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AAF am acctability fdn

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SEE BIDEN NOMS SCALPS hit man

SEE SCHED F / DOGE DEPT EDUC

SEE COMPASS LEGAL PROFL CPI

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American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is an American [conservative] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_States)opposition research group founded in 2020 that has opposed nominees to the Joe Biden administration

see buckham

see benghazi BS

see lie pwr any means

see pjt 2025

see jane m slime machine

conf w heritage on oppos benghazi BS; calls itself good gov't group (evil?)

explicit say retaliation for effective dem oversight (j6?)

evil bc attack POC women as racist?!

cleta CPI

bad code see bak 7 23

pics posters

eg lubchenko

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanAccountabilityFoundation/photos/pb.100068224886548.-2207520000./298333809019094/?type=3

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanAccountabilityFoundation/photos

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pjt 2025

site under constr

https://www.reformeducation.us/

The institute strives for the outright banning of all public sector employee collective bargaining and thus the ensuing collection of compulsory dues that warp the fabric of government by shutting out taxpayers from decision-making.

Leading the Char

Matt.Buckham@reformeducation.us

Our President, Matt Buckham, recently handled personnel for President Donald Trump where he oversaw cabinet level departments, including Department of Labor, and other independent agencies. 

In this role, Matt pushed to place leaders throughout government and coordinate the recapture of Executive Branch agencies that were under career and opposition control. Matt was one of the first staffers for the House Freedom Caucus, helping them navigate their first year as a group. Matt has served on Capitol Hill for over 11 years in various 501c3, government, and Executive Branch roles. He is a follower of Jesus Christ called to bring freedom to the captives.

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ggl ai 6 26

American Moment is a conservative youth fellowship and training organization founded by Saurabh Sharma and Nick Solheim, operating as an official partner organization of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). [1, 2, 3]

Financial details regarding its funders, donors, and relationship with CPI include:

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guk

Revealed: how a shadowy group of far-right donors is funding federal employee watchlists

Project 2025 architects are among those behind the American Accountability Foundation and their blacklists targeting people of color

Jason Wilson

Sun 9 Feb 2025

A rightwing non-profit group that has published a “DEI Watch List” identifying federal employees allegedly “driving radical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives” is bankrolled by wealthy family foundations and rightwing groups whose origins are often cloaked in a web of financial arrangements that obscure the original donors.

One recent list created by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) includes the names of mostly Black people with roles in government health alleged to have some ties to diversity initiatives. Another targets education department employees, and another calls out the “most subversive immigration bureaucrats”.

The lists come amid turmoil in the US government as Donald Trump’s incoming administration, aided by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has sought to fire huge swathes of the federal government and purge it of DEI and other initiatives – such as tackling climate change – that Trump has dubbed “woke”.

While the publication of the personal details of government workers – whom the website describes as “targets” – has reportedly “terrified” many in federal departments, the Guardian has discovered that some current and former employees of AAF have taken pains to conceal their affiliations with the group on LinkedIn and other public websites.

One of the donors to the AAF is the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025, which has been a driving ideological force behind Trump’s re-election and first weeks in government.

Heidi Beirich, the chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), said: “It’s not surprising to find a vile project such as this backed by Project 2025 entities and far-right donors who have it out for public employees.”

Disclosure documents show that the AAF has been closely involved in training Republican staffers in collaboration with the affiliated Conservative Partnership Institute, in sessions that promise to train rightwing operatives in skills including “open source research” and “working with outside groups”.

Funding fear

Significant sums come to AAF via “dark money” donor-advised funds, which obscure the original benefactors by design.

In the most recent filings for large donor-advised funds, AAF received $25,000 via the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund; $16,750 via the National Christian Charitable Fund; and $22,300 via the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund.

But other donors are named private foundations, some of which also donated to affiliated organizations including the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).

In 2022, for example, the Dunn Foundation gifted $250,000 to CPI and $25,000 to AAF. In 2023, the same foundation gave AAF another $25,000 and upped its CPI donation to $2.5m.

In 2023, the WL Amos Sr Foundation handed $10,000 to AAF, $55,000 to CPI-affiliated American Moment, and $300,000 to CPI, along with another $200,000 to Project 2025’s architects at the Heritage Foundation.

The Guardian emailed Foundation Source, listed as the administrator of the Dunn Foundation in filings, and William Amos III, who is listed as president of the WL Amos Sr Foundation, to ask about their donations and whether they approved of AAF’s style of political advocacy.

The Guardian also emailed others listed as officers or trustees of other family foundations that have made substantial donations to AAF, including Tina Kimbrough, executive director of the Nord Family Foundation; and Hallie McFetridge, a trustee of the Quinn Family Foundation.

Only Quinn’s McFetridge responded, saying: “As we are a family foundation, different members of the family are able to make gifts as their conscious dictates. Another member of our family made this particular donation.”

She added that she would pass the Guardian’s questions on to that person but that “I can assure you I would find this absolutely intolerable. I strongly disagree with this approach to political advocacy.”

Other heavyweight conservative groups have pitched in for AAF.

AAF was one of two organizations to receive direct grants in 2023 from the Club for Growth Foundation. That foundation is co-located and affiliated with a family of non-profits and political committees including Club for Growth Action and Club For Growth PAC, which channel money to conservative causes and candidates from billionaire mega-donors Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein and their affiliates.

According to tax filings, in 2023 AAF also received $50,000 from The 85 Fund, which is one among a network of organizations funded by Leonard Leo, the conservative mega-donor and Federalist Society mastermind.

Although 2024 filings for AAF are not yet available, last June the organization reportedly also received $100,000 from Heritage for a project whose “goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda”.

‘Incubated’ by the Conservative Partnership Institute

The most crucial support for AAF, however, has come from the organization that birthed it: the CPI, which continues to have a profound influence on the Trump administration and the Republican party as a whole via its own activities and those of its flotilla of spin-off groups.

AAF was founded in 2021 to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration”, as Tom Jones, the organization’s head, told Fox News at the time.

In 2021 and 2022, however, CPI’s filings indicate that it was the “directly controlling entity” for the “related tax-exempt organization” AAF, and that CPI funded AAF to the tune of $335,100 in 2021 and $210,000 in 2022.

This was the period in which a well-heeled CPI was incubating a “network of closely affiliated think tanks, legal groups, and training centers dedicated to the thorough makeover of the federal government”, according to the Nation.

That network included America First Legal (AFL), the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) and American Moment, along with AAF.

All of these groups were on the advisory board for Project 2025, and most have placed personnel at the highest levels of the new Trump administration.

AFL’s Stephen Miller is Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy; CRA’s Russell Vought is poised to be confirmed as head of the office of management and budget; and in a little-reported move, Trump placed American Moment’s founder, Saurabh Sharma, as special assistant in the presidential personnel office.

Moulding Magaminds

The Guardian reported last year that CPI had been cementing ties between the far right and the GOP by means of training events for Hill staffers and their bosses in Congress

Many of these events were held at “Camp Rydin”, a sprawling 2,200-acre (890-hectare) property on Maryland’s eastern shore purchased after a $25m donation was made to CPI by its namesake, retired Houston software entrepreneur Mike Rydin, in the wake of January 6.

Others were held at one of at least nine adjacent properties on Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue purchased by CPI since 2022, in what reports described as a $41m “shopping spree” that has created a “Maga campus”.

CPI literature describes the precinct as “Patriot’s Row”.

Records obtained from US Senate and House ethics disclosures indicate that AAF has benefited from being front and center at many of these events.

At a 29 May 2024 “Legislative Assistant Symposium” attended by staffers then working for senators including Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and JD Vance, AAF’s Jones was billed as speaking on “strategies for how Congress should approach oversight and accountability”, alongside speakers from CPI, AFL, Advancing American Freedom and anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA.

A parallel event with the same line-up drew staffers for hard-right Maga representatives including Anna Paulina Luna – who recently introduced a bill that would see Trump’s face added to Mount Rushmore – and Paul Gosar, who in November invoked antisemitic conspiracy theories in a newsletter defending Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead national intelligence.

NumbersUSA was part of a network of groups “founded and funded” by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center called the “puppeteer of the nativism movement and a man with deep racist roots”.

At an event held 15-17 February 2023, hosted by AAF and attended by staffers for Congress members including Luna, Ken Buck and Marjorie Taylor Greene, trainees were to learn skills including “how to effectively draft requests for information from agencies and witnesses”, “tools and techniques for conducting open source research into agencies, individuals, and organizations”, and conducting “mock interviews with reluctant / recalcitrant witnesses”.

AAF’s reticent researchers

Prior to AAF, Jones worked as a Capitol Hill staffer for a string of high-profile hard-right Republicans including Ron Johnson, Cruz and the former senator Jim DeMint, who headed up CPI after he was forced out in an internal power struggle at Heritage.

Since opening his AAF unit, he has blooded a new generation of rightwing opposition researchers. Some of those researchers appear reluctant to publicly advertise their affiliation.

On LinkedIn, four people openly flag their affiliation with AAF: Jones himself; communications manager Yitz Friedman of Brooklyn, New York; development adviser Nadeen Wincapaw of Tampa, Florida; and associate researcher Elisabeth Guinard of Helena, Montana.

Search engine-cached versions of the LinkedIn page of Jerome Trankle of Washington DC, however, indicate that he is research director at AAF. Data brokers also yield an AAF-associated email address for Tankle.

Trankle’s live LinkedIn profile has him doing “ESG & Financial Services” research at “AAF” without using the badged – and searchable – link some of his colleagues use.

The Guardian emailed the address associated with Trankle at AAF to ask why he doesn’t more clearly advertise his affiliation but received no response.

Additionally, an anti-fascist research group claimed late on Wednesday to have identified additional researchers on the basis of LinkedIn profile pictures that had inadvertently been included in purposed evidentiary materials about government workers on the DEI Watch List site.

The Guardian corroborated the inclusion of researchers’ profile pictures in evidence on the DEI watchlist.

One of those identified, Cari Fike, is married to Hugh Fike, a senior director at CPI, and is a former lobbyist for Heritage Action, the 501(c)4 associated with the Heritage Foundation.

The Guardian contacted Fike for comment on her apparent involvement in researching government workers for AAF.

Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “It’s rather ironic that an organization that is targeting public officials through a watchlist that could open them up to harassment and mistreatment goes to such lengths to protect its own,” adding: “Clearly, they understand how dangerous this outing can be.”

Dirt machine

The dirt machine now targeted at government workers was honed on higher-profile targets during the Biden administration.

Early on, AAF pointed its opposition-research machine at Biden nominees including Saule Omarova, nominated for comptroller of the currency; Sarah Bloom Raskin, nominated for vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, supreme court justice, whom the organization falsely claimed had been soft on sex offenders.

In the process of “desperately seeking dirt” on the Federal Reserve nominee Lisa Cook, AAF used a customary tactic of peppering her employer, Michigan State University, with records requests. But Jones went one step further by bombarding “dozens” of her colleagues in a bid to cast doubt on her tenure promotion a decade earlier.

A significant proportion of the nominees targeted by AAF – including Brown Jackson, Cook and Omarova – were women of color.

The dozens of public employees whose information was collected in “dossiers” on the DEI watchlist site are overwhelmingly people of color. Of 44 profiles listed under agencies at the time of reporting, 29 were people of color, and 20 were women of color alone. Just five were white men.

“The fact that many on the list are people of color just adds another layer of vileness to the project,” Beirich said.

“Recent attacks by the Trump administration on public employees shows that the Maga/Project 2025 movement will go as far as possible to make life miserable for public servants.”

This article was amended on 10 February 2025. An earlier version incorrectly stated that employees of Foundation Source act as trustees for the Dunn Foundation; rather Foundation Source acts as an administrator. A spokesperson said after publication that Foundation Source “does not recommend (or decide) specific organizations for its clients to fund”, and that it has no affiliation with the CPI or AAF.

It also clarified that Jeff Yass and Richard Uihlein have not contributed to the Club for Growth Foundation.

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OMFG

FOX BS VID] Conservative nonprofit names top Education Dept bureaucrats Trump should fire | Fox News

FIRST ON FOX - The American Accountability Foundation, a conservative government research nonprofit, assembled a "watch-list" of top bureaucrats at the Department of Education who it recommends President-elect Donald Trump should fire.

The AAF, which has received funding from the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation in the past, published a list on its website of 19 "dossiers" naming "America's Most Subversive Education Bureaucrats."

