Filed under "dirty dark money right-wing tactics"...

On Monday night's The Rachel Maddow Show, New Yorker columnist Jane Mayer promoted her latest piece "The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees." Here she exposes the "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."

This so-called "American Accountability Foundation," Mayer told Rachel Maddow, "does sort of phony research, basically, and pretty sloppy job if you really look into it. 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."

"...Of course it turned out that a lot of the senators were getting their research from this group," said Mayer.

There's more at The New Yorker article, worth the click:

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 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.