appointed chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today, Buckham handles a congresswoman who proudly attends “white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin” rallies, as Congresswoman Liz Cheney characterized them, and has become renowned for touting conspiracy theories about how the California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers. On Thursday, when the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, Greene, not surprisingly, was one of eight Republicans who voted against it.

Buckham’s ties to Russian interests date back 25 years to 1997—before Putin came to power—when he served as an aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. This was the heyday of “Casino Jack” Abramoff, the lobbyist-conman who took on pay-for-play clients ranging from the Choctaw Indian tribe of Mississippi to the Kremlin with a panache made for Hollywood. At the time, Buckham, in addition to his job with DeLay, oversaw a lobbying outfit called the U.S. Family Network, which presented itself as a public advocacy group but was really a vehicle funded largely by clients of Jack Abramoff." - New Republic

TakeAway: Follow the dark money funding Republican smears on highly qualified Biden nominees based on their race and gender. Does such a group deserve nonprofit exempt status?

Deepak

DemLabs

===

wiki 11 22

American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is an American conservative opposition research group founded in 2020 that has opposed nominees to the Joe Biden administration.[1]

History

The AAF's executive director and co-founder, Tom Jones, previously worked for Republican senators Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz (directing opposition research for Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign), Jim DeMint, and John Ensign. Its other co-founder, Matthew Buckham, worked in the White House Presidential Personnel Office during the Trump presidency.[2] TheNew Yorker described the AAF as a dark money group ("a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers") that is an offshoot of another such group, the Conservative Partnership Institute, which employed Mark Meadows after he left the Trump administration.[2][3]

The AAF describes itself as a "charitable and educational organization that conducts non-partisan governmental oversight research and fact-checking so Americans can hold their elected leaders accountable".[4] Jones told Fox News in April 2021 that he aimed to "take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration".[2][5]

Campaigns

According to The New Yorker, the AAF "aims to thwart the entire Biden slate", and as of April 2022 had targeted 29 nominees.[2] The AAF acknowledged its role in derailing Biden's nominations of David Chipman to be director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2021;[6] Sarah Bloom Raskin to be vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board in 2022;[3] and David Weil for the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor.[2] The AAF's research was used by Republican opponents of the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson for the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022.[7]

In September 2021, the AAF filed an ethics complaint against representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for attending the Met Gala. The AAF claimed that her attendance amounted to accepting an illegal gift since her estimated $35,000 ticket was paid for by Conde Nast, a for-profit company, not a charity. The event itself is however a charitable fundraiser.[8][9][10]

References

  1. ^ Wong, Scott (March 24, 2021). "Conservative group escalates earmarks war by infiltrating trainings". The Hill.
  2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Accountability_Foundation#cite_ref-Mayer_2-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Accountability_Foundation#cite_ref-Mayer_2-2) d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Accountability_Foundation#cite_ref-Mayer_2-3) e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Accountability_Foundation#cite_ref-Mayer_2-4) Mayer, Jane (April 16, 2022). "The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees". The New Yorker.
  3. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Accountability_Foundation#cite_ref-Mayer_2_3-1) Mayer, Jane (March 15, 2022). "Sarah Bloom Raskin Withdraws Her Nomination to the Federal Reserve Board". The New Yorker.
  4. ^ "American Accountability Foundation". AAF. Retrieved April 19, 2022.
  5. ^ Shaw, Adam (April 11, 2021). "New conservative group wields unorthodox tactics to block Biden agenda, nominees". Fox News. Retrieved April 19, 2022.
  6. ^ Markay, Lachlan (September 14, 2021). "Conservative group behind sunk ATF nomination takes a victory lap". Axios. Retrieved April 19, 2022.
  7. ^ Pilkington, Ed (March 24, 2022). "Republicans turn Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing into a political circus". The Guardian. Retrieved April 19, 2022.
  8. ^ Clark, Dartunorro. "Conservative group files ethics complaint against AOC for attending Met Gala". NBC News.
  9. ^ Mishra, Stuti (September 15, 2021). "AOC hit with ethics complaint over Met Gala appearance as she fires back at critics". The Independent.
  10. ^ Vakil, Caroline (September 15, 2021). "Conservative group files ethics complaint over Ocasio-Cortez appearance at Met Gala".