AAF President Tom Jones, a former Republican congressional staffer, told Fox News Digital that the "public-facing" list was not compiled at the behest of the Trump transition team, but rather because the conservative organization believes it's important that the American people "understand that there's a lot of civil servants within the federal government, and particularly within the Department of Education, who are not impartial technicians executing on the agenda of the president, but rather are ideologues who have an agenda that they're willing to implement despite the clear direction from the voters in November."

"At the end of the day, it's fundamentally undemocratic. What you get is a group of people who don't reflect the will of the American people implementing their agenda over that of what the American people said was their will in November. At the end of the day, what it means is you get a left-wing approach to education, particularly higher education," Jones told Fox News Digital. "The higher education system in America is broken. I think the events of last summer, where you saw left-wing pro-terrorist groups take over American campuses, and the faculty and administration support them, really should have been a wake-up call for all Americans. And I think this could be a wake-up call for this administration."

Jones said those on the list include individuals who are "serial donors" to Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and President Biden, as well as other "hard core ideologues" who will prioritize their own progressive agendas, such as promoting Biden’s student loan "bailouts," increasing regulations on successful online class partnerships, and conducting a "witch hunt" against Christian and career colleges through the Student Financial Aid Office of Enforcement.

NEW GOP BILL SEEKS TO HOLD PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES TO SAME TAX STANDARD AS CORPORATIONS: 'ON NOTICE'

Jones identified one individual at the Office of Enforcement who "had spent his career at the Maryland Attorney General's Office investigating career colleges and Christian colleges." He pointed to another person who stated that he would work to turn the DOE into a "mini-CFPB," a reference to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Jones described as "essentially just a witch hunt factory that's used to investigate organizations of people that the administration doesn't like." The nonprofit described one general attorney for the DOE included on the list as "a leading legal advocate for transgender rights in the debate over religious exemptions for certain universities."

"These people are not going to say, you know what, 'I hated Trump last week, but on January 22nd, I'm going to be super excited about implementing his education agenda.' Unless these folks are moved out of their positions within the Department of Education, they're going to continue to work behind the scenes to attack alternatives to traditional four-year institutions," Jones said.

Others named on the list include a civilian employee within the DOE Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) who the nonprofit says spearheaded a "$6.1 billion student loan forgiveness scheme to art institute students."

"They call it relief, but it's really a huge giveaway to people who pursue college degrees that are just unaffordable," Jones told Fox News Digital. "And look, that's completely unacceptable to essentially have the federal government repaying the student loans for someone and putting that burden on the back of a plumber or a welder, you know, a teacher who is taking care of their education or who didn't go on to college, they've now got to pay for some guy who's got a feminist studies degree from Columbia and $150,000 in debt. That's just simply, fundamentally unfair and wrong. But look, if you want to go get that degree, you should be prepared to pay for it."

:{:{. President Biden has announced another $1.2 billion in student loan forgiveness, adding to a total of $138 billion forgiven.}:

The list includes another DOE employee who the nonprofit says helped the Biden administration "weaponize federal student aid policies against faith-based higher education."

TRUMP TAPS FORMER WWE CEO LINDA MCMAHON TO SERVE AS EDUCATION SECRETARY

The nonprofit accuses the person of playing a key role in the DOE levying a $37.7 million fine against Grand Canyon University, the nation’s largest Christian college, for alleged misrepresentation of the cost of its doctoral degree programs, accusing the Biden administration of effectively having "bullied" the college into wiping out student debt for them.

Everyone named on the list is making six figures, Jones said, adding that some are even earning an annual salary of more than $200,000, while the average American teacher's salary sits at around $50,000 to $60,000.

"These woke bureaucrats at the Department of Education are pulling down $200,000 to attack alternatives to education," Jones said. "The Office of Enforcement is attacking things like career colleges and Christian colleges, and they're getting rich doing it. And that's just shameful. So I'm hopeful that the administration says, look, this is, you know, paying people $200,000 a year to attack opportunities for, you know, welders, nurses and folks like that to get a higher education. It's just unacceptable."

"At the end of the day, American people need to understand that the people we're talking about here are not technicians," Jones said. "This isn't plumbing that they're doing. This is policy work. This is fundamentally ideological work. And at the end of the day, these people are just like the political appointees that can be fired at the beginning of the administration."

"I'm hopeful that the administration really takes the opportunity to treat them like political appointees and ask them to move on, because if they don't, they're going to get left-wing political ideology in the administration for the next four years," he added. "And unfortunately, we saw some of that happen in the first administration. I'm cautiously optimistic that the administration learned their lesson the hard way, the first time that they can't let a bunch of unelected bureaucrats run roughshod over their agenda during this administration."

Jones said he supported President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to become Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, who still faces a Senate confirmation process.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"I'm excited that she's going to have the ability and the latitude to do the hard work that it takes to really shake up the Department of Education, because it's, you know, it's a Carter administration agency that's stuck in the 1970s, when the world has moved on to different approaches to education, whether it's in, you know, high schools or whether it's in post-secondary education," Jones said.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Department of Education press office, as well as the individual staffers listed, seeking comment.

The AAF assembled a similar "watch-list" of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees who it recommended the Trump administration clear out. In response at the time, DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas condemned "in the strongest terms any effort to harass or intimidate our public servants."

"What Alejandro Mayorkas did was use the force of the Department of Homeland Security to chill speech by groups like the American Accountability Foundation," Jones told Fox News Digital. "There were no examples of anyone feeling threatened, but what there were examples of was him ordering departments within the Department of Homeland Security to open investigations of AAF. That's, you know, that's the kind of weaponization of the U.S. government that we saw for four years under the Biden administration… So the idea that some folks are feeling targeted is just nonsense and a complete red herring and really a tool for Mayorkas and Biden administration officials to shut down speech that they don't just don't agree with."

Danielle Wallace is a Breaking News Editor for Fox News Digital, serving as a critical newsroom playmaker at the intersection of major historic political events and the age of AI.

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american-accountability-foundation

American Accountability Foundation

About

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is a nonprofit launched by the far-right Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which refers to itself as a “government oversight and research organization” that uses “aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging, rapid response, and Congressional investigations.”

However, much of AAF’s work is actually focused on discounting and discrediting President Biden and his executive nominees through opposition research and negative, often factually inaccurate narratives. The organization uses the X handle @ExposingBiden to push its point of view. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, for instance, AAF “put forward [the narrative] that she had supported lighter sentences for people who had been involved with child pornography,” according to journalist Maggie Severns.

AAF has released a number of reports to assist right-wing attacks on “woke capitalism” and ESG investing. In July 2023, it published Naming and Shaming: The ESG Movement’s Efforts to Defund Trade Associations and Put the Advocacy Community Out of Business. The report argues that ESG-related shareholder resolutions at public companies are actually “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives and business groups,” specifically through defunding corporate lobbying.

In July 2023, AAF also produced Proxy Wars: Glass Lewis,a report claiming that the proxy advisory company Glass Lewis has an “overwhelmingly liberal” bias that has fueled the “implementation of ESG policies at major corporations.”

In April 2023, AAF published what it calls an investigative report titled None of It Is Our Money: An Introduction to the Leftist Activists and Liberal DC Insiders at BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Using Your Money to Advance Their Political Agenda.The report has been publicized by other anti-ESG groups such as the Independent Women’s Forum.

AAF’s anti-ESG research support was also cited in the March 2023 Consumers’ Research report titled Defeating the ESG Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.

In February 2023, AAF joined other major anti-ESG groups in signing a group letter calling on U.S. senators to “stop Biden’s ideological embezzling of Americans’ retirement accounts.” The following month, it signed onto an Advancing American Freedom letter thanking senators who opposed President Biden’s “woke 401(k)” rule.

AAF produced and distributed a research memo titled, “BlackRock is Using OPERS’ Investments to Push a Woke Agenda” on June 20, 2024 in a move to get the major asset manager blacklisted under Oklahoma’s 2022 Energy Discrimination Elimination Act.

AAF is led by Tom Jones, a former legislative director for Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and was head of opposition research for Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, AAF has received funding from Leonard Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, but the Center for Media and Democracy has not been able to document this.

AAF is being investigated by the IRS for violating its tax-exempt status, Politico reported in March 2024.

Operatives

Top Funders

Core Financials

Source: 2024 IRS filing

*For more information, visit the AAF page on SourceWatch

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TOM JONES STORM

Thomas_H_Jones

*Activities and notes: College Republicans; Honor Society

LEGIT? Aug 2, 2022 — UCAR will become the new home for programs run by the Consortium for Ocean Leadership (COL), which is set to dissolve at the end of September.

Employment History

President

President

Principal

Legislative Director

Sen. Jim DeMint (**R**-SC)

Senior Policy Adviser

Legislative Director

Sen. Jim DeMint (**R**-SC)

Aviation Professional Staff Member

Sen. Jim DeMint (**R**-SC)

Staff Director

Deputy Director for External Affairs

Director of Public Policy

*Legislative Assistant

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WASHINGTON (TNND) — A new report from a conservative watchdog group is renewing scrutiny around Chinese nationals working inside U.S. universities and federally funded research institutions, raising broader questions about national security risk and oversight.

The report, first reported by Just the News, was produced by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF).{ } (TNND)

The report, first reported by Just the News, was produced by theAmerican Accountability Foundation(AAF). It identifies 21 Chinese academics who are currently or were recently affiliated with U.S. universities and national laboratories, arguing that their backgrounds and research portfolios warrant closer government scrutiny.

[pdf?]

National security concerns

According to AAF, the concern is not espionage or proven misconduct. Instead, AAF frames its findings as a preventive risk assessment based on a combination of factors: the researchers’ areas of study, their prior education in China, and alleged ties to institutions connected to the Chinese government or military.

In its report, AAF argues that many of the identified researchers work in what are known as “dual-use” fields, areas of science that have legitimate civilian applications but could also be adapted for military use. Those fields include artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced materials, semiconductors, robotics, and viral research.

In a statement to The National News Desk, Tom Jones, head of AAF, said:

For years, DC politicians have talked and postured about China’s influence in vague terms, but our research shows the threat is real, specific, and already inside our institutions. The CCP isn’t sending ordinary students; they’re embedding operatives in our labs and research programs, and America’s universities are rolling out the red carpet. That has to stop.

Push for additional screening

The report does not accuse any of the named individuals of espionage, intellectual property theft, or criminal wrongdoing. Instead, AAF describes its conclusions as a national-security risk analysis, calling for tighter screening and oversight.

The report does not accuse any of the named individuals of espionage, intellectual property theft, or criminal wrongdoing. Instead, AAF describes its conclusions as a national-security risk analysis, calling for tighter screening and oversight. (TNND)

The report also raises questions about federal funding.

Tax dollars at play

According to AAF, some of the researchers it identifies have received U.S. government funding through grants tied to agencies including the Department of War, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy.

In one example cited by the group, a researcher is described as conducting work with potential military applications at Lawrence National Laboratory, a federally funded research facility. AAF argues that when taxpayer dollars support research in sensitive fields, the background and affiliations of researchers become a national-security consideration, not just an academic one.

Alarms raised for years

TheHouse Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Partyhas warned for years that the Chinese Communist Party views overseas education as a strategic tool for acquiring advanced scientific and technical knowledge. In a 2024 report, the committee stated that some U.S.-funded research has been conducted in collaboration with Chinese institutions tied to China’s defense and industrial base.

AAF’s report adds a new data point to that debate, one that stops short of alleging wrongdoing, but presses policymakers to reconsider how the U.S. evaluates risk when sensitive research, federal funding, and foreign affiliations intersect.

The broader policy question now facing lawmakers is not whether international collaboration should continue, but how to ensure that it does so without exposing vulnerabilities in areas tied to national defense and emerging technologies.

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daily seig heil

https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/videos/when-a-new-president-is-elected-especially-when-that-president-is-of-a-different/389744477480526/

When a new president is elected, especially when that president is of a different party from the previous administration, personnel changes ensue. But just as important as who a new president should hire into his or her administration is the consideration of who to fire, or at least remove from positions significant influence, according to Thomas Jones.

Through an initiative called Project Sovereignty 2025, Jones, president of the conservative oversight organization American Accountability Foundation, is working to compile a list of “deep state” civil servants currently working on immigration policy and who would likely not support a conservative administration’s border policies.

