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In an escalation of partisan warfare, a little-known dark-money group is trying to thwart the President’s entire slate.
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 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.
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 is merely catching up with the sleazy tactics of progressive dark-money groups—which, he claims, went to great lengths to try to block Cabinet nominees during the Trump Administration, not to mention conservative Supreme Court nominees such as Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. Of course, neither Thomas nor Kavanaugh were felled by anonymous slurs during their nomination hearings; they were credibly and directly confronted by female victims who accused them, in sworn testimony, of sexual misconduct. Nan Aron, the former head of Alliance for Justice, a progressive group that led the charge against both Thomas and Kavanaugh, acknowledged that, over the years, her group had scoured the records, finances, and personal lives of nominees it opposed. The crucial difference, she said, was that “it wasn’t the groups that were manufacturing” the scandals which plagued the nominees. As she put it, “None of the groups were looking for Christine Blasey Ford—no one made phone calls to find her.”
Ford, who maintains that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school, reached out directly to Democrats in Congress. The ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, Dianne Feinstein, sent an emissary to evaluate Ford’s claims and declined to make them public, but by then Ford had voiced her complaints to enough people that the word spread to reporters, including to me and Ronan Farrow, another writer at this magazine. Some conservatives have tried to establish a false equivalence between conventional reporting and the mudslinging directed at Ketanji Brown Jackson. But Ford testified in Congress against Kavanaugh. A second woman who accused him of sexual misconduct on the record, Deborah Ramirez, offered to speak to the F.B.I. (Kavanaugh strongly denied the allegations against him during his own congressional testimony.) Notably, the A.A.F.’s campaigns against Biden nominees have produced no witnesses or alleged victims who have testified before Congress. And some of the group’s accusations have been summarily rejected by outside authorities. The New York Attorney Grievance Committees curtly declined a demand by the A.A.F. that they investigate Biden’s nominee for general counsel of the Navy, John P. (Sean) Coffey, whom the A.A.F. had accused of engaging in “an unethical pay-to-play scheme” when his law firm represented pension funds. In a four-paragraph response to Jones, obtained by The New Yorker, the chief attorney for the legal group declined to take action, noting, “You provide no evidence.”
Brian Fallon, the co-founder and executive director of Demand Justice—a progressive nonprofit dark-money group that has become a target of conservative critics, because it scrutinizes the records of right-leaning judicial nominees—told me, “It sounds as if this group is reverse-engineering the process. It’s almost like they’re trying to create the story line as opposed to finding a dry fact”—and then “trying to get people to give voice to the narrative.” His group conducts opposition research, too, but he said that it was “ham-fisted and sloppy” to post requests for dirt on anonymous message boards or to send mass e-mails to a nominee’s colleagues. “Most opposition researchers on our side would worry about using such tactics,” he said. “Because people are so quick to play the victim, they’d worry about becoming the story.”
Fallon said that crumbs of negative information about high-profile nominees can always be found, but unless the facts pass “the smell test of being in good faith,” and can hold up under the scrutiny of experts and the press, they aren’t worth much. During the closely watched confirmation hearings of Jackson, he argued, the mud stained mainly those who threw it; the senators who lobbed the sex-offender accusations “oozed bad faith, and were lambasted” to the point that the critique “wasn’t adopted by the Republican Party at large.” In the end, Jackson secured three Republican votes and “emerged from the hearings with higher approval ratings.” He said, of the A.A.F., “They may be taking a victory lap, but their opposition research backfired.” The A.A.F.’s strategy, however, has proved more damaging when deployed on nominees whose hearings receive less attention. Such people are easier to smear because charges against them are often not properly scrutinized.
