The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees

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. Rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the AAF 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 AAF 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 AAF, which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focused on blocking women and people of color.