Jones joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the agenda and implementation of Project Sovereignty 2025.

tell a story about those ppl? left has investigation skillset, gop only in election = oppo res? cadre deep state no one know who they are and what their bias; you need to be somewhere else in govt doj dhs leftwing immig gps with open border agenda, supercharge into the interior, life goal senier exec service --15, immigration judges 100 ppl targeted; biden threat by 25th

ethic compl ilhan for official contrib things of value guy raise $ former pm

russia hoax sudanese raise $

exposing biden on X

[### Ilhan Omar hit with ethics complaint over appearance with ...

New York Post

https://nypost.com › 2024/07/03 › us-news › ilhan-oma...](https://nypost.com/2024/07/03/us-news/ilhan-omar-hit-with-ethics-complaint-over-event-with-ex-somalia-pm/)

Jul 3, 2024 — Ilhan Omar with an ethics complaint Wednesday over an event she took part in last weekend that featured former Somalia Prime Minister Hassan Ali ...Read more

[### Ilhan Omar's rally with the former Prime Minister of Somalia

Facebook · M.A. Rothman

640+ reactions · 1 year ago](https://www.facebook.com/MichaelARothman/videos/ilhan-omars-rally-with-the-former-prime-minister-of-somalia-the-interest-of-ilha/674254588895995/)

The interests of Omar is that of the Somalian people and Somalia.” The enemy from within. Tammy Jo Fisher ...Read more

[### "The interests of Ilhan is that of the Somalian people and ...

Instagram · mnalphanews

200+ likes · 1 year ago](https://www.instagram.com/reel/C823eQlCY2V/)

"The interests of Ilhan is that of the Somalian people and Somalia,” former Somali Prime Minister Hassan Khaire said during a celebration of ...Read more

[### Republicans smeared Ilhan Omar over a faulty translation. ...

Minnesota Reformer

https://minnesotareformer.com › 2024/02/01 › republic...](https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/02/01/republicans-smeared-ilhan-omar-over-a-faulty-translation-heres-what-she-really-said/)

Feb 1, 2024 — Republican lawmakers and commentators questioned U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar's allegiance to the United States — even calling for her to be deported — ...Read more

[### Progressive US lawmaker Omar faces censure over ...

Al Jazeera

https://www.aljazeera.com › News › Government](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/1/progressive-us-lawmaker-omar-faces-censure-over-mistranslated-speech)

Feb 1, 2024 — Omar, a Somali American Congress member, says the attacks are the latest instance of hardline Republican 'Islamophobia'.

[### Ilhan Omar Brags About Advancing a Somalia First Agenda ...

The Heritage Foundation

https://www.heritage.org › progressivism › commentary](https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/ilhan-omar-brags-about-advancing-somalia-first-agenda-congress)

Feb 5, 2024 — Omar appears not just to put her Somali ethnicity first but sees her job in Congress as representing the interests of the east African country and its ...Read more

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x tag swampmonitor

an 525

U.S. President Donald Trump sparked widespread outrage Thursday by abruptly firing Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden with a two-sentence email sent by the White House's deputy director of presidential personnel.

According to her bio, Hayden was the first woman and first African American to lead the national library, which is the largest in the world and home to more than 178 million items—from books to photographs to primary historical documents.

Hayden was also the first professional librarian appointed to the role in decades, The Washington Postnoted. She was nominated for a 10-year term in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate with bipartisan support.

Her sudden termination was met with fury, with education advocates, civil rights campaigners, and Democratic lawmakers condemning the firing as yet another Trump administration attack on a cherished public institution.

"This is an absolute disgrace," civil rights attorney ‪Sherrilyn Ifill wrote in response to the news. "Dr. Hayden is a consummate professional, career librarian, and public servant. I cannot think of anyone in the Trump administration who is fit to address the Librarian of Congress in this way."

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"This move undermines the foundational principles of our democracy and erodes public trust in our institutions."

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT.) said in a scathing statement that "this is yet another example in the disturbing pattern of the President removing dedicated public servants without cause—likely to fill the position with one of his 'friends' who is not qualified and does not care about protecting America's legacy."

"Dr. Hayden's tenure has been marked by a steadfast commitment to accessibility, modernization, and the democratization of knowledge," said DeLauro. "Her dismissal is not just an affront to her historic service but a direct attack on the independence of one of our most revered institutions."

"This move undermines the foundational principles of our democracy and erodes public trust in our institutions," DeLauro added. "The Trump administration must provide a transparent explanation for this decision. I urge my colleagues in Congress—especially the Republicans who benefited from Dr. Hayden's work—to stand united in defending the integrity of the Library of Congress."

Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House panel that oversees the Library of Congress, called Hayden "an American hero" who "has spent her entire career serving people—from helping kids learn to read to protecting some of our nation's most precious treasures."

"President Trump's ignorant decision will impact America's libraries, our copyrighted economic interests, and service to the American people by threatening support for Congress. His decision is a complete disgrace," added Morelle, who vowed to introduce legislation guaranteeing that the Librarian of Congress is appointed by lawmakers, not the president.

Trump fired Hayden hours after the right-wing American Accountability Foundation urged the president to terminate her, claiming she is "woke" and "anti-Trump." The group celebrated her termination in a post on X late Thursday.

NOW READ:Someone finally put spoiled child Trump in his place

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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.

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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

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10 24 an

A far-right group is not just content with identifying politicians to vote out of office: It's now aiming its sights on career federal employees.

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) — which is one of the 100 partner organizations in the Heritage Foundation's controversial Project 2025 initiative — has recently launched a website called the "DHS Watchlist," in which it posted the names, headshots and biographical information of 10 government employees working in the Department of Homeland Security in President Joe Biden's administration. Its "Top 10 Targets" list includes senior-level employees in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services along with associate counsels and policy analysts in the department. Two immigration judges are also listed as "targets."

"The DHS Bureaucrat Watch List is dedicated to exposing the career staff who have outsized influence on efforts to secure the southern border," AAF states on its DHS Watchlist website. "While everyone knows who Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland are, few Americans know who the career bureaucrats are that implement their orders."

READ MORE:**'Nearly all' voters know about Project 2025 and majority have negative view of it: report**

In its write-up of Texas-based immigration judge Noelle Sharp, the AAF said she "made her bones keeping criminal aliens out of jail and away from deportation, and that she "brags on her website that she worked to keep criminal aliens from being deported."

"Our firm specializes in Immigration Law, and we have the flexibility, experience, and technology to work with clients around the world. Whether you wish to visit Disney Land for a week, obtain your permanent residency, or become a United States citizen, we will will help your personal 'American Dream' come true," Sharp's website reads (AAF linked to an archived version of her firm's website on its hit list). "We bring extensive experience and professionalism to every case and customize our support to your individual needs and concerns."

AAF also singled out immigration judge Elizabeth Young as a "target" on its "DHS Watchlist" site. The group accused her of "leading a charge to come up with creative legal maneuvers to keep illegal aliens from being deported" while she led an immigration law clinic at the University of Arkansas.

"The men and women who end up in front of an immigration judge are often some of the worst cases of immigration fraud," the group wrote without a source to back up its claim. "Unfortunately, Judge Young has been dangerously generous handing asylum status at alarming rates."

READ MORE:**Undercover video details Project 2025's secretive 'second phase' — and exposes Trump's connection**

There are no explicit instructions for readers, though users on the social media platform Bluesky were concerned that the lengthy descriptions of its "targets" could lead to political violence. Journalist Don Moynihan wrote that Tom Jones, who leads AAF, is a Republican-aligned opposition researcher with a history of making spurious claims about Democrats.

"I looked at the site which posts the civil servants name, title & salary. But the actual accusations are weak tea," he wrote. "One praised Fauci in a tweet! Another won an award for excellent performance in her job, which means she can't be trusted. One spoke on a diversity panel! No real scandals there."

Political violence has become especially prevalent in the 2024 cycle. Reuters recently reported that there have been at least 300 instances of politically motivated attacks from both sides since the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Some of the more high-profile examples include the two attempted assassinations of former President Donald Trump, and a Democratic campaign office in Arizona being targeted in three different shootings in as many weeks. That office has since been closed.

READ MORE:'He is on on our side': Org behind Project 2025 boasts repeatedly about close ties to Trump

*Click here to view the DHS Watchlist website.

*Click here to view the DHS Watchlist website.

The DHS Watchlist: America's Most Subversive Immigration Bureaucrats

The DHS Bureaucrat Watch List is dedicated to exposing the career staff who have outsized influence on efforts to secure the southern border. While everyone knows who Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland are, few Americans know who the career bureaucrats are that implement their orders.

By uncovering hidden agendas and failures, we aim to restore integrity to our immigration system and border protection by showing America who can be counted on to reform America’s broken immigration system and who is in league with left-wing open border groups. Join us in defending our borders and reclaiming America's sovereignty.

Top 10 Targets

Connie Nolan

Associate Director – Service Center Operations Directorate; USCIS

EG

Connie Nolan

Salary:

$192,253

Grade:

SES

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)

Associate Director – Service Center Operations Directorate; USCIS

Connie Nolan's

Notable Prior Employment History

2003 – Present- U.S. Department of Homeland Security

1992 – 2003 - U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service

Laid Groundwork for Marriage Fraud with a “100% Virtual” Screening Office

In August 2024, the Biden administration unveiled a program critics derided as a glorified form of marriage “amnesty.” As part of this initiative, the administration set up a 100% virtual screening process, which raised concerns of marriage fraud among immigration watchdogs such as the Immigration Accountability Project. Ms. Nolan was a key cog in this effort, according to internal USCIS emails reported about in the Washington Times: (source)

One detail is clear: USCIS is creating a “100% virtual” office to handle the applications.

An internal email late last month said the agency was rushing to recruit immigration officers, assistants and supervisors for the new virtual office, known as Waivers and Temporary Status, or WATS.

The email from Connie Nolan, associate director of USCIS service center operations, confirmed that training for the background check unit won’t begin until Aug. 19 the date the program is supposed to start taking applications. Some positions won’t even be reassigned until a week later, according to the email.

USCIS didn’t respond to repeated inquiries for this report, but Ms. Nolan acknowledged chaotic times at the agency.

“We know there has been a lot of changes in the past couple of years and probably more to come. Change brings opportunities and with it personal growth,” she wrote.

Experts on the immigration security side of the debate said the virtual office is worrying because it increases chances for fraud in a program already ripe for bogus applications.

“In a ‘100% virtual’ program, fraud will be rampant, especially marriage fraud,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project. “It’s easy to produce fake marriage certificates and other documentary ‘proof’ of long-term residence. It’s a whole lot harder to fake a long-term marriage in person.”…

Virtual screening makes it easier for immigrants to fool immigration officials with sham marriages and obtain US visas. Getting away from in person interviews makes a mockery of the legitimate marriage visa process and should never be allowed.

Recognized as a Biden Immigration Team Leader in 2023

In 2023, Connie Nolan won a “meritorious rank award” from President Biden. This is a clear indication that she’s ‘on the team.’ Further, Secretary Mayorkas made comments praising the award recipients’ “dedication to mission”:

WASHINGTON – Today, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas recognized 30 members of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) workforce who received the 2023 Presidential Rank Award (PRA) for exceptional service.

“I am incredibly proud of the 30 DHS executives who have been selected to receive this year’s Presidential Rank Award. The award speaks to these senior executives’ extraordinary dedication to mission and exceptional work as public servants,” said Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.” …

…

… DHS employees selected by President Biden to receive the prestigious awards include: …

…FY2023 Meritorious Rank Recipients

The Meritorious Rank Award is presented to leaders for sustained accomplishments and is awarded to only five percent of career SES members and Senior-Level (SL) employees and Scientific and Professional (ST) corps…

…

  •  Connie Nolan, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Simply stated – Connie Nolan would not receive this award if she was not perceived by Biden Administration officials as being a team player onboard with the disastrous Biden immigration agenda. (source)

Jennifer Higgins

Deputy Director – USCIS

Royce Bernstein Murray

Assistant Secretary, Border and Immigration Policy, Department of Homeland Security

Daniel Delgado

Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Immigration Policy, DHS

Andrea Saenz

Immigration Judge, Department of Justice

Wilson Osorio

Associate Counsel, USCIS

Kursten Phelps

Policy Analyst, Office of Policy and Strategy, Humanitarian Affairs Division – USCIS

Colleen Renk Zengotitabengoa

Senior Advisor for Humanitarian Affairs - USCIS

Kathryn E. Anderson

Deputy Chief, Office of Policy & Strategy, USCIS

Rebecca Swaintek-Green

Associate Counsel, USCIS

Funded by the Heritage Foundation Innovation Award.

