Whisper Network

Many posts have discussed social media. 

Melanie Mason and Jeremy B. White at Politico:

Five months before Arielle Fodor, better known on social media as “Mrs. Frazzled,” helped set in motion the downfall of Rep. Eric Swalwell, she was singing his praises on Instagram.

“You know how I love to tell you when I meet a politician who acts like a normal human and not a robot!” she posted the day after the California Democrat launched his campaign for governor. “Eric is that.” 

It was a fairly anodyne post for Fodor, a prodigious professional poster. But it drew an unusual response: Three people privately warning her that Swalwell was no good.

Those messages were the embers of a firestorm that in short order incinerated Swalwell’s campaign, and is now engulfing what remains of his political career.

Swalwell suspended his campaign Sunday, days after multiple news outlets reported on allegations that he sexually harassed women, had sexual relationships with subordinate staff and, in two cases, committed sexual assault. Swalwell has denied accusations he had nonconsensual sex with anybody, though he acknowledged “personal failings.”

The broad contours of Swalwell’s alleged behavior, if not the specifics, did not come as a surprise to many working in and around politics, especially in Washington. The 45-year-old cable news darling and Trump antagonist had developed a reputation for unsavory and sometimes unwanted behavior toward women. Those warnings were shared in whisper networks but rarely traveled outside the circle of political insiders.

That is, until Swalwell sought a promotion to lead the nation’s most populous state and a pair of content creators worked to spill that open secret into public view. His breakneck undoing is a testament to the striking power of a new media ecosystem in which influencers with huge audiences can not only publicize politicians, but control the political conversation. Their growing clout has thrust campaigns into a new digital Wild West, where long-buried allegations and unsubstantiated rumors can find their earliest stages of vetting, a warning for politicians at all levels, including in the run-up to 2028.

On paper, it was a lopsided matchup. Swalwell had a national profile and support from many in the Democratic Party apparatus. Fodor and another content creator, Cheyenne Hunt — along with behind-the-scenes help from Hunt’s friend, a woman who alleged she had been personally harassed by Swalwell and still remains anonymous — had their keyboards and iPhone cameras.

Oppo

Many posts have discussed opposition research. 

Holly Pretsky at City and State New York:

Researchers don’t just work for political campaigns. They also investigate opponents in legislative fights and policy campaigns, working on behalf of unions and advocacy groups. Yang said a typical oppo book on a candidate and their opponent can cost between $20,000 and $30,000. Davis was paid $35,000 each by the 2022 congressional campaigns of Alessandra Biaggi and Carlina Rivera, and Scott Stringer’s mayoral campaign paid him more than $80,000 in 2021. Local campaigns prioritize research too. Yusef Salaam’s City Council campaign worked with Davis last year, as did Susan Zhuang’s. Wanecke worked with Sandy Nurse’s campaigns. “It’s just a neutral part of the business, and you would be naive to completely ignore it,” Yang said. The low-hanging fruit are the easiest things to dig up: old news reports on a person, their legislative voting record, campaign fundraising and expenditure records, what they’ve said on social media. Another starting place is what the opponent is claiming about themselves. For example, if they say they’re born and raised in the district, the researcher would start by verifying that. Another common tactic is looking for online content that the opponent has deleted – spending a lot of time on Internet Archive. Deception and hypocrisy are common themes in successful “hits.”

I love oppo,” said political consultant Evan Stavisky, whose firm Parkside Group has worked with state Senate Democrats and Rep. Tom Suozzi. “Candidates have an obligation to voters to present them with the full picture about who the candidates are and what the stakes are in the election.” His mom, Queens state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky, had a primary challenger in 2016 who had made anti-gay comments in Korean to a church group. “It would have done a disservice to the constituents for them not to understand that,” Evan Stavisky said. And it’s true. When there is a lack of vetting, voters can get burned. Just look at disgraced former Rep. George Santos, the poster child for failed oppo. After the Times finally exposed the extent of his lies post-election, there was quite a bit of discourse and finger-pointing about vetting. Everyone was blamed: the Nassau County Republican machine, the state Democratic Party, Democratic candidate Robert Zimmerman’s campaign, the researchers, the journalists, even the voters themselves for not caring enough! The DCCC did put together an 87-page book on Santos, but it largely focused on Santos’ conservative stances and involvement with Jan. 6 and “The Big Lie.” It also stated that Santos attended Baruch College, which the Times later found was false.