External links

Categories: 

===

DIRTY TRICKS

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/16/democratic-strategists-launch-war-room-00065498

group of top Democratic strategists are launching a multi-million-dollar hub to counter an expected investigative onslaught by the likely incoming House GOP majority — digging into President Joe Biden, his administration and his son, on top of potential Cabinet impeachments.

The newly relaunched Congressional Integrity Project initiative, details of which were shared first with POLITICO, will include rapid response teams, investigative researchers, pollsters and eventually a paid media campaign to put congressional Republicans “squarely on the defense,” founder Kyle Herrig said in an interview.

It’s designed to serve as the party’s “leading war room” to push back on House Republican investigations, Herrig said in an interview. He added that the project would “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work, and hold them accountable for ignoring the urgent priorities of all Americans in order to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump and MAGA Republicans." [vid]

a team of researchers has already begun scouring public records, press clippings and other documents in a bid to immediately undercut House GOP leaders, from Minority Leader — now speakership hopeful — Kevin McCarthy to the likely committee chairs expected to manage probes of Biden and his network.

The House GOP views investigations as a key piece of its agenda for the next Congress once it takes the narrow majority that’s now expected, particularly as much of its legislative wish list is on track to stall thanks to the Senate filibuster and Democratic president. McCarthy has privately talked with committee chairs-in-waiting to coordinate plans, making the swift launch of the outside-group pushback plan a potential godsend to Democrats.

Democratic leadership on the Hill has been briefed about the project’s relaunch, according to a person familiar with its plans.

Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic strategist who is part of the project’s new leadership team, called the House GOP’s looming investigations a “vendetta” after two impeachments of and investigations into former President Donald Trump while Democrats controlled Congress, including the bipartisan select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The project “will exploit every tactic available,” Woodhouse said, adding: “It’s not enough to wait and see what they’re going to do and how far they’re going to go.”

Republicans wouldn’t formally take the House until January, but its leaders are already vowing to cut a broad investigative swath. As McCarthy put it during his conference’s recent agenda rollout: “Every committee has responsibilities for oversight.”

“They’ve virtually outlined no substantive agenda for governing,” Herrig said of House Republicans. “This is what they’re going to do ... so you really need a concentrated effort that’s doing this every day.”

In addition to Herrig and Woodhouse, the project’s leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades, served in the Obama administration and advised the Biden administration’s pandemic response.

In a sign of the important role the initiative will play over the next two years — and its proximity to the White House — other senior advisers include Jeff Peck, a former Biden aide during the president’s time in the Senate who served as treasurer and vice chair of the Biden Foundation as well as a senior adviser to the Biden-Harris transition.

The Congressional Integrity Project leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades. | Brian Stukes/Getty Images for Protect Our Care

For the final two years of Biden’s term, Republicans will be aided in their oversight push by a coalition of outside conservative research groups that have already mapped out potential targets and started digging into issues ranging from Hunter Biden’s business dealings to immigration policy.

And GOP lawmakers have left their own investigative breadcrumbs that make it clear where they intend to go. Likely Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) will lead the Hunter Biden investigation, with Republicans already preparing to elevate the probe to Joe Biden although no evidence has publicly emerged that his decisions were affected by his son’s business dealings. Comer recently told POLITICO that he and likely Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) would provide a public update this week.

Jordan, meanwhile, is preparing to use the gavel he’s poised to take for conduct a sweeping investigation into the Justice Department and FBI, two frequent targets of Trump’s ire. That probe is likely to touch on everything from the search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents to tracking threats against local school officials, which the GOP slams as an effort to target parents despite denials from the bureau. [vid]

other GOP areas of interest include the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Ukraine aid and a coronavirus probe that is likely to sweep up longtime public health adviser Anthony Fauci.

McCarthy and his allies are under pressure from their base and some members of their own conference to pair their investigations with impeachment articles; some in the party are clearly itching for payback after then-President Trump was impeached twice. Though impeaching Biden is likely a heavy lift — and a step that McCarthy isn’t endorsing for now — Republicans see Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a more likely target for attempted removal from office.

congressional Democrats and others close to the administration view Republicans’ vows to investigate Mayorkas’ department and the border as the latest sign that they aren’t serious about trying to pass immigration legislation. And they slam Republican investigative plans writ large as thinly veiled attempts to help Trump, pointing to Jordan’s public remarks earlier this year that characterized GOP probes as helping “frame up the 2024 race.”