The A.A.F. describes itself as a champion of transparency, but it declines to reveal the sources of its funding. Its official mailing address is a handsome historic building a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. But when I stopped by there recently, to ask for the group’s basic financial records—which all tax-exempt nonprofits are legally required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the building is occupied by a different nonprofit group: the Conservative Partnership Institute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loyalists in exile. It has become the employer of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and of Trump’s former ad-hoc legal adviser Cleta Mitchell, both of whom are fighting subpoenas from the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cameron Seward, the general counsel of the Conservative Partnership Institute, appeared in the lobby and assured me that there was no relationship between his group and the A.A.F. Yet documents that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to secure its tax-exempt status, describe the group as existing “in care of” C.P.I. Moreover, C.P.I.’s 2021 annual report notes that it launched the A.A.F. because “conservatives didn’t have a group performing research on Biden’s woke nominees—even though plenty of liberal groups were digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on our side.” The groups have several overlapping directors, including Jones, who sits on both boards. The A.A.F. told the I.R.S. that its mission is to conduct nonpartisan research, but it is curious that the largest contribution by far to its parent group, C.P.I., is a million-dollar “charitable contribution” from Save America—Trump’s political-action committee. Trump reportedly raised much of the PAC’s money from supporters after his 2020 defeat, and his campaign has called the group an “election defense fund.”
Save America made its contribution to C.P.I. a few months after Meadows joined the group. Meadow’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.”
Local residents cook at a makeshift camp next to a checkpoint in Kyiv. (photo: Roman Pilipey)
Law enforcement officials lead subway shooting suspect Frank R. James, 62, away from a police station in New York City on Wednesday. (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show right here in New York, where police have arrested a man in connection with Tuesday’s subway shooting. Sixty-two-year-old Frank James was apprehended after he himself called the city’s Crime Stoppers line and told them he was at a Manhattan McDonald’s. Also, it was after bystanders said they saw James on the street and alerted officers.
This is Zack Tahhan, a 21-year-old Syrian immigrant, and his cousin, Mo Cheikh. He said they were repairing a camera system at a hardware store when they spotted James.
ZACK TAHHAN: I see the police car, police. We tell him, “This is the guy, about — this is the guy. He did the problem in the Brooklyn.”
MO CHEIKH: When we saw this guy, we were like between 70 to 80% sure: Is it him? Is it not? So we pull up the picture, the amber alert on our phones. We saw the picture. We saw. We confirmed that, between the three of us, “Oh, that’s the guy. That’s him. A hundred percent sure, that’s him.”
AMY GOODMAN: Police accuse Frank James of shooting 10 passengers on a subway car in Brooklyn. At least 13 other people were injured in the attack, which began after the gunman released two smoke grenades in a crowded train during morning rush hour on Tuesday. He’s being charged in federal court with violating a law against terrorist and other violent attacks on mass transit. He faces life in prison.
A motive behind the shooting is still unknown. James had a YouTube channel where he posted videos railing about racism, violence and his struggles with mental illness, including what he called the “horror show” of New York City’s mental health services. YouTube has since taken down the channel. This is a clip of Frank James in a post from when he said he was heading to New York.
FRANK JAMES: I’m heading back into the danger zone, so to speak, you know, and it’s triggering a lot of negative thoughts, of course, because I do suffer, have a bad severe case of post-traumatic stress after the [bleep] I’ve been through [bleep] years, man.
AMY GOODMAN: Frank James also lashed out at New York City Mayor Eric Adams in his videos. After Tuesday’s attack, Adams vowed to deploy more police patrols and expand mental health outreach programs to combat violence. This is Mayor Adams speaking on NY1.
MAYOR ERIC ADAMS: First of all, being angry does not give you the right to enter our subway system, discharge 33 rounds, striking 10 people, injuring 16 because of your actions. You don’t have that right. And I am not going to succumb to any person who believe they can attempt to harm New Yorkers because they are angry. The failure of those with mental health, homelessness, the failure of our educational system did not start January 2022. We have abandoned and betrayed New Yorkers for years. That betrayal is going to stop. And I’m committed to doing so.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Andrew Solomon, professor of clinical medical psychology at Columbia University, award-winning author of several books on mental illness, including Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity and his widely acclaimed memoir, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.