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Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and others in MAGA media have recently praised disgraced Sen. Joe McCarthy and his blacklists, a tactic that Project 2025 partner organization the American Accountability Foundation is attempting to bring to the White House should Donald Trump win in November.

According to The Associated Press, AAF is planning to create and publicly post a list of “100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be … ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings,” with a focus on “those in senior executive positions who could put up roadblocks to Trump’s plans for tighter borders and more deportations.”

The plan is reportedly underwritten by a $100,000 grant from conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation as part of Project 2025, its far-reaching and extreme effort to provide policy and personnel recommendations for a potential second Trump administration. One of Project 2025’s top priorities is the implementation of “Schedule F,” a scheme to remove job protections from federal workers by reclassifying career staffers as political appointees — a direct attack on federal unions that could be used to fire civil servants deemed insufficiently pro-Trump.

AAF is one of more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, and its initiative — synergistically dubbed Project Sovereignty 2025 — is the latest broadside against the 2.2 million people who work for the federal government. The AP article notes that the group’s list of what Heritage referred to as “anti-American bad actors” echoes the blacklist era of McCarthy, the disgraced anti-communist crusader whose name became synonymous with one of the most repressive periods in U.S. history.

Notably, MAGA media have been attempting to rehabilitate McCarthy’s illiberal tactics and goals using rhetoric that often dovetails with justifications for AAF’s project.

In a Decemberinterview,

vid]

Project 2025’s Schedule F and AAF’s proposed blacklist are clear, direct descendants of the literal McCarthyism that MAGA media figures are so quick to praise. The McCarthy era saw massive purges of left-wing federal employees as part of the Cold War’s rightward shift in national politics, halting the potential for American social democracy and helping to plant the seeds for the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and the ensuing rise in inequality that accompanied it.

McCarthy and fellow anti-communists like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover also directed their oppressive tactics toward gay people — and those suspected or accused of being gay — who worked for the federal government during a period known as the Lavender Scare. McCarthy “directly linked homosexuality and Communism,” depicting gay people working in government as a national security threat. Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 10,000 federal workers were forced to resign during this period, often behind closed doors for fear of their gay identity — real or perceived — becoming public.

McCarthyist attacks on workers extended far beyond federal government employees. The broader Red Scare was disastrous for unions and the working class, hollowing out organized labor’s power and setting the stage for the wage stagnation and exploding wealth inequality that have defined the United States since the early 1980s. As leading historian of McCarthyism Ellen Schrecker writes, “labor's declining percentage of the workforce” had its “roots in that grim moment."

MAGA media’s celebration of that “grim moment” for workers further highlights the superficial rhetoric of right-wing populism.

Now, Project 2025 has taken up the mantle of targeting the federal workforce — and the working class at large— with effects that could be just as long lasting. As Roberts told Bannon in June, “What we're doing here is building not just for 2025, Steve, but for the next century in the United States."

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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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NYT

Pro-Trump Nonprofit Paid Millions to Companies Tied to Its Own Leaders

The Conservative Partnership Institute’s three highest-paid contractors had connections to the group’s leaders or their relatives, raising concerns about self-dealing.

Two men in dark suits shaking hands across a table.

A job fair sponsored by the Conservative Partnership Institute on Capitol Hill in June 2018. The group was founded the year before and aims to help conservatives wield power.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times

David A. Fahrenthold

Reporting from Washington

May 6, 2024

The Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit whose funding skyrocketed after it became a nerve center for President Donald J. Trump’s allies in Washington, has paid at least $3.2 million since the start of 2021 to corporations led by its own leaders or their relatives, records show.

In its most recent tax filings, the nonprofit’s three highest-paid contractors were all connected to insiders.

One was led by the institute’s president, Edward Corrigan, and another by its chief operating officer. At a third contractor, the board members included the group’s senior legal fellow Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Last year, the Conservative Partnership Institute hired a fourth company connected to an insider: a fund-raising firm run by Mr. Corrigan’s brother, Patrick Corrigan. Public filings show the company received a contract three weeks before the firm was legally formed.

The Conservative Partnership Institute applied to the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt nonprofit, and the agency approved. That means donations to the group are tax deductible, like gifts to a food bank or the American Red Cross. It also means that, by law, its money must serve the public good rather than private interests.

The nonprofit has pushed those limits by entwining itself with only one faction of American politics. It pays high salaries to some of Mr. Trump’s former officials, hosts retreats for Republican lawmakers at a rural compound and funds efforts to vet people and ideas for a second Trump term.

Legal experts say these insider transactions also raise concerns about self-dealing. While hiring insiders is permitted when certain safeguards are in place, the payments moved money out of daylight and into opaque entities that the nonprofit’s leaders helped control.

“There’s no checks and balances,” said Michael West, a lawyer at the New York Council of Nonprofits. Because there is no real third party to determine whether the insider-led companies were charging the nonprofit a fair price, Mr. West said, “the potential for overpayment here is epic.”

Mr. Corrigan, the institute’s president, did not respond to questions about what steps the group took to assure that it was not overpaying the insiders’ companies. The companies did not say what rates they charged.

Image

A close-up frame of Edward Corrigan. He is smiling.

Edward Corrigan, the president and chief executive of the Conservative Partnership Institute, at a panel discussion in National Harbor, Md., last year. His group applied to the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt nonprofit and was approved.Credit...Leigh Vogel for The New York Times

Of the insiders who had dual roles at the nonprofit and its vendors, only one responded to questions from The New York Times. Wesley Denton, the institute’s chief operating officer and a former Trump administration official, said he also had been paid by Compass Professional, one of the vendors.

Mr. Denton’s annual compensation, with benefits, from the institute was $391,735. He declined to say how much he received from Compass Professional. He was on the board of both the vendor and the institute.

“We’re proud to have helped launch new, independent, nonprofit service providers that provide high-quality professional services,” Mr. Denton said in a written statement.

The institute’s donors include several Republican political campaigns, as well as conservative businesspeople. One major donor, the retired Texas aviation entrepreneur Robert Bruce, said the nonprofit’s leaders had not told him about their use of vendors with insider connections.

“I’ve never had a conversation like that,” Mr. Bruce said in a phone interview.

He estimated he had given “several hundred thousand” dollars to the institute. Mr. Bruce said he had no concerns that the nonprofit’s leaders were misusing money. “I’ve known them a long time,” he said. “They’re good people.”

The Times traced the relationships between the group’s leaders and their vendors by examining charity and corporate filings with the federal government, five states and the District of Columbia.

The records do not show what share of the $3.2 million went to the institute’s top leaders and their family members — only that the money flowed to companies where they served as an owner or a director. In at least one case, a company failed to flag that connection as required in a state filing.

Image

Two people wearing Trump 2024 hats and clothing.

The Conservative Partnership Institute pays high salaries to former Trump officials, hosts retreats for Republican lawmakers at a rural compound and funds efforts to vet people and ideas for a second Trump presidency.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

The Conservative Partnership Institute was founded in 2017 by former Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, after he was ousted as the president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative nonprofit. The group’s aim was to help conservatives wield power, shepherding them “through the Washington swamps without being infected with Potomac Fever,” Mr. DeMint said in 2017.

The institute’s fund-raising actually improved when conservatives lost power.

In 2021, with Democrats in charge in Washington, the institute hired former Trump staff members, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. It began courting donors as the voice of Mr. Trump’s allies and ambitions.

Fund-raising jumped to $45 million in 2021 from $7 million in 2020. The nonprofit, newly flush, bought a 2,200-acre retreat on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and a series of commercial buildings near the U.S. Capitol, with plans for a restaurant, a school and TV studios. The group also began convening workshops and seminars for conservative lawmakers and staff members as well as seeding new conservative nonprofits.

As the money flowed, the institute’s leaders began to found a series of companies in Delaware.

The first was Compass Professional. Its first annual report listed a slate of directors, including Edward Corrigan and Mr. Denton.

Next was Compass Legal Services. Its initial filing listed directors, including Ms. Mitchell and Charlotte Davis, one of the institute’s board members.

By the end of 2021, the group had paid its companies a combined $639,259, according to an audit that it filed with state-level charity regulators.

Federal law allows nonprofits like this one to hire insiders as long as they properly disclose the payments and ensure the insiders do not overcharge. Legal experts still advise against it because of the temptation for insiders to abuse their power over charity funds.

“You have an obligation to behave in the interest of that organization,” said Linda Sugin, a professor of nonprofit law at Fordham University. “The problem is, when you’re on both sides of the transaction, then we’re skeptical that you’re going to put the organization’s interests before your own.”

Ms. Sugin said the institute could have reduced its risk by soliciting bids from competing firms to gauge whether the insiders were charging market rates. The institute could have asked its leaders to recuse themselves from the decision to hire their own companies, she said.

Mr. Corrigan and other leaders did not respond to questions about whether their group took those steps.

If a nonprofit is found to have given improper benefits to insiders, the insiders could face financial penalties from state or federal regulators. In extreme cases, the I.R.S. could revoke the group’s tax exemption.

In 2022, a third Delaware company was formed: Compass Property Management. Its corporate filings show Mr. Denton as president.

During that year, the nonprofit paid the three insider-connected companies a combined $2.6 million, according to the audit that it filed with states. The institute said those payments were “for the use of facilities, personnel, human resources and other professional services.”

How much of that flowed to the insiders on those vendors’ boards of directors?

Mr. Denton offered only a partial answer.

He said the vendors did not pay their board members solely because they were board members.

However, as in his case, Mr. Denton said the companies could pay their board members for other reasons, for “doing employment work for these organizations, outside of their board duties.” The president of Compass Legal issued a statement saying his company did not pay “outside directors” but did not specify which directors were counted as “outside.”

Compass Professional and Compass Legal have worked for other clients, including Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and Gun Owners of America, according to federal campaign and charity filings. The companies’ leaders did not respond to queries about how much of their business came from the Conservative Partnership Institute.

The most recent data on what the institute paid the three original insider-connected companies is from 2022. Since then, corporate filings show, the companies’ board members have shifted, but Conservative Partnership Institute leaders or their family members remained on the boards of each.

Last year, the institute also hired a company that was partly owned by Patrick Corrigan, Compass Direct LLC, to a fund-raising contract, paying $180,000 over the next year.

In a filing in North Carolina, the institute said that contract began on July 1, 2023. But Patrick Corrigan’s company was not founded until July 24, three weeks after it won the contract.

In its own filings with North Carolina, Patrick Corrigan’s company was asked if he was related “as parent, spouse, child or sibling to ANY officer, director, trustee or employee” as his client, which was his brother’s nonprofit.

In filings for 2023 and 2024, the company answered “no.” Patrick Corrigan signed the forms.

After The Times pointed this out, Patrick Corrigan responded with a one-line email: “The NC filing has been updated,” he wrote. He did not respond to other questions.

Robert Draper and Julie Tate contributed reporting.

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

:{A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 2024, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump-Allied Nonprofit Paid Millions to Firms With Ties to Insiders.

---

ymail 1123

Public Citizen has been attacked by a far-right entity associated with Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff and one of the MAGA operatives charged in Georgia for conspiring to carry out Trump’s attempted coup.

Please stick with me for more about this attack.

Here’s where Mark Meadows comes in.

Meadows — amidst being one of Donald Trump’s chief lackeys and sorting through legal difficulties arising from the plot to overthrow the 2020 election — has found time to be part of a far-right outfit that has sponsored an array of reactionary enterprises in Washington, D.C.

One of those extremist entities is the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which claims to be “the one new conservative organization the Left fears most.”

To give you a taste of how the AAF spends its time, after President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the group loudly repeated a Republican lie that she had called the judicial system “unfair” to sexual predators.

The Meadows-backed AAF also went after Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin — who had been nominated for a position within the Federal Reserve, and who has the temerity to think that fossil fuel companies have something to do with climate change — for missing a paperwork deadline when they were reeling from their son’s suicide just two weeks earlier.

And now the Mark Meadows-backed American Accountability Foundation has attacked Public Citizen through the Corporate Reform Coalition that we lead.

The Meadows-linked AAF issued a 79-page screed that denounces the Public Citizen-led Corporate Reform Coalition as a “motley crew” that is “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives.”