The Congressional Integrity Project is also aiming to raise funds for a paid media campaign, including dedicated websites, digital ads, mobile billboards, newspaper ads and, occasionally, TV ad buys. Its public opinion research will be shared with like-minded organizations and congressional allies to contrast GOP investigations with issues the American public cares most about, project leaders said.

Their goal is to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential campaign when Republicans also controlled the House and created a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. That GOP select panel ended up zeroing in on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepared to ascend to the Democratic nomination, culminating in an 11-hour grilling of Clinton.

Republicans’ two-year Benghazi investigation spent $7 million in taxpayer money and dogged Clinton on the campaign trail before finally producing an 800-page report that didn’t focus on the former secretary of state.

Then-Majority Leader McCarthy quipped in 2015 to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Benghazi committee had successfully driven down Clinton’s poll numbers. “He took a lot of crap for it, but in the end, it was true” that the investigation hurt Clinton politically, recalled Woodhouse.

Rather, Democrats hope the flood of investigations will lead to a repeat of the 1998 midterm elections, held amid the GOP push to impeach then-President Bill Clinton. Voter backlash against that move helped Democrats defy historical trends in House races that favor the party that doesn’t occupy the White House gaining seats.

:{:{:{POLITICO---:(style="box-sizing:border-box;position:absolute;left:-999em;top:-999em"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;speak:none;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;display:block"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;speak:none;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;display:block"):}:

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axios

gop Republican congressional aides huddled this month with conservative think-tank leaders on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hone tactics and messaging for Biden administration probes, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: If the GOP wins control in the midterms, leaders want to kick off high-profile investigations as soon as the new Congress is seated. Republicans plan to draw on investigative power from allies across Washington.

Details: The retreat was hosted by the Heritage Foundation, theConservative Partnership Instituteand theAmerican Accountability Foundation, a nonprofit run by Trump administration alumni that's dogged Biden nominees with independent investigative work.

The big picture: With unified Democratic control in D.C., Republicans have been limited in their efforts to wield Congress' probative powers around high-profile issues such as a southern border immigration surge, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and economic shocks that threaten a U.S. recession.

Behind the scenes: Over two days, congressional aides at the retreat got briefings from prominent conservative activists and organizations on a host of investigative tactics.

What they're saying: "We are pleased we brought together senior staff and leading outside researchers to focus on enhancing oversight skills, particularly since we're expecting increased oversight opportunities in the future," Jones said in an emailed statement.

Howell, who leads Heritage's Oversight Project, t0ld Axios the goal of the event was to ensure congressional staff members are equipped to kick-start investigations as soon as the new Congress is gaveled in.

Between the lines: The event provides a glimpse of where Republicans see potentially fruitful oversight avenues.

Republican oversight won't be confined to federal agencies or the White House, Howell said.

ref axios lachlan markey

https://www.axios.com/2021/09/14/conservatives-aft-withdrawal-biden-nominee

david chipman nom atf scalp

even before President Biden formally withdrew his nominee to be the nation's top firearm regulator on Monday, a new conservative opposition research group was ready for a victory lap.

Why it matters: Democrats honed a research operation during the Trump era that effectively opposed some of his top nominees. Two veteran Republican operatives behind the American Accountability Foundation didn't see a comparable apparatus for the GOP, so they set out to create one.

Driving the news: Chipman, who lobbied for gun safety group Everytown after leaving ATF, was the first high-profile Biden nominee to withdraw from consideration.

What's new: During an interview, Jones took credit for helping to unearth and publicize allegations from Chipman's former colleagues at ATF — where he was a special agent until 2012 — that he'd disparaged agents of color who received promotions.

Between the lines: AAF's research largely ignored policy. Its strategy more resembled the type of research that political campaigns compile on their opponents: public records digging and research focused on Chipman's background.

SW 11 22

American Accountability Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization launched with the help of the rightwing Conservative Partnership Institute that describes itself as a "government oversight and research organization that uses investigative tools to educate the public on issues related to personnel, policy, and spending".[1]

With a Twitter handle of "@ExposingBiden", the group works to prevent Biden Administration nominees from getting approved.[2] It also hosts a website called BidenNoms.com that tracks how Republican senators vote for President Biden's nominees. The site describes itself as "an effort to ensure that personnel in leadership positions within the federal government reflect the values and concerns of the American people, not the liberal coastal elite or their woke allies in corporate America."[3] The site also includes profiles of each nominee.

