WATCH: Maddow follows the money on shadowy right-wing group attacking all Biden nominees
Every single nominee for President Joe Biden is being opposed by a far-right shadow group called the American Accountability Foundation. The right-wing, tax-exempt organization, is smearing every nominee claiming to do "research" on the people that are being brought in to run the U.S. government.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday discussed this in a segment that played off a story that New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer tracked down when she tried to figure out why Republicans were opposing Sarah Bloom Raskin for a position on the Federal Reserve Board as the vice-chair for supervision.
As Mayer explained to Maddow, Raskin is incredibly well qualified and liked by the banking world and had been confirmed twice before with bipartisan support. Suddenly, there were allegations that were made up that she had an "ethical problem." Mayer explained that the allegations have "nothing to do with reality" and are a "made-up story."
Maddow noted the kind of twisted smears that were evident in the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz "discovered" a book being taught by a private school that says that babies aren't born racist. He found that objectionable and since Brown Jackson sits on the board of the school, he decided she shouldn't be on the Supreme Court.
One of the other Biden nominees is being accused, falsely, of being a communist by the same organization.
The difference between this group and others is that this one is going after every single nominee because they were nominated by Biden.
The American Accountability Foundation "does sort of phony research, basically, and pretty sloppy job if you really look into it," said Mayer. "Most of the mud that it slung has dissolved when you take a close look, but the problem is for a lot of the lesser-known nominees, people are not really looking very carefully."
"So, I started looking at this group trying to figure out who are these people, and of course it turned out that a lot of the senators were getting their research from this group," said Mayer. "The senators were getting their money from the fossil fuel industry, and they needed a pretext to take her down in order to stop the Fed from including climate change as one of the things that it might consider us an important economic risk. So, anyway, I started trying to find out who these people were."
See the full interview below and read her story at the New Yorker.
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