Of course, Public Citizen is not intimidated by — or afraid of a fight with — Donald Trump, MAGA zealots like Mark Meadows, or obscurely named right-wing front groups.

---

american-accountability-foundation

CMD?

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is a nonprofit launched by the far-right Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which refers to itself as a “government oversight and research organization” that uses “aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging, rapid response, and Congressional investigations.”

However, much of AAF’s work is actually focused on discounting and discrediting President Biden and his executive nominees through opposition research and negative, often factually inaccurate narratives. The organization uses the X handle @ExposingBiden to push its point of view. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, for instance, AAF “put forward [the narrative] that she had supported lighter sentences for people who had been involved with child pornography,” according to journalist Maggie Severns.

AAF has released a number of reports to assist right-wing attacks on “woke capitalism” and ESG investing. In July 2023, it published Naming and Shaming: The ESG Movement’s Efforts to Defund Trade Associations and Put the Advocacy Community Out of Business. The report argues that ESG-related shareholder resolutions at public companies are actually “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives and business groups,” specifically through defunding corporate lobbying.

In July 2023, AAF also produced Proxy Wars: Glass Lewis,a report claiming that the proxy advisory company Glass Lewis has an “overwhelmingly liberal” bias that has fueled the “implementation of ESG policies at major corporations.”

In April 2023, AAF published what it calls an investigative report titled None of It Is Our Money: An Introduction to the Leftist Activists and Liberal DC Insiders at BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Using Your Money to Advance Their Political Agenda.The report has been publicized by other anti-ESG groups such as the Independent Women’s Forum.

AAF’s anti-ESG research support was also cited in the March 2023 Consumers’ Research report titled Defeating the ESG Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.

In February 2023, AAF joined other major anti-ESG groups in signing a group letter calling on U.S. senators to “stop Biden’s ideological embezzling of Americans’ retirement accounts.” The following month, it signed onto an Advancing American Freedom letter thanking senators who opposed President Biden’s “woke 401(k)” rule.

AAF is led by Tom Jones, a former legislative director for Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and was head of opposition research for Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, AAF has received funding from Leonard Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, but the Center for Media and Democracy has not been able to document this.

Operatives

Top Funders

Core Financials

Source: 2021 IRS filing

---

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, and suggested 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

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

===

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KICKASS WHITEHOUSE

posted by aaf 6 min title "AAF attacked by ...."

KBJ crack and porn too hvy sent

CPI AAF HQ "care of" Am 1st legal

donors trust, bradly jones: radical leftist" soft on sexual pred. [old scam // judge coal baron?]

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. 

jones: biden got more thru than trump b/c our guys not fighting, no party discipline, no 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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===

Matt Buckham is a graduate of Grove City College with a degree in economics. Matt came to the Hill in 2011to fight for freedom after the passage of Obamacare. His first job was working as an intern in the Senate Steering Committee where he quickly learned of the appropriations cycle and reckless government spending. He later joined the legislative staff of Senator Jim DeMint where he worked on domestic policy issues.

In 2013, Buckham left the Senate to work atThe Heritage Foundationin a role that would allow him promote conservative policy ideas through the education of Members and their staff.

Matt worked for the House Freedom Caucus in their first year as a policy and communications advisor. In this role he helped define and communicate the Caucus’ position on defunding Planned Parenthood. Matt’s love for preparing the conservative movement for battle led him back to The Heritage Foundation where he spent the last year working to better equip both the Hill and coalition partners.During this time he was able to assist President Trump’s transition team by placing conservatives in key positions within the administration through the personnel team.

==

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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] The New 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:^a ^b^ ^c^ ^d^ ^e Mayer, Jane (April 16, 2022). "The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees". The New Yorker.
  3. ^ ^Jump up to:^a ^b^ 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: 

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https://**documented**.net/investigations/conservative-partnership-institute

Conservative Partnership Institute (“CPI”) is a$45 million “America First” institution boosted with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. Led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, CPI is creating the MAGA-oriented political infrastructure that the Trump administration lacked.

CPI is recruiting America First staffers and providing in-depth training for Hill offices, as well as creating legal institutions, opposition research firms, think tanks, and other groups helmed by former Trump officials and allies, including Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, and Cleta Mitchell. Formed in 2017, CPI's fundraising surged to $45 million in 2021.

The group’s ambitions are sprawling, from amplifying conspiracies around stolen elections and “critical race theory,” to tanking Democratic nominees and filing lawsuits against the Biden administration. CPI’s president, Ed Corrigan, helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team, and the group is positioned to staff and support far-right Congressional offices and the next MAGA administration.

CPI is located blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and serves as a hub for the far-right "America First "movement. The House Freedom Caucus holds weekly meetings at CPI, and texts obtained by the January 6 committee show lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Mike Lee referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period following the 2020 election. Nearly two dozen individuals tied to the January 6 attempted coup are connected to CPI, according to Grid's analysis."CPI is helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights."

Nerve Center for the MAGA Movement

CPI’s Washington D.C. headquarters serve as ahub for the far-right conservative movement. According to CPI, in 2021 the “House Freedom Caucus, the Senate Steering Committee, Congressional Chiefs of Staff, Congressional Communicators, Congressional Legislative Directors, and numerous conservative organizations and activists coalesced regularly at [CPI’s headquarters] to plan their methods and means of attack against the Left to save this country.”

Former Republican CongressmanDenver Riggleman described CPI as playing a "coordinating function" for the House Freedom Caucus, and said that it serves as "sort of like a bizarre Freedom Caucus HQ."

CPIboasted of holding 600 meetings or events in 2021, served as a "strategy center" to oppose President Biden’s vaccine requirements, and hosted multiple “war rooms**” during Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination. CPI is also expanding, and says that it is “in the process of acquiring multiple properties adjacent to our D.C. headquarters in order to create a culture of collaboration and victory for the movement.”

According to CPI, members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Andy Biggs, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. Byron Donalds have made the CPI headquarters “their home away from home.”

At least fifteen members of the House and Senate have disclosed paying membership dues to CPI or its "Conservative Partnership Center" using campaign or leadership PAC funds.

Ties to Trump’s 2020 Coup Attempt

CPI and its affiliate groups “employ or assist at least 20 key operatives reportedly involved in Trump’s failed effort to subvert the 2020 election,” according to Grid, including Cleta Mitchell,the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and joined the infamous callwhen the president urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes; Mark Meadows, Trump's former White House chief of staff who was in communication with alleged Jan. 6 plotters and at least tolerated Trump's attempted coup; and Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who supported Trump’s desire for DOJ to declare the result fraudulent, and whose home was raided by the FBI in June of 2022.

Texts obtained by the January 6 committee also show Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Mike Lee referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period after the 2020 election.

Mike Lee to Mark Meadows, Nov. 9 2020:

We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our guest speaker. My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies. You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.

Marjorie Taylor Greene to Mark Meadows, Dec. 31, 2020:

Good morning Mark, I'm here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th. I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn't get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help. We are getting a lot of members on board. And we need to lay out the best case for each state. I'll be over at CPI this afternoon.

CPI hardly shies away from its affiliation with Trump’s failed coup.

Months after the Capitol insurrection, in summer of 2020, CPI hosted a “Hot Gulag Summer” event that served Jan. 6-themed cocktails, including the “Capitol Attaquiri,” “Insurrection on the Beach” and the “Mostly Peaceful Mojito.”<[bad code lots ...] “We gave conservatives on Capitol Hill the right skills, the right people, and the right connections—all for the purpose of making America great again,” CPI described in its annual report. For example, in 2021 CPI held “5-week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, where “theyarmedconservative staffers with everytacticthe House and Senate rules gave them: how toforce amendment votes, how to work outside the Establishment- dominated committee process, and how to leverage nominations to wage policy fights:”

“You may have seen that conservatives defeated Biden’s gun-grabbing pick to lead the ATF and stopped a communist- sympathizing economist from becoming comptroller of the currency. That didn’t happen by accident.”

According to CPI, “our trainings have become so respected that conservative congressional offices and grassroots advocacy organizations now come to us when they have job openings to fill. They know that we maintain a databaseof current and prospective congressional staffers who have been through our trainings and are up to the task of putting America first.”

In 2021, CPI purchased a $7.25 million collection of waterfront farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hold Congressional staff retreats and trainings. CPI has since held several all-expenses-paid retreats at the property for Congressional staff. Staffers who attend retreats at the CPI-owned property only disclose receiving an estimated $99/night gift of lodging, which helps obscure reveal the actual benefit received.

CPI-Launched Projects, Many Led by former Trump Officials

In 2021, CPI launched eight new projects, as well as entities to provide legal compliance and administrative support for those groups:

CPI also helped launch two organizations to support these projects. Compass Professional Services, which is housed within CPI, provides payroll and administrative services to these entities. Compass Legal Services, also located at CPI headquarters, provides legal, campaign finance, and tax compliance services; according to campaign finance records, CPI members like Marjorie Taylor Greene also pay Compass Legal for legal compliance services, as does Trump's Save America PAC.

CPI Pushing Boundaries of Tax-Exempt Charitable Status

As a 501(c)(3) charity, CPI is exempt from taxation, and its donors get a lucrative tax deduction. But in exchange for those tax benefits, CPI is prohibited from supporting candidates or engaging in partisan political activity.

However, as NPR has reported, CPI is putting its tax-exempt status at risk by closely coordinating its activities with Republican political organizations and selectively offering its facilities and services to Republican candidates. In November 2022, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse sent a letter to CPI inquiring into whether CPI has violated its tax-exempt charitable status.

The NPR report and Sen. Whitehouse's letter detailed several CPI activities that may violate tax law. For example, in the 2022 election cycle, CPI's Election Integrity Network worked closely with the Republican National Committee (RNC) as it worked to recruit and train poll workers and watchers in key swing states, as reported by POLITICO based on audio obtained by Documented. RNC officials have been speakers at several CPI summits, and RNC state election integrity directors are taking part in state-wide election integrity efforts spearheaded by CPI. A 501(c)(3) organization may provide an impermissible private benefit to a political party if it provides programs to recruit and train poll watchers and workers in a partisan manner.

In addition to working closely with the RNC on training and recruiting election observers and poll workers, CPI has hosted political candidates at its events. For example, Governor Ron DeSantis gave the keynote address at CPI’s Florida summit in March of 2022, which amounted to a campaign speech where DeSantis urged people to vote in the election, and stressed that “We need everybody to come out and really, really have a huge, huge November in the state of Florida.”

A 501(c)(3) organization engages in prohibited political campaign intervention by inviting just one candidate to speak at its event, and where that candidate urged support on election day. [audio]

moreover, since late 2020, dozens of GOP candidates have used campaign funds to rent CPI’s facility and services, including for “campaign events” and "fundraising event fees," according to FEC records. Seventeen Congressional candidates and four senatorsreported $4,000 payments to CPI or CPC from their campaign committees or leadership PACs, with the majority of those disbursements described as “membership” payments or dues.

A 501(c)(3) charity engages in prohibited political campaign intervention by selectively offering its facilities to political candidates or committees. There is no record of Democratic candidates renting CPI facilities, and CPI's facilities do not appear available to the general public.

CPI's Fundraising

Since forming in 2017, CPI's fundraising has increased dramatically—most recently, jumping from $7.3 million in 2020 to $45 million in 2021, according to CPI's 2021 tax filing. (CPI's 2021 Annual Report, released in early 2022, reported $19.7 million in revenue plus $25 million in "Capital Fund Revenue").

Trump's Save America PAC gave $1 million to CPI in July 2021. CPI also held a fundraiser at Mar al Lago in April 2021, with former President Trump as the keynote speaker.

As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI does not publicly disclose its donors.

However, an analysis by Grid identified more than 40 foundations, charities and other organizations that have funded CPI, including $1.25 million from GOP megadonor RichardUihlein’s foundation in 2020, $500,000 from the late gaming machine mogul Stanley E. Fulton’s private foundation, and $200,000 from the Chicago Community Trust.

Donors Trust, the “dark money” funding hub, donated a total of $1.3 million to CPI in 2021, with $200,000 earmarked for American Moment and $10,000 in support ofCleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network.

CPI has also identified some financial supporters in its 2021 annual report.

David and Brenda Frecka: CPI thanked the pair for their financial support in its 2021 annual report, and named a "David and Brenda Frecka Boardroom" at CPC. In 2021, David Frecka gave $1M to Jim Jordan's House Freedom Action, and Brenda Frecka gave $1.15M to Debbi Meadows's Right on Women PAC

Mike Rydin: According to CPI’s annual report, Ryden “made a generous gift” so that CPI could purchase a townhouse next door to its headquarters “for additional meeting and event space as well as space to host out-of-town guests.” The property sold for $1.5M in 2020.