Professor Solomon, if you could start off by talking about your takeaway from the horror that took place over the last two days, but also these videos that were posted by the suspect, who repeatedly talked about the mental health hell that he confronted?
ANDREW SOLOMON: I think it’s difficult to make a clear diagnosis of the perpetrator of these horrific crimes on the basis of what he’s put forward, but he says that he’s been in the mental health system and has experience of it. There is no question that you have to be at least unhinged to undertake the kind of attack that he did and that what he has done represents a lapse in mental health.
The misfortune is that we seem to talk about mental health as though it were a matter of protecting innocent subway riders, which it is, and not as though it were a matter of assuaging the acute suffering of people who have delusions or hallucinations or an unclear grasp of reality, which it also is.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Andrew, could you talk specifically about what the difficulties are of people accessing mental healthcare, in general, in New York City?
ANDREW SOLOMON: Access to mental healthcare in New York City is really disgraceful. There were big institutions that were closed down in the 1970s and the 1980s. Those institutions were horrific. The best known is Willowbrook. And people saw the appalling footage that was taken in Willowbrook that showed people chained to beds and sitting in their own excrement, and so on and so forth. But what was agreed was that those large institutions would be closed down, and in their place there would be community care. The community care was never established.
And so now we have hospitals for people in a state of extreme illness, and you have to go and check yourself in, unless you can be held to be a harm to yourself or to others. And essentially, what those hospitals do is warehouse people so that they aren’t out on the streets dealing with these issues. But they warehouse people fairly temporarily. They are effective at preventing people from dying by suicide, because the means to do so are confiscated. There’s very little therapy. And what doesn’t seem to exist at all are adequate programs to take people who have been in hospitals, and reintegrate them in the general community.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And also, Andrew, what are the communities that are most vulnerable to mental illness and who have the most difficult time accessing treatment? You’ve talked about, even in your most recent piece in The New Yorker, “The Mystifying Rise of Child Suicide” — you’ve spoken of how difficult it often is even for the most affluent to access adequate mental healthcare.
ANDREW SOLOMON: Well, it certainly is difficult to adequately get healthcare for children, which is what I was writing about. It’s very difficult to get mental healthcare for children. But such care as exists tends to go to people who are privileged, not only economically but also in education, and who know how to argue with doctors who don’t want to take their children in, and who know whom to call to get the best standard of mental health. The quality of mental healthcare for people in poverty, and particularly for people of color, has been terrible. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduced the Pursuing Mental Health Equity Act of 2020, which was supposed to improve Black access to mental health services across the country. It’s stalled in committee.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read the beginning of a piece from The Daily Beast, which says, “The man sought by the NYPD in Tuesday’s subway shooting recorded a video message to Mayor [Eric] Adams in which he said he had been through the city’s mental-health system and experienced a kind of emotional violence that would make someone [quote] ‘go and get a gun and shoot [MFers].’” I mean, he said the whole words. If you can talk about what this means and what needs to happen now, Dr. Solomon, and particularly when we look not only here in New York but across the country as we — I don’t even know if we can say come out of this pandemic, but what’s happened in the last few years?
ANDREW SOLOMON: Well, what’s happened in the last few years has exacerbated underlying problems of mental health, and it’s done so through a number of mechanisms. The primary one, of course, has been people getting sick and dying. The secondary one has been the isolation in which people have been operating, and, along with that isolation, the forced intimacy with the people with whom they have sheltered or quarantined during the pandemic. There is a sense of instability in the world, which is to do with the pandemic and Black Lives Matter and Ukraine and lots of other things going on. All of these forms of instability are likely to exacerbate underlying mental health conditions. Many mental health problems result from the conjunction of an underlying vulnerability to mental health problems and external circumstances that trigger those problems. That does not explain everything, but it explains many of these problems.