Fox News reported that the AAF focuses on the second tier of Biden's nominees, the appointees beneath the Cabinet level. Jones told Fox News, "That second tier are really the folks who are going to do the day-to-day work implementing the agenda...It's obviously severely problematic if there's a radical leftist running an agency, but it's also really problematic if their deputy has worked on leftist issues in the past and is out of step and has deep roots within the progressive movement and is going to implement an agenda out of touch with what the American people care about."[4]

News and Controversies

AAF Attack on Federal Reserve Nominee Lisa Cook

Following Biden's nomination of Michigan State University professor Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve, AAF group sought to discredit Cook's tenure at the school and further qualifications for the position, Politico reported. Cook's nomination garnered bipartisan support and she was endorsed by both conservative and liberal economists.[5] The New Yorker reported that Jones fished for information from about 50 of her colleagues at MSU, asking in an email, "Are any of you concerned that... she's not good enough to sit on the Federal Reserve Board?"[6] He also posted about Cook on "Economics Job Market Rumors", an online forum that the New York Times reports as "a cesspool of misogyny".[7]

AAF Spread Misleading Claims about SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson

In alignment with a widespread misconception[8] popularized by Republicans, AAF released a statement saying Biden's nominee for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson "argued that America's judicial system is 'unfair' to sexual predators".[9]

AAF Attack on the Raskin Family

AAF launched an attack on Sarah Bloom Raskin and her husband Jamie Raskin following Bloom Raskin's nomination to the Vice Chair for Supervision of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Due to her stance on the fossil fuel industry's hand in climate change, AAF pushed the narrative that "Sarah and Jamie Raskin are career politicians who have used the system to enrich themselves"[10] The AAF filed an ethics complaint against Jamie Raskin due to his late disclosure of a stock sale by Sarah Bloom Raskin.[11] While Bloom Raskin told the New Yorker that she did not expect special treatment, she did explain that their son had committed suicide two weeks after the sale and that they "were comatose, barely functioning, so of course Jamie didn't remember to file".[6]

AAF Attack on Comptroller of the Currency Nominee Saule Omarova

AAF bullied President Biden's nominee for Comptroller of the Currency Saule Omarova into withdrawing herself from consideration after launching an investigation into her history and falsely painting her as a Marxist. Omarova told the New Yorker, "There were so many accusations. AAF was at the forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult. It was complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, 'Go back to the Soviet Union!'."[6] The AAF's tactics for attacking Omarova primarily involved taking clips of her speaking and reproducing them without context and weaponizing her childhood in Kazakhstan against her.[12]

AAF Attack on Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Nominee David Chipman

The New Yorker reported that the AAF accused Chipman of being both racist and too "woke", exaggerating his belief that Army bases should not be named after Confederate soldiers and his opposition to monuments that celebrate them due to their racial insensitivity. AAF claimed that he wanted to "use fighter jets to bomb" Mount Rushmore. Due to the relentless harassment of AAF, users on Twitter called for his death and his wife, a long-time ATF employee felt too unsafe to continue working and quit her job[6].

AAF Infiltrated Zoom Training Meeting for Congressional Staffers

AAF members posing as congressional aides infiltrated and recorded a Zoom meeting about earmark spending rules in the spring of 2021. The recording was posted online. Appropriations Committee spokesman Evan Hollander wrote in an email, "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."[13] Founder Tom Jones 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."[4]

Launched with the Help of the Conservative Partnership Institute

AAF lists itself as in care of the Conservative Partnership Institute in its 501(c)(3) application, and in CPI's 2021 annual report, it described that AAF was part of a "new dimension" to the group's work. The report states, "Before the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), 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."[14]

AAF Founder Tom Jones

Founder and executive director Tomas Jones was the Legislative Director to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Senior Policy Advisor to former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Opposition Research Director for Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz, and served as the President of both the339 Group and the Cannon Research Group.[15] He also served as legislative director forJohn Ensign of Nevada.[6]He told Fox News that AAF wants to "take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden Administration"and that, unlike other opposition groups, AAF is based not on individual clients but on "causing trouble for the new administration".[4]

Funding

Funding information for AAF is not publicly available as of July 2022.