Dr. William Amos Jr.: The son of the AFLAC founder “has generously supported the Conservative Partnership Institute. For his incredible contributions to CPI’s growth and mission, in 2021, CPI honored Dr. Amos with CPI’s Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Foster Friess "supported many groups in the movement, including CPI. Foster will always be an important part of the CPI story. With love and purpose, Lynn carries on her late husband’s legacy of helping those in need."

Doug and Charlotte Waikart "made the ultimate commitment to sending American values into the future by supporting CPI in their estate plans."

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ref grid

last summer, while most of official Washington was still reeling from the historic assault on the Capitol, a clubhouse for Trump White House exiles hosted a bash that all but toasted the insurrectionists and plotters responsible.}:

“Hot Gulag Summer,” held at the nondescript Capitol Hill town house leased by the Conservative Partnership Institute, advertised Jan. 6, 2021-themed cocktails, including the “Capitol Attaquiri,” “Insurrection on the Beach” and the “Mostly Peaceful Mojito.” ...“We’re all going to be sent to the gulag eventually,” the invitation read. “We might as well party and get to know each other before we are all ‘reeducated.’”[bad code] CPI is structured in part to act as a 21st century megaphone for pro-Trump messaging, including media perpetuating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, furthering MAGA-friendly culture war battles and pushing back against efforts to hold Trumpworld figures accountable....The offices at 300 Independence boast an in-house podcasting studio, a television studio and a host of employees with large Twitter followings. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert is a “frequent visitor” to CPI’s television studio, according to CPI’s annual report, and she records her podcast, “Bullet Points,” at CPI, as do Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona (“What’s the Biggs Idea?”) and Matt Gaetz of Florida (“Firebrand”), as well as several other right-wing figures.

CPI also opens its facilities to right-wing outlets who help promote Trump-friendly messaging. The Epoch Times, a far-right media company affiliated with the anti-Chinese Communist Party Falun Gong religious movement, films two shows in the building, according to CPI. Right-wing outlet Newsmax filmed a documentary about Jan. 6 at CPI’s television studio.

“A Rorschach test for your sanity”

“This is a Rorschach test for your sanity,” Miller went on. “If you heard this story, and you thought, ‘Man, I believe every word about this and I’m going to go online and say something about it energetically,’ something is wrong with you. Something is wrong with you if you’re that gullible.”

Later that evening, former Trump Pentagon official Kash Patel, now with CPI’s Center for Renewing America, went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to join the attacks on Hutchinson. The 26-year-old former Meadows aide, Patel said, was a “junior staffer who is completely, I believe, lying to the Jan. 6 committee for [her] own self-gain.”

OnHannity’s show the day after Hutchinson’s testimony,Freedom Caucus co-founder Rep. Jim Jordanof Ohio laid into the committee: “This is not an unbiased finder of fact. These are nine people as you said, Sean, nine people who voted to impeach President Trump, nine people who are out to get President Trump and don’t want him to run. … All we have got from them is lie after lie after lie.”

Miller, Patel and Jordan declined to respond to Grid’s requests for comment.

Where the money comes from

CPI is thriving. In less than five years, it has grown from a newcomer to a $19.7 million organization. Its network likely has raised much more, because separate organizations that are affiliated with CPI raise funds independently of their parent organization.

The group’s success has irked some Republican operatives who feel CPI is acting as a job provider for otherwise out-of-work ex-Trump aides.

“They’re frauds,” said one longtime Republican strategist who has worked for major campaigns and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person’s job could be at risk for speaking negatively. “They claim to be fiscal conservatives, but they’ve made a living off of generating conservative outrage in order to raise money for themselves.”

Other Republican luminaries who have donated to CPI include the late GOP megadonor Foster Friess, who is known for helping fund the Koch donor network. The late gaming machine mogul Stanley E. Fulton’s private foundation gave $500,000 to CPI, according to its records. The Chicago Community Trust reported $200,000 in contributions to the group.

“They’ve got a lot of money, and they’re willing to use that money in any way to advance their goals,” said Norm Ornstein, election expert and emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “And their goals are radical goals about voter suppression, overturning election results if they don’t like them and trying to keep any Democrat who’s in office from governing.”

A who’s who of Jan. 6

Several of the figures of greatest interest to the Jan. 6 committee are now employed by CPI or its subsidiary groups, including:

Several of these figures work for CPI affiliates, which report operating from the same building as CPI and get support from the organization but have distinct names and legal identities, and at times list addresses other than CPI’s Independence Avenue headquarters. The website for Miller’s America First Legal, for instance, lists the group’s address as a nearby UPS store.

“We try to keep out — we don’t try to take credit,”DeMintsaid earlier this year to supporters, according to audio reviewed by Grid. “We try to give other people the credit, because that’s how you are going to build the movement and build trust.”

“We’re honored our Trump White House colleagues like Kash Patel and Jeff Clark are on our teamto punch back against the Deep State,” Semmel said. “We only hire fighters at Renewing America.”

CPI and several of its other affiliate groups, like Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, did not respond to interview requests or requests for comment for this story.

Freedom Caucus

CPI has forged close ties to the Freedom Caucus, the far-right group of Republican House lawmakers co-founded by Meadows that was deeply involved in the events leading up to Jan. 6, according to reports and sworn testimony.

Neither Perry, Jordan, Biggs, Gaetz nor Greene responded to requests for comment for this story.

A MAGA institution?

Rather than tarnish the reputation of the burgeoning think tank, having allies like Meadows and Greene have helped CPI burnish its identity, Washington Republicans said.

The group’s focus at the moment may be on deflecting attention from Jan. 6, but its gaze is facing forward, at future elections — and future MAGA administrations.

“Everything we love and care about in this country goes down the drain if the election system continues the way it is,” DeMint told attendees at an event this spring, according to a recording reviewed by Grid.

DeMint warned the crowd they would be unfairly painted by liberals and the media: “What we’re doing today is what the left says is the ‘Big Lie,’” he said. “You’re involved with the ‘Big Lie.’”

“It’s aiming to be more than just a place where former Trump officials can cool their heels until the next administration,” said Fischer, of Documented. “It appears to be taking some pretty serious steps to try to establish itself as an institution in Washington D.C. and create that political infrastructure to support the America First movement.”

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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 relaunchedCongressional 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---

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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.

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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.

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aaf mailchimp

breitbart Exclusive — Oversight Group Says DOJ Attorney Handling Voting Integrity Likely Illegally Voted in North Carolina

A nonprofit government oversight group released an investigation, first seen by Breitbart News, which claimed Janie Sitton, an attorney who appears to work on voter integrity at the Department of Justice (DOJ), haslikely illegally voted in North Carolina.

American Accountability Foundation (AAF) outlined in its memo that Sitton, who is originally from North Carolina, has been working in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division since 2000. The division she works in frequently takes cases regarding voting rights.

AAF also noted that she previously worked as an adjunct professor of law at William and Mary School of Law, teaching sexuality and the law. In fact, she wrote Introduction to the Symposium, (De)Constructing Sex: Transgenderism, Intersexuality, Gender Identity and the Law for the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, published in October 2000.

The memo explained that records showed that Sitton had been a “resident” and “active voter” in Washington, DC, since August 13, 2010 — within days of buying her home on August 17 that year. It was also revealed that Sitton voted in five elections from 2012 to 2018 in Washington, DC, and at least once in North Carolina since 2020.

[Read the FULL story at Breitbart]

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aaf newsmakers [i thnk that mean they ref aaf

thefed BS

Report: Wall Street Bigwigs Are Left-Wing Activists Using Your Money To Push Their Politics

A new report out earlier this month shows that Wall Street’s near-religious adherence to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards is an effort run by Democrat political operatives at the nation’s premier financial institutions.

On Aug. 9, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a nonprofit governmental watchdog, published a 47-page report chronicling Wall Street ties at the “Big Three” asset management firms, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, with Democrat politicians who have a history of radical activism.

“The number of liberal staffers that are now serving in influential roles in financial firms raises the question — has a new ‘revolving door’ come to Washington?” researchers wrote in their memorandum of the report. “While traditionally D.C. staffers will go from official positions to K Street — there now seems to be a new trend emerging of D.C. staffers going from official positions to Wall Street.“

[Read the FULL story at The Federalist]

Biden Student Loan Amnesty a Windfall for DC Staffers

Analysis of financial disclosures by the conservative-leaning American Accountability Foundation found that the political staff at the agency that oversees the student loan program stand to benefit. The outstanding student loan debt balance among 41 education staffers evaluated could amount to between $2.8 and $6.5 million. According to the AAF estimate obtained by RealClearPolitics, the president may have wiped away as much as $512,646 of their debt.

More than 45 million Americans owe $1.6 trillion in federal student debt, a balance that the New York Times reports dwarfs what they owe in car loans, credit cards, and other consumer debt. The White House insists that the administration’s plan will target low- to middle-income borrowers in particular, with 90% of relief going to earners who make less than $75,000 a year. As many as 43 million people can benefit, according to an administration infographic, and 20 million people “can have their loans fully cancelled.”

Tom Jones echoed that criticism. The founder of AAF pointed to the “windfall” that political employees at the Education Department were set to receive, calling it “shameful” evidence of “the gap between the people and the ruling class in Washington, D.C.” Press spokesmen for the department did not respond to RCP requests for comment.

[Read the full story at Real Clear Politics]

Follow the Money In The Biden Administration

Anti-fossil fuel appointee should be rejected

Read More

Biden Education Department staff will get $500K from student loan bailout: report

Read More

AAF to File Suit Against New York State Office of the Attorney General if Audit Records Not Released In Political Smear Operation

Read More

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random

no lnx WE

Breitbart Exclusive — Oversight Group Says DOJ Attorney Handling Voting Integrity Likely Illegally Voted in North Carolina

A nonprofit government oversight group released an investigation, first seen by Breitbart News, which claimed Janie Sitton, an attorney who appears to work on voter integrity at the Department of Justice (DOJ), has likely illegally voted in North Carolina.

American Accountability Foundation (AAF) outlined in its memo that Sitton, who is originally from North Carolina, has been working in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division since 2000. The division she works in frequently takes cases regarding voting rights.

AAF also noted that she previously worked as an adjunct professor of law at William and Mary School of Law, teaching sexuality and the law. In fact, she wrote Introduction to the Symposium, (De)Constructing Sex: Transgenderism, Intersexuality, Gender Identity and the Law for the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, published in October 2000.

The memo explained that records showed that Sitton had been a “resident” and “active voter” in Washington, DC, since August 13, 2010 — within days of buying her home on August 17 that year. It was also revealed that Sitton voted in five elections from 2012 to 2018 in Washington, DC, and at least once in North Carolina since 2020.

[Read the FULL story at Breitbart]

Social Justice Warriors Pushing ESG On Wall Street Have Deep Ties To Political Left

A standing rule of any organization is that personnel is policy. A new investigative report released by the American Accountability Foundation shines a light on how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing is not a strategy intended to increase returns, but rather is a tool for global elites who wield their enormous financial power—with other people’s money—to achieve their liberal political ends.

Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street collectively represent 80% of all passive investors, which includes 401(k) investments, IRA and brokerage accounts, and pension and institutional funds. These investment houses use your money to achieve controversial environmental and social goals like “anti-racism” training, fossil energy divestment, and instituting race- or gender-based hiring quotas. While these policies have failed to gain traction in Congress and have been struck down in the courts, they are becoming increasingly popular in the Davos jet-set crowd.

As the report suggests, the driving force behind this trend may be the new revolving door between liberal politics and Wall Street. Leaders of these investment houses, including Larry Fink who is the CEO of BlackRock, have denied that ESG is about politics or any particular social or ideological agenda and emphatically stated that ESG “is not woke.” But the mid- to lower-level staff at these investment houses responsible for the day-to-day implementation of ESG investing suggest otherwise. Many of them have earlier careers as partisan staff for liberal politicians and leftist organizations. Given the alignment between ESG goals and the woke agenda heralded by many Democrats, it’s hard to see past the obvious coordination.