And at the moment, the stimuli are enormous, and mental health services remain available only to a relatively small elite. Otherwise, you have these institutions that, as I said, are really cruel places. I mean, somebody who is an expert in this field and was at the National Institute of Mental Health said, “The worst place you can go if you’re feeling suicidal is a public mental health facility. It will push you the rest of the way toward that feeling.” And, of course, suicide and homicide are closely related. And often people who commit homicide are expressing their own despair, their own internal mental health problems, as well as expressing anger and hatred and bias.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Andrew, could you explain what we know about — you gestured at this in your response right now — about what causes mental illness, and in particular severe mental illness, to what extent environmental factors are responsible, and to what extent unavoidable biological or chemical factors are?
ANDREW SOLOMON: Almost everyone has some degree of biological vulnerability to mental illness. And the question is whether it’s a low threshold, in which they are extremely vulnerable to mental illness, in which case the triggering external circumstances can be quite trivial, or whether it’s someone who is terrifically prone to mental illness, in which case the triggering factors have to be enormous. But almost always it’s a result of a conjunction between external stimuli and internal vulnerability. That being said, there are some people who are just chemically or physically or biologically programmed, it would seem, to mental illness. We don’t yet understand the mechanisms of that programming, but we know that it exists.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what are some of the misconceptions about people who are mentally ill? I mean, the Coalition [for] the Homeless has found that the large majority of people, at least in this city, in New York City, have some form of mental illness. And experts say that rather than what people fear, that those who are mentally ill are more likely to be prone to violence, that, in fact, according to this coalition and experts, homeless people who are mentally ill are more likely to be subject to violence.
ANDREW SOLOMON: Only between 3 and 4% of violent crime in the United States is committed by people who are suffering from mental illness. It’s a very small proportion, overall, of crime. But people with mental illness are more likely to commit crimes that seem strange and inexplicable to onlookers, because they’re often guided by delusions rather than by greed or avarice or rage or any of the other qualities that motivate the rest of violent crime.
To treat people who are mentally ill as criminals ahead of the time that they actually do anything would be a gross injustice. Most mentally ill people will never commit a crime, no matter what the mental illness is that they have. But there are some people with mental illness who do commit crimes. And a lot of them would not commit those crimes if they were receiving adequate supports for their illness, if they were being treated as the Americans with Disabilities Act required, if they were being treated for the illness and were being treated as disabled people and experienced the rights and privileges that go along with disability, as well as the liberation that has existed in the disability rights movement.
AMY GOODMAN: Andrew Solomon, I wanted to ask you about the clearing of homeless encampments here in New York City and across the country. Do you see mental illness being transformed into a criminal problem, as something to be dealt with by police? And, for example, after, of course, this, the natural reaction after this attack is to say the money is just going to pour into police departments across the country. Your response to this?
ANDREW SOLOMON: Well, in the first place, I think it’s important that somebody be out there paying attention to what people are posting on YouTube. There was a lot of evidence that this man was going to be involved in something troubling, and nobody was paying attention, and nobody did anything.
On a larger scale, I think criminalizing the mentally ill because some mentally ill people commit crimes is not so far away from criminalizing members of racial minorities because some people who are in racial minorities commit crime, or people in any other category that you would care to name.
I think our primary focus has to be on helping people with mental illness function, and providing context for them — work context, supportive context, medical context, ongoing contexts — in which they could be helped to function as well as they would like to function, rather than abandoning them until something like this happens.
You know, there’s an upsurge in calls for mental health services every time there’s a major random crime, every time there’s a school shooting, every time there’s what appears to be a group suicide. Every time any of the rest of these things happen, there are people saying, “We have to have better mental health services.” Well, we do have to have better mental health services, but those can’t be provided by the police. At the moment, the institution in the United States housing the largest number of mentally ill people is the correctional system of the state of California. Does that really seem like an appropriate setting for these people?
And the treatment of them, though it would have some complexity and some expense, would result in a sense not only of better public safety but of people entering the functioning economy and the functioning world who are currently marginal to it. So, treating these people makes sense not only or not primarily from a public safety standpoint, but it makes sense in terms of having a functional system in a functional country in which people are able to contribute what they have to contribute.
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, we don’t want to end before addressing the piece you wrote in The New Yorker, “The Mystifying Rise of Child Suicide.” Just summarize it for us.
