Ex-Ted Cruz aide built dark money 'slime machine' to smear Biden nominees: report
Investigative journalist Jane Mayer has a bombshell new report on a dark money group that built a "slime machine" attacking President Joe Biden's nominees.
Mayer broke down how Republicans attacked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as "pro-pedophile" with QAnon adjacent attacks.
She wrote "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."
Mayer is the author of the acclaimed 2016 book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
"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," Mayer explained. "And the A.A.F. hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little entrenched support. The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focused on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of the twenty-nine candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty percent were women."
The organization is led by a former top staffer to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
"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," she wrote. "When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, 'Ms. Meyers . . . Go pound sand.'"
The group's failure to disclose its funding was not the only major red flag.
"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," Mayer explained. "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."
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) described A.A.F. as a "right-wing, dark money, front group."
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