[Read the full story at IWF]

mandy g sept

standing rule of any organization is that personnel is policy. A new investigative report released by the American Accountability Foundation shines a light on how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing is not a strategy intended to increase returns, but rather is a tool for global elites who wield their enormous financial power—with other people’s money—to achieve their liberal political ends.

Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street collectively represent 80% of all passive investors, which includes 401(k) investments, IRA and brokerage accounts, and pension and institutional funds. These investment houses use your money to achieve controversial environmental and social goals like “anti-racism” training, fossil energy divestment, and instituting race- or gender-based hiring quotas. While these policies have failed to gain traction in Congress and have been struck down in the courts, they are becoming increasingly popular in the Davos jet-set crowd.

As the report suggests, the driving force behind this trend may be the new revolving door between liberal politics and Wall Street. Leaders of these investment houses, including Larry Fink who is the CEO of BlackRock, have denied that ESG is about politics or any particular social or ideological agenda and emphatically stated that ESG “is not woke.” But the mid- to lower-level staff at these investment houses responsible for the day-to-day implementation of ESG investing suggest otherwise. Many of them have earlier careers as partisan staff for liberal politicians and leftist organizations. Given the alignment between ESG goals and the woke agenda heralded by many Democrats, it’s hard to see past the obvious coordination.

The rank and file ESG “stewardship teams” come from the Offices of Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and former President Obama as well as the left-wing non-profits like the Center for American Progress. Others are serving on boards for progressive organizations, including Resource Generation, which “offers programming that encourages members to see capitalism not as a market-based equalizer promising upward mobility, but as a damaging system predicated on, ‘stolen land, stolen labor and stolen lives.’”

These are just a few examples of the many that the AAF report extensively covers. The liberal aligned goals and the outcomes lay out a clear indication that ESG is a mechanism for advancing a woke agenda that benefits the political left while producing lower returns for investors. Statements suggesting otherwise should be taken with a grain of salt.

The ESG agenda, just like the woke agenda it perpetuates is causing serious harm like lost value for retirees and broader economic degradation. While ESG acolytes will get paid their high dollar fees, either way, the rest of us will be left with the consequences.

This is why many states like Florida, New Hampshire, Texas and West Virginia are pushing back. Congress should take note as well.

Related Stories

Elected Officials Can Be Bulwarks Against ESG

Gabriella Hoffman | September 1, 2022

Wall Street Is Using Your Money to Buy Virtue; Don’t Let Them

Mandy Gunasekara | August 31, 2022

High ESG Scores Foreshadow Economic Decline

Gabriella Hoffman | August 22, 2022

ESG Is Fueling Inflation Woes

Gabriella Hoffman | August 19, 2022

[Read the full report at AAF]

Biden administration staffers benefit from student loan bailout

Biden transition official resigns from nonprofit group given migrant housing contracts

Here’s How Big Tech Plans To Rig The 2022 Midterms

VISIT OUR RESEARCH WEBSITES:

BidenNoms.com | KalpanaKotagal.com

AAF exists to educate the public on 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.

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eg lubchenko

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanAccountabilityFoundation/photos/pb.100068224886548.-2207520000./298333809019094/?type=3

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanAccountabilityFoundation/photos

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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 the 339 Group and the Cannon Research Group.[15] He also served as legislative director for John 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]

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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, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, “Ms. Meyers . . . Go pound sand.” Citing an article that I had written debunking attacks on Bloom Raskin from moneyed interests, including the A.A.F., he said, “You are a liberal hack masquerading as an investigative journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones subsequently posted this comment on his group’s Twitter account, along with my e-mail address and cell-phone number.

A decade ago, Bill Dauster, a Democrat who is now the chief counsel to the Senate Budget Committee, helped Jones organize a bipartisan Torah study group for Jewish congressional staffers. Dauster recalls him as “soft-spoken and cordial,” and finds it hard to reconcile the man he knew with Jones’s current persona. “I find what he appears to have done quite distasteful,” he said.

In interviews with right-wing media outlets, Jones hasn’t been shy about his intentions. Last April, he told Fox News, which called A.A.F.’s tactics “controversial,” that his group wants to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden Administration,” making it “as difficult as possible” for the President and his allies on Capitol Hill “to implement their agenda.” When asked why his group was bothering to attack sub-Cabinet-level appointees, he explained that people in “that second tier are really the folks who are going to do the day-to-day work implementing the agenda.”

Last year, an A.A.F. member infiltrated a Zoom training session for congressional staffers about the ethics rules surrounding earmarks—pet spending projects that lawmakers write into the federal budget. The infiltrator asked leading questions during the meeting and then posted a recording of it online. The attempted sting backfired: nothing incriminating was said, and the A.A.F.’s underhanded tactics became the story. Evan Hollander, then the spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, told The Hill that, “for a group that purports to concern itself with ethics, using fake identities, misrepresenting themselves as Congressional staff and surreptitiously recording meetings is hypocritical in the extreme.”

Jones made no apologies. He told Fox News, “I’m never doing anything illegal. But just because it’s impolite to log into an earmark-training seminar and offend the morals of Capitol Hill staff, that’s not going to stop me from doing it.” He added, “If I’ve got to trail someone on the ground to find out what they’re doing, I’m totally going to do it. Because people who are making decisions need to have this information—they need to understand who they are trusting with the reins of government. And sometimes that means we will use unorthodox methods.”

:{:{Liberal and conservative political groups habitually scrutinize a prominent nominee’s record or personal life in search of disqualifying faults. But the A.A.F. has taken the practice to extremes, repeatedly spinning negligible tidbits or dubious hearsay into damning narratives. The group recently deployed its unorthodox methods, Politico has reported, while “desperately pursuing dirt” on Lisa Cook, the nominee for the Federal Reserve. Cook, who has been a tenured professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University since 2013, has attracted bipartisan support.}:

Glenn Hubbard, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the George W. Bush Administration, has said, “Cook’s talents as an economic researcher and teacher make her a good nominee for the Fed, adding to diversity of perspectives about policy.” In college, Cook won a Marshall Scholarship. She subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and served as a staff economist on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also held appointments at 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, 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 ismerely 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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oops but interesting swamp contrast?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america

During the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.

Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”

Many of Trump’s transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower. On Friday, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” The influence of the Kochs and their allies is particularly clear in the areas of energy and the environment. The few remarks Trump made on these issues during the campaign reflected the fondest hopes of the oil, gas, and coal producers. He vowed to withdraw from the international climate treaty negotiated last year in Paris, remove regulations that curb carbon emissions, legalize oil drilling and mining on federal lands and in seas, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.

For policy and personnel advice regarding the Department of Energy, Trump is relying on Michael McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies. McKenna’s clients include Koch Companies Public Sector, a division of Koch Industries. According to Politico, McKenna also has ties to the American Energy Alliance and its affiliate, the Institute for Energy Research. These nonprofit groups purport to be grassroots organizations, but they run ads advocating corporate-friendly energy policies, without disclosing their financial backers. In 2012, Freedom Partners gave $1.5 million to the American Energy Alliance.

Michael Catanzaro, a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN Group, is the head of Trump’s energy transition team, and has been mentioned as a possible energy czar. Among his clients are Koch Industries and Devon Energy Corporation, a gas-and-oil company that has made a fortune from vertical drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Another widely discussed candidate is Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the shale-oil company Continental Resources, who is a major contributor to the Kochs’ fund-raising network. Wenona Hauter, of Food and Water Watch, says that Hamm has “done all he can to subvert the existing rules and regulations.”

Myron Ebell, an outspoken climate-change skeptic, heads Trump’s transition team for the E.P.A. Ebell runs the energy-and-environmental program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulatory Washington think tank that hides its sources of financial support but has been funded by fossil-fuel companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries. David Schnare, a self-described “free-market environmentalist” who has accused the E.P.A. of having “blood on its hands,” is a member of the E.P.A. working group. Schnare is the director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Thomas Jefferson Institute, part of a nationwide consortium of anti-government, pro-industry think tanks. He is also the general counsel at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which has received funding from coal companies. In 2011, Schnare started hounding the climate scientist Michael Mann, who had been a professor at the University of Virginia, by filing public-records requests demanding to see his unpublished research and his private e-mails. The legal wrangling tied up Mann’s work until 2014, when the Virginia Supreme Court ordered Schnare to desist. The Union of Concerned Scientists has described these actions against climate scientists as “harassment.”

Norman Eisen, who devised strict conflict-of-interest rules while acting as Obama’s ethics czar, says, “If you have people on the transition team with deep financial ties to the industries to be regulated, it raises questions about whether they are serving the public interest or their own interests.” He ruled out Obama transition-team members who would have had a conflict of interest in their assigned areas, or even the appearance of one. “We weren’t perfect,” he said. “But we tried to level the playing field because, let’s face it, in the Beltway nexus of corporations and dark money, lobbyists are the delivery mechanism for special-interest influence. ”

Questions to Trump’s transition team about its conflict-of-interest rules went unanswered, as did questions to the lobbyists and industry heads involved. But the composition of the group runs counter to a set of anti-lobbyist proposals that Trump released in October, to be enacted in his first hundred days. It called for a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave public office, and a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying for a foreign government.

The tenth item on the list of proposals is the Clean Up Corruption in Washington Act, which would implement “new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.” Trevor Potter, who served as the commissioner of the F.E.C. under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, described Trump’s ethics proposals as “quite interesting, and quite helpful.” He was puzzled, though, by the vagueness of the “Drain the Swamp” act. “It’s a complete black box so far,” Potter said.

Potter wondered if Trump’s lack of specificity reflected internal divisions. He noted that Don McGahn, who served as the Trump campaign’s attorney, is an opponent of almost all campaign-finance restrictions. “Many on the transition team are registered lobbyists who are deeply invested in the system Trump says he wants to change,” Potter said. “It looks like the lobbyists and special interests are already taking over.”

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/in-the-mueller-report-erik-prince-funds-a-covert-effort-to-obtain-clintons-e-mails-from-a-foreign-state

erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater, a former private-security company embroiled in controversy surrounding its use of lethal force against civilians in Iraq, makes a strange cameo appearance in the redacted version of the Mueller report, which was released on Thursday morning. Prince, who is the brother of Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, is described as having provided some funding for a secretive effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails from shadowy operatives working on the so-called dark Web.

According to the report, Prince “provided funding to hire a tech advisor to ascertain the authenticity” of e-mails that conservative activists had obtained. Prince, who was interviewed by the special counsel’s team, said that the cache of e-mails in question turned out to be fakes.

The report, however, details a strange effort by Trump-campaign associates to hack into Clinton and the Democrats’ e-mail accounts that paralleled the Russian plot. According to Mueller, the effort began as early as December, 2015, and ramped up after Trump publicly declared, on July 27, 2016, that he hoped Russia would “find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing” from Clinton’s private e-mail server. Mueller and his team never interviewed Trump, but the retired lieutenant generalMichael Flynn, the campaign aide whom Trump later appointed his national-security adviser, told them that Trump repeatedly asked to get Clinton’s e-mails. According to the report, Flynn tried to do this by contacting multiple people who might be able to supply them, including two well-placed conservative operatives, Peter Smith and Barbara Ledeen.

Smith, an investment banker and Republican donor, had helped finance an investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual relationships in Arkansas, leading to the 1993 Troopergate scandal. Ledeen, a Republican Senate staffer, worked for Chuck Grassley. Grassley was then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and one of the fiercest defenders of Trump and critics of the Russia investigation. Barbara Ledeen’s husband, Michael Ledeen, had co-authored a book with Flynn. A spokesman for Grassley’s office described Barbara Ledeen’s efforts as her private pursuit, rather than an official effort undertaken by the senator’s office.

In December, 2015, Ledeen e-mailed Smith a proposal to obtain Clinton’s private e-mails, which, she claimed, “were classified” and had been “purloined by our enemies.”According to Mueller’s report, the proposal claimed that the “Clinton email server was, in all likelihood, breached long ago,’ and that the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence services could ‘re-assemble the server’s email content.’ ” In an account of Ledeen’s efforts, the *Guardian* cited notes by federal investigators that said her motive was concern for the well-being of her children, who have served in the U.S. military, and whose safety, she suggested, could have been undermined if Clinton’s e-mails had fallen into hostile governments’ hands. But, in her e-mails to Smith, as revealed by the Mueller report, Ledeen appears more focussed on partisan politics. She writes, “if even a single email was recovered and the providence [sic] of the email was a foreign service, it would be catastrophic to the Clinton campaign.”