ANDREW SOLOMON: The age of suicide has been steadily coming down for the last at least 15 years, and probably for much longer. And the rate of suicide among young people has been going up. And it was vastly exacerbated by the pandemic. The number of suicide attempts among adolescents was roughly double in 2020 what it was in 2019.
I talked to a number of families who had lost children to suicide. The rate is going up most rapidly among Black children. There’s a great increase going on there. The stories are desperate and heartbreaking. There was one story that I came across of a girl who was 5 years old and who hanged herself with her jump rope, leaving behind a note that said, “I am sad for what I do.”
What has happened to our society that children are able to conceptualize suicide? But what, more significantly, has happened that has allowed them to be successful in attempting to follow through with it? And a lot of what’s happened is access to means. We have more guns, but we also have more videos online that will show you how to kill yourself if you want to. When I was 5, I wouldn’t have known how to tie a noose or how to hang myself.
And because we have a romanticized vision of childhood, we persistently propose that children can’t really get to the point of suicide, that children don’t really do these things. But they do, and they do in greater numbers. And while the numbers have gone up for prepubertive children, they’ve skyrocketed for adolescents, where the problem is really an acute and constant one.
AMY GOODMAN: Andrew Solomon, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of clinical medical psychology at Columbia University, author of several books on mental illness, including Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. We’ll link to your piece in The New Yorker, “The Mystifying Rise of Child Suicide.”
The U.S. military took four of Adel al-Manthari’s family members when an Air Force drone struck his car. Four years later, his doctors say that same strike is about to take his legs. (photo: al-Manthari's Family)
excerpt:
Adel al-Manthari is the sole survivor of a March 2018 American drone strike in Yemen that killed his four cousins and sentenced him to a lifetime of severe health problems. For just a fraction of the cost of one of the $150,000 missiles that an American drone fired at his family, the Defense Department could pay for the complicated surgery Manthari’s doctors say he needs to keep his legs.
But that would require the Pentagon to do something that so far it has so far refused to do in Yemen: admit it made a mistake and killed civilians who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Manthari, like a number of other victims of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, has spent the past four years trying to clear his family’s name, get the U.S. to apologize, and compensate his family for his injuries and the death of his four cousins—all to no avail.
Protesters in New York City rally against high rent prices. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In this file photo taken Feb. 13, people wait for water at a camp, one of the 500 camps for internally displaced persons in town, in Baidoa, Somalia. (photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AP)
A dolphin stranded on Quintana Beach in Texas died after being harassed by beachgoers. (photo: Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network)
The Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network posted on Facebook that a female dolphin was found stranded, but alive, on Quintana Beach in Texas last Sunday. Beachgoers pushed the animal back into the sea, but it was further harassed by people who attempted to ride the sick animal.
She got stranded on the beach "and was further harassed by a crowd of people on the beach where she later died before rescuers could arrive on scene," the organization stated. "This type of harassment causes undue stress to wild dolphins, is dangerous for the people who interact with them, and is illegal - punishable by fines and jail time if convicted."
The Quintana Beach County Park, which responded on scene, called the incident a "tragedy."
"Park staff was called to assist in keeping the public away from the dolphin until rescuers could arrive from Galveston," it posted on Facebook. "Unfortunately it was a retrieval, not a rescue."
Heidi Whitehead, the executive director of the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network, told NPR over email that attempting to ride a beached dolphin is "thankfully not a common behavior that has been reported to us."
Whitehead said the organization sees people attempting to feed or swim with dolphins, chasing groups of the animals with boats or jet skis, or trying to pet them — all behaviors that are illegal. Violations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act can lead to civil penalties of up to $11,000 or up to one year in prison, in addition to other penalties.
She said the illegal acts disrupt the animals' natural behavior and can cause injury, entanglement or death of the dolphins, like in this most recent case.
The Quintana Beach County Park said the animal's body has since been taken for a necropsy to try to determine the reason it was stranded on the beach.
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