Jane Mayer

The campaign against Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to serve on the Supreme Court was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation (AAF). An explicit purpose of the AAF—a politically active, tax-exempt nonprofit charity that doesn’t disclose its backers—is to prevent the approval of all Biden Administration nominees. The AAF’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.

Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject of whether Russian election interference affected the outcome of the 2016 election, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016.