The report shows that, though Smith declined to participate in the project at first, Ledeen went ahead and obtained a cache of e-mails. After Trump publicly called for help in getting Clinton’s e-mails, Smith initiated his own effort and circulated information about it to members of Trump’s campaign. According to Mueller’s report, in August, 2016, “Smith sent an email from an encrypted account with the subject ‘Sec Clinton’s unsecured private email server’ ” to recipients including the Trump-campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis. Smith reported that he was involved in efforts “to poke and probe on the above,” and that the Clinton’s server had been “hacked with ease by both State-related players and private mercenaries.”

Smith set up an L.L.C. for the project and structured it as an “independent expenditure group” that, under campaign law, could not coördinate with the Trump campaign,yet Smith circulated e-mails saying that his initiative was “in coordination with” the Trump campaign “to the extent permitted” by the law. The New Yorker obtained a document from Smith, from September, 2016, in which he claimed that he was working with the Trump-campaign representatives Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, and Michael Flynn, and also with the Republican National Committee, Judicial Watch, Citizens United, and the conservative activist James O’Keefe. There is no evidence that any of these individuals were, in fact, working with Smith. But the Mueller report’s depiction of Smith, Ledeen, Flynn, and Prince’s efforts suggests that Trump and his immediate campaign orbit were deeply intent on obtaining Clinton’s private e-mails during the period when Russia was hacking into them.

In September, 2016, Smith and Ledeen rejoined forces, at which point Prince provided some of the funding for the operation. Mueller’s team obtained files from Smith’s computer showing that Smith had documents that WikiLeaks had stolen from the computer of the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, though Mueller found no conclusive evidence that Smith had obtained the stolen files prior to WikiLeaks’s public release of them. (Smith died in May, 2017, in what was ruled a suicide.)

In his remarks prior to releasing the report, Attorney General William Barr stressed that it is not criminal to disseminate stolen information, such as the e-mails that the Russians hacked from the Democrats during the 2016 campaign, so long as those spreading the stolen information were not involved in the initial theft. It appears that the Attorney General’s definition of the criminal law was narrow and careful for a reason—many Trump-campaign supporters were involved in tiptoeing right up to the line.

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ggl 11 22

Meet the Team - American Accountability Foundation

https://www.americanaccountabilityfoundation.com › m...

Tom Jones previously ran the opposition research program for Cruz for President, served as Legislative Director to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), Senior Policy ...

https://www.americanaccountabilityfoundation.com › a...

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

American Accountability Foundation - Wikipedia

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

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is an American conservative opposition research group founded in 2020 that has opposed nominees to the Joe ...

American Accountability Foundation Shows How Right-Wing ...

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

Apr 20, 2022 — The American Accountability Foundation is a dark-money operation founded by the former oppo guy for the presidential campaign of Tailgunner ...

Stephen Klebs on Twitter: "@FoxNews Tom Jones, founder of ...

https://twitter.com › stephenklebs › status

Tom Jones, founder of the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), told Fox News in an interview. "Our goal is to take a big handful of sand and throw it ...

The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees

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

Apr 16, 2022 — 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 ...

American Accountability Foundation - SourceWatch

https://www.sourcewatch.org › title=American_Account...

AAF Spread Misleading Claims about SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. In alignment with a widespread misconception popularized by Republicans, AAF released a ...

Conservatives crow over ATF withdrawal - Axios

https://www.axios.com › Politics & Policy

Sep 13, 2021 — Even before President Biden formally withdrew his nominee to be the nation's top firearm regulator on Monday, a new conservative opposition ...

New conservative group wields unorthodox tactics to block ...

https://www.foxnews.com › politics › new-conservative-g...

Apr 13, 2021 — Former Speaker of the House and Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich analyzes the Democrats' nearly $2T coronavirus stimulus package. A new ...

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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

American Accountability Foundation

MAILCHI.MP

American Accountability Foundation

Exposing BidenNoms.com

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American Accountability Foundation

September 23  ·

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

American Accountability Foundation

MAILCHIMP

American Accountability Foundation

Exposing BidenNoms.com

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Norman Finkle

https://youtu.be/Hpgkyk0QyYo

MAGAt Hide Out

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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

American Accountability Foundation

MAILCHI.MP

American Accountability Foundation

Exposing BidenNoms.com

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1 Comment

Norman Finkle

https://youtu.be/Hpgkyk0QyYo

MAGAt Hide Out

YOUTUBE.COM

MAGAt Hide Out

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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

American Accountability Foundation

MAILCHI.MP

American Accountability Foundation

Exposing BidenNoms.com

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American Accountability Foundation

August 29  ·

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

American Accountability Foundation

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American Accountability Foundation

Exposing BidenNoms.com

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American Accountability Foundation

August 19  ·

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

American Accountability Foundation

MAILCHI.MP

American Accountability Foundation

Exposing BidenNoms.com

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Desiree Martinez

Great job on petition and sanction!!! TY

12w

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

American Accountability Foundation

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American Accountability Foundation

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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."

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Linda McMillan

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

30w

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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!

30w

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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11 Comments

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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Democrats need to get serious about combatting and evading slime

This edition of the Revolving Door Project newsletter was originally published on our Substack. View and subscribe here.

Here at Revolving Door Project, we spend a significant portion of our time working to explain how and why executive branch positions matter. Our team members have collectively published tens of thousands of words detailing the tools executive agencies have to help regular people and insisting that this administration make full use of them.

And yet, one of the clearest illustrations of our case to date came in the form of a New Yorker profile on the American Accountability Foundation published over the weekend. AAF is the right-wing “slime machine” that “aims to thwart the entire Biden slate” of nominees. Although most likely hadn’t heard of the group prior to this weekend, anyone who follows politics will be familiar with its work which has included driving some of the ugliest attacks against nominees such as Saule Omarova, Lisa Cook, and Sarah Bloom Raskin. For AAF, attacking nominees is a way 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.” And it hasn’t just targeted the highest profile roles because, as founder and director Tom Jones told Fox News last spring, “that second tier are really the folks who are going to do the day-to-day work implementing the agenda.”

This is a point that we’ve sought to emphasize throughout our work: while Democrats and progressives have all too often ignored the potential of executive branch action, corporations and those working on their behalf devote significant resources to shaping executive policy and appointments in their favor. It would appear, however, that the Biden administration failed to take that lesson to heart. By all accounts, the White House was ill-prepared to combat the slime that AAF has unleashed. Its defense of nominees like Omarova, for example, was famously pitiful.  Its biggest mistake, however, arguably came much earlier. The President should have followed our repeated advice and moved with urgency to name all critical nominees right out of the gate, when they could still benefit from his post-inauguration momentum. With each passing month, the White House’s position has only grown weaker, making each nominee’s path to confirmation steeper. 

But, unfortunately, there’s no turning back the clock now, so the administration will have to do its best with the reality as it is now. That means mounting a more formidable defense for nominees who are currently being subjected to horrendous right wing attacks (see: Gigi Sohn, nominee to the Federal Communications Commission). It also means recommitting to filling all remaining non-Senate-confirmed vacancies with the best possible candidates.

Senate Democratic leadership could also help relieve the pressure on existing nominees. The glacial pace of Senate confirmation proceedings has provided AAF ample time to generate and propagate bogus narratives. As we’ve written before, Senate Majority Leader Schumer could reduce the time AAF has to, to paraphrase, throw sand in the administration’s gears by moving to reduce the amount of floor time the Senate must allocate for each nominee. 

Personnel

In a series of back and forth reporting volleys that left heads spinning, White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy has confirmed that she is not, in fact, stepping down from her role as Joe Biden’s climate advisor…for now.  News of McCarthy’s departure and her attempts to downplay an eleventh hour exit marked the beginning of the end for many of the advisors who weathered a tumultuous freshman year in Biden’s White House. A major shake up is on the way, with Democrats in competitive House districts retiring in waves and Biden officials wary of a GOP-controlled congress lining up an exodus of their own.

With future Biden cabinet officials likely facing a confirmation blockade by the imminent Republican Senate majority, non-Senate confirmed appointments like McCarthy’s will take on even greater importance, serving as the few roles Biden has full control over seating in his administration. 

As November approaches, the Beltway press has picked up on the conservative consensus rearing its head in the Biden White House that elevating moderate policy positions and personnel are critical to wooing swing voters in the upcoming elections. But positioning centrists like Michael Barr, Gina Raimondo, and predicted McCarthy successor Ali Zaidi to assume ever more control in the post-midterm administration will do little to help the Biden administration succeed. In fact, such appointments are likely only to move the administration further from enacting popular policies that have a shot at extricating Biden from dismal approval ratings, especially given his break from campaign promises on fossil fuel leasing and student debt cancellation. As Elizabeth Warren wrote in the New York Times, there is still a narrowing path for Democrats To Avoid Disaster in November, but only if Biden uses his executive authority to lead the charge.

Governance

Some agencies are working hard to ensure their impact is felt quickly. Just last week, for example, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) lawyer filed a brief asking the Board to reverse a number of anti-labor precedents. If the board obliges, workers will face many fewer obstacles on the path to union formation and recognition. Or, as Harold Meyerson wrote for The American Prospect,“Should the Board vote to uphold these arguments, the legal playing field for employer-employee relations, which has tilted steeply toward management for the past 50 years, would be considerably evened out.”

Other agencies, however, have been far less zealous advocates for the public interest. The White House should focus its energy on deploying these untapped tools over the coming months. Over the weekend, the New York Times Editorial Board laid out some of the steps that the new Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office can take to combat widespread abuse in the patent system and, in the process, bring down inflated drug prices. As many environmental advocates have pointed out, the administration also has numerous options to genuinely begin providing relief from rising fuel prices in the short and long-term. Instead, it has opted to unnecessarily provide concessions to the fossil fuel industry by reopening oil and gas lease sales on public lands, a change that is likely to have zero impact on supply.

The administration should undoubtedly target problems like these that are inflicting the most pain on working families, but it also need not limit itself to them. Taking on persistent nuisances, like robocalls or airline cancellations, could also pay political dividends.

Corporate Crackdown

Think tanks, policy councils, formal advisors, informal advisors, congressional committees, and entire government research offices are some of the plausible resources Joe Biden has at his disposal for measured and effective policy advice on subjects ranging from climate change to tax policy. It is striking then that despite the glut of anointed policy experts and life-time government officials, Biden has turned at regular intervals to big businesses and its respective influence networks to set policy that can only work if it regulates the very corporations now producing it.

As Timewrote last week, “Across the Biden Administration, and around the world, government officials have increasingly focused their attention on the private sector—treating companies not just as entities to regulate but also as core partners.” This high order public private partnership has seen Brian Deese, once the dedicated greenwasher at the multinational investment leviathan BlackRock, assume the helm of the National Economic Council, pharmaceutical firms like Pfizer and Moderna reap billions in tax-payer subsidies only to advise against critical pandemic-ending patent sharing with developing nations, and even a Secretary of Commerce more intent on taking advice from big tech monopolies than trust busting them.

As our team at RDP detailed in the latest Industry Agenda Report, corporate “solutions” like carbon offsets have emerged concurrently with the energy industry polluting faster and stronger than ever before, while at the same time offering a convenient cover for politicians taking fossil fuel cash, and executives adapting to a greenwashed media landscape. In the past month, Biden has signaled a massive push to increase rare earth metal extraction while also changing the rules that regulate mining (they haven’t been updated since the 1800’s), giving electric car manufacturers and all those involved in their production prime seats at the planning table. The dash to convert to EV’s is better than nothing on the climate front, but car manufacturers and mining companies shouldn’t dictate the pace and policy of the forward charge.

At RDP, we are continuing to track the Biden administrations successful efforts to crackdown on corporate crimes, whether through toughened regulatory agencies like the SEC and FTC, or with sweeping executive actions like those released last summer to spur competition and reel in corporations failing to address the supply chain breakdowns swelling their profits while leaving consumers in the lurch. You can read more about hits and misses in our corporate crackdown series here.

Thanks to Dan Boguslaw for his contributions to this edition.

Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:

Michael Barr is the Wrong Man to Stop the Next Financial Crisis

How The Department Of Commerce Can Combat Economic Malaise

The Return of Michael Barr

After Progressive Pick Forced Out, Biden Taps Crypto-Linked Michael Barr for Top Bank Regulator Job

Biden to Nominate Michael Barr as Fed Vice Chair for Supervision

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