Core Financials

Core financials for AAF are not publicly available as of July 2022.

Personnel

Staff Members[16]

Board Members[17]

Contact Information

Employer Identification Number (EIN): 85-4391204

American Accountability Foundation

300 Independence Ave, SE

Washington DC 2003

Articles and Resources

Articles

[irs doc]

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/09/13/maga-group-grooms-members-of-congress-and-their-staff-for-america-first-movement/

CPI hit squad:

CPI has also launched a number of spin-offs to further right-wing causes, including the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), America First Legal, Center for Renewing America, American Cornerstone Institute, American Moment, and the State Freedom Caucus Network.

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Staffers Coached in Conservative Oversight

From May 5–6, seven House Republican staffers and three Senate Republican staffers attended an Effective Oversight Training Retreat paid for by AAF and led by CPI, AAF, and the Heritage Foundation—all ostensibly nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organizations.

Attendees participated in six training sessions, according to an agenda obtained by CMD, including on “how to work with legal experts to leverage research and advance conservative priorities in the courts,” “working with outside groups involved in oversight,” and “how to conduct effect research into Presidential appointees and nominees” to “help congressional staff perform proper oversight.”

The latter session was led by AAF’s founder Tom Jones, who is credited with leading GOP opposition to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmationand for sinking the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin for vice chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, among others.

AAF runs the website bidennoms.com,which currently features opposition campaigns against Phillip Washington for administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); Gigi B. Sohn to be a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Kalpana Kotagal to be a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); and Dilawar Syed for deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA).

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}:

Kotagal appears to be a top target of AAF, prompting it to create the separate website kalpanakotagal.com, where she is labeled a “radical leftist” who is “poised to weaponize the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with an anti-American agenda.”

SCREENSHOT FROM WWW.KALPANAKOTAGAL.COM

Kotagal is actually an accomplished employment and civil rights plaintiffs’ litigator, perhaps best known for co-authoring the “Inclusion Rider,” a contract provision in Hollywood designed to increase diversity in casting and production staff.

In addition to staffers from CPI, AAF, and Heritage, others from the right-wing Capital Research Center, the Republican Study Committee, and Compass Legal also led training sessions. CPI launched Compass Legal to take “care of things like legal filings” and help nonprofits “to comply with federal tax law so they can keep their nonprofit status,” according to its 2021 Annual Report.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-slime-machine-targeting-dozens-of-biden-nominees

no lnx many

A Reporter at Large

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....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-slime-machine-targeting-dozens-of-biden-nominees

no lnx many

A Reporter at Large

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, includingRon 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 theNational Bureau of Economic Researchand 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, [conf w heritage] 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. Meadows’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.”

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American Accountability Foundation

October 7  ·

ICYMI: AAF Files Bar Complaints Against DOJ Attorney - https://mailchi.mp/americanaccoun.../big-week-at-aaf-9446141

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September 23  ·

Elon Musk took notice of us!- https://mailchi.mp/americanaccoun.../big-week-at-aaf-9441809

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Norman Finkle

https://youtu.be/Hpgkyk0QyYo

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American Accountability Foundation

September 16  ·

Did Biden DOJ Voting Attorney... VOTE ILLEGALLY?! - https://mailchi.mp/americanaccoun.../big-week-at-aaf-9374781

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American Accountability Foundation

September 2  ·

Your Investment Portfolio is Probably Funding Wacko Climate Policies - https://mailchi.mp/americanaccoun.../big-week-at-aaf-9371733

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American Accountability Foundation

August 29  ·

ALERT: AAF to File Suit Against New York State Office of the Attorney GeneralIf Audit Records Not Released - https://mailchi.mp/americanaccoun.../big-week-at-aaf-9370689

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American Accountability Foundation

August 19  ·

She should be fired! - https://mailchi.mp/americanaccoun.../big-week-at-aaf-8930473

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Desiree Martinez

Great job on petition and sanction!!! TY

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American Accountability Foundation

July 29  ·

No silly Congressman, you can't pay for that with campaign funds! - https://mailchi.mp/americanaccoun.../big-week-at-aaf-8926741

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American Accountability Foundation

April 8  ·

Dara Lindenbaum was responsible for "campaign finance" for now convicted felon and former Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh. She would shift the FEC in a radically progressive direction.

