A new Bloomberg profile of John Burton, a former operative for President Barack Obama, reveals that Republican Party candidates may soon have yet another major headache to deal with.
According to Bloomberg, Burton over the past two years has assembled a team of 16,000 "amateur sleuths" whose job is to dig up damaging information on Republican congressional candidates.
Now, with just over a month to go before the 2018 midterm elections, Burton is getting ready to conduct a massive information dump that he hopes will sink the GOP's chances of holding onto its congressional majorities.
Burton's organization, dubbed Citizen Strong, has been running so secretly that it's only just now revealed its existence as a 501(c)4 group that's funded by "dark money" given by anonymous donors.
One of Citizen Strong's top targets, reports Bloomberg, is Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), whose willingness to push for Kremlin interests on Capitol Hill has earned him the nickname "Putin's favorite congressman." When Burton put out a call to his network for help in taking down Rohrabacher, he was flooded with offers from several professionals who agreed to work on the project in their spare time, including "a forensic accountant, a team of corporate lawyers, and a fluent Russian speaker."
However, Burton insists that his research does not involve illegal activities such as the hacking that occurred against the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
"There’s so much just sitting out there that’s been made available through sunshine laws, through states posting personal financial disclosures and putting lobbyist disclosures online, and through social media,” he explains to Bloomberg. “There’s just a ton of content, far more than there was when I was starting out 10 years ago.”