How is someone entangled in so much fraud eligible for safeguarding our nation's election system?

'It Depends': Biden's FEC Pick Won't Say If Stolen Election Claims Undermine Democracy - Washington Free Beacon

FREEBEACON.COM

'It Depends': Biden's FEC Pick Won't Say If Stolen Election Claims Undermine Democracy - Washington Free Beacon

President Joe Biden's pick to serve on the Federal Election Commission refused to say on Wednesday afternoon whether "stolen election" claims undermine faith in democracy, saying "it depends on the context."

10

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Linda McMillan

This organization is a “slime machine” to spread Trump lies

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1 of 52

American Accountability Foundation

April 8  ·

ICYMI →Our team recently discovered 6 nominees who made sizable donations to then-candidate Joe Biden.

This begs the question: did these nominees buy their ambassadorship? AAF is committed to holding the Biden Administration accountable.

Biden ambassador nominees made substantial political donations, escalating decades-long bipartisan trend

FOXNEWS.COM

Biden ambassador nominees made substantial political donations, escalating decades-long bipartisan trend

Government watchdog American Accountability Foundation has published data showing contributions to various political campaigns from multiple ambassador nominees totaling in the millions.

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41 Comments

Richard Saltonstall

U.S. citizens who subscribe to dis information are being manipulated. American Accountability, Fox, One America among others are not news.

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American Accountability Foundation

March 31  ·

BREAKING: The Senate formally REJECTED David Weil's nomination for DOL's Wage and Hour Division administrator.

AAF was proud to be a part of the effort to keep an anti-small business, unethical hypocrite out of our federal government.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/.../senate-turns-back-david...

Senate Turns Back David Weil as Labor’s Top Wage-Hour Enforcer

NEWS.BLOOMBERGLAW.COM

Senate Turns Back David Weil as Labor’s Top Wage-Hour Enforcer

The Senate Wednesday turned back President Joe Biden’s nomination of David Weil as the U.S. Department of Labor’s top wage-hour regulator.

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14 Comments

Paul Williamson

The AAC smeared David Weil with made up stories . They are Putin's best asset in the US.

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American Accountability Foundation

March 22  ·

“Any repeated criminal behavior or repeated attacks bother me."

Did Ketanji Brown Jackson say the same thing while trying to keep repeat offender and murderer, Vaughn Kosh, on the streets?

22 Comments

Kathy Backlund

Ketanji Jackson should not be any kind of judge, especially a Supreme Court Judge!! She is obviously biased and is going to be another activist judge.

We need judges who will follow and believe in the Constitution!

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American Accountability Foundation

March 21  ·

Anyone who supports Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination is condoning her record of representing murderers like Vaughn Kosh and letting sex predators off the hook.

Sen. Hawley warns of Biden SCOTUS pick's 'long record' of letting child porn offenders 'off the hook'

FOXNEWS.COM

Sen. Hawley warns of Biden SCOTUS pick's 'long record' of letting child porn offenders 'off the hook'

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley posted a lengthy Twitter thread Wednesday containing several examples that he says demonstrates an “alarming” pattern of lenient treatment of sex offenders who prey on children from Biden Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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27 Comments

Kathy Backlund

If only these close minded people, who obviously only watch the DemocRats mainstream media, would watch many channels...then decide who you think is telling the truth and who is trying to ruin our beautiful country! At the same time they are ruining ou… See more

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American Accountability Foundation

March 21  ·

BREAKING: AAF research uncovers Ketanji Brown Jackson's previous representation of longtime criminal and murderer, Vaughn Kosh.

Between her soft-on-crime approach and partisan politics, it is clear that Judge Brown Jackson is the wrong choice for SCOTUS.

https://townhall.com/.../the-way-scotus-nominee-ketanji...

The Way SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson Handled Her Role as Public Defender Also Raises Questions

TOWNHALL.COM

The Way SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson Handled Her Role as Public Defender Also Raises Questions

This week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of her confirmation hearings to decide if she will serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Part

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Gary Davis

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 a… See more

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Esquire

https://www.esquire.com › news-politics › politics › da...

Apr 20, 2022 — Gyanendra is lucky he never met the modern Republican Party. ... Tom Jones, the A.A.F.'s founder and executive director, is a longtime ...

the last king of Nepal, Gyanendra, was trying to get a nascent constitutional monarchy to stop doing a buck-and-wing on its own dick. In 2001, he’d become king after the crown prince slaughtered eight members of his own family, including his father, King Birendra. Birendra had been trying to establish a British-style system. Political rivalries beset the new government, and an ongoing Maoist insurgency added to the disorder. Eventually, Gyanendra grabbed as much power as he could. He fired a series of prime ministers and dissolved the parliament in 2002. Eventually, he was forced by popular unrest to bring back the parliament and, ultimately, to agree to an end to the monarchy that had ruled Nepal for 240 years. At one point in the turmoil, Gyanendra sounded a call for help:

We, therefore, call on all willing political parties to come forth to fully activate, at the earliest, the stalled democratic process in the greater interest of the nation.

Gyanendra is lucky he never met the modern Republican Party. He might’ve quit a career in government years before he actually did.

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, national treasure Jane Mayer goes spelunking down to the sunken place again, this time to explore something called the American Accountability Foundation. The A.A.F. is a dark-money operation founded by the former oppo guy for the presidential campaign of Tailgunner Ted Cruz. (And let’s pause here to wonder how this guy can possibly still have a job in politics. If your candidate gets successfully tagged as the son of Lee Harvey Oswald’s breakfast buddy, you’re very bad at oppo.) The A.A.F. was very involved in laundering the rats before they were fcked during the confirmation hearings on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, but the operation has wider ambitions than that. It has taken for its mission the spurious sliming of presidential nominees, so as to render the Biden administration powerless to govern.

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 focused 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 percent were women.”

As it happens, during the Jackson hearings, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who has been bulldogging the issue of dark-money influence in the judicial nominating process, called out the A.A.F. andtied it securely to the wingnut-welfare trough operated by various rightist foundations, including those run by the Koch Brothers and the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. And, in keeping with long-standing conservative traditions, the guy running the A.A.F. has proven to be a considerable dickhead.

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.’”

Public service is such an ennobling pursuit.

ggl 7 23

The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees

The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com › News › Politics

Apr 16, 2022 — Tom Jones, the A.A.F.'s founder and executive director, is a longtime Beltway operative specializing in opposition research.

American Accountability Foundation Shows How Right ...

Esquire

https://www.esquire.com › news-politics › politics › da...

Apr 20, 2022 — Gyanendra is lucky he never met the modern Republican Party. ... Tom Jones, the A.A.F.'s founder and executive director, is a longtime ...

American Accountability Foundation

SourceWatch

https://www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › American...

Dec 12, 2022 — AAF Founder Tom Jones. Founder and executive director Tomas Jones was the Legislative Director to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, ...

American Accountability Foundation

Monitoring Influence

https://www.monitoringinfluence.org › Org

Thomas Jones, President/Director & Co-Founder. Thomas Jones was a longtime Republican operative specializing in opposition research prior to founding AAF. Jones ...

American Accountability Foundation

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › American_Accountab...

The AAF's executive director and co-founder, Tom Jones, previously worked for Republican senators Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz (directing opposition research for ...

Missing: cpi ‎| Must include: cpi

Our Team

American Accountability Foundation

https://americanaccountabilityfoundation.com › our-te...

AAF is led by Tom Jones. Tom has two decades of political, policy, research, and investigations experience serving in senior legislative and investigatory ...

Missing: gop ‎cpi

WINNING

Clear Path International

https://www.cpi.org › 2022-CPI-AnnualReport-

Feb 23, 2023 — In 2022, conservatives from across the movement came to CPI for ... In October, AAF's Tom Jones, pictured, led dozens of conservative allies ...

48 pages

PA House of Representatives - Tom Jones

PA Legislature -

https://www.legis.state.pa.us › legis › home › House_bio

Tom Jones. District 98. Republican, serving Lancaster County (Part), Lebanon County (Part) ... Biography. Personal History. Married to Rochelle M. Jones ...

Missing: aaf ‎| Must include: aaf

The Nomination Of Lisa Cook

Accountable US

https://accountable.us › Lisa-Cook-Case-Study

The A.A.F. is a non-profit republican opposition research firm founded by former Senate ... who now runs the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).