It is common practice for a campaign to bring oppo to a reporter, who then writes about it, only to see the article they wrote cycled back into campaign ads. In 2022, the DCCC was shopping around oppo on how New York Republicans had been inconsistent in their stances on abortion. City & State eventually wrote about the flip-flopping in 2023. Just recently, there has been a spike in traffic on that story. That’s due to a series of social media posts in late March from a sponsored Facebook page called “The American Horizon,” which took our logo, added new photos and rewrote our headline. Who pays for “The American Horizon” posts, according to Facebook’s ad library? The DCCC. A closed loop.

Old Oppo Handbook

Many posts have discussed opposition research.   Joseph Rodota quotes a 1972 opposition research handbook from a progressive organization:

Although the Handbook went to print in 1972 — well before oppo research moved online — it has some useful tips that are relevant today:

In most cases you are looking for contradictions; turnabouts on key issues, speeches which don’t jibe with votes, telling one group one thing and another something else.

When digging into campaign contributions, oppo researchers should ask themselves:

…who are your opponent’s friends (are any of them disreputable), did your opponent get a lot of money from a single group or groups (how did he serve that special interest in the Congress), and how did he raise and/or spend the money in the last election (in conformity with campaign laws or not).

The Handbook also suggests looking for any failure to bring federal spending back home:

you should evaluate your opponent’s effectiveness in bringing programs and business to your district. In many cases, Congressmen do nothing to secure available funds or inadvertently block grants through sheer incompetence… Believe it or not, there is plenty of federal money passed up each year.

And offers a word of caution:

We recommend you speak to as many people as possible about your opponent, but there is a problem: you may not want it known that you are investigating his background… You are risking disclosure when you talk with journalists, associates of the Congressman, his staff, or supporters.

Oppo and Presidential Libraries

Many posts have discussed opposition research.

 Joseph Rodota at Oppo File:

The National Archives runs 13 presidential libraries, containing the records of presidents from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush. (The Barack Obama Presidential Library is under construction. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library is currently a website; no physical location has been announced.) They even offer a nifty passport book; you collect stamps each time you visit another presidential library; once the passport is full, you can show it any library and receive a “special gift.”

For my book on the Watergate, I found material in each of these libraries. (Most of that was done via email, so I’m not eligible for my “special gift,” sadly.) Some of the best stuff came from the Kennedy library, including the hate mail the first Catholic president received after the Washington Post reported that the company behind the Watergate, an Italian real estate conglomerate, had “Vatican financial ties.”

All types of people visit presidential libraries and museums, including history buffs, school kids — and opposition researchers..

That’s because presidential libraries contain more than 600 million pages of text, nearly 20 million photographs, over 20 million feet of motion picture footage, and nearly 100,000 hours of audio and video.

As Willie Sutton famously said when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Another reason: The day-to-day conversation within a White House, via memo or e-mail, can be very frank. For example, one aide might complain to another that a certain politician is becoming a pest. A politician may reach out to a White House pal and share dirt on a rival. You get the picture.

From an oppo researcher’s perspective, a presidential library is a river filled with golden nuggets. You just need to know where to dip your pan.

Oppo and Plagiarism

Joe Rodota at Oppo File says that opposition researchers used to have a hard time detecting plagiarism.

That changed in 2000, as “plagiarism consultant” Jonathan Bailey explains:

Though plagiarism had long been against most schools' ethics codes, detecting it was a challenge. In 2000, Turnitin.com was launched. Though the technology was originally designed to detect “frat file” plagiarism, a pre-internet plagiarism technique that involves storing copies of physical essays for use in later years, it was adapted to deal with internet plagiarism, as well.

There are other “content similarity detection” programs out there, and oppo researchers use them every day.

...

In an earlier campaign cycle, oppo researchers in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee busted a Republican for plagiarism. In 2014, GOP oppo researchers decided to return the favor. They started with a universe of “targeted races” and winnowed that list down, focusing on campaigns that shared consulting teams. The NRCC oppo researchers figured the same people in those firms might be writing copy for two or more candidates, thereby increasing the possibility some of the content might be duplicated.

With that list of campaigns in hand, it became a simple matter of taking pages from candidate websites and entering them into Google. Examples of plagiarism leapt from their laptop screens and a target was identified: Staci Appel, candidate for Congress in Iowa’s 3rd District.

Organizing Online Harassment of Harassment Victims

Many posts have discussed the political uses and abuses of social media.

 Nicholas Fandos at NYT:

The menacing posts began cropping up on Twitter last September just hours after a former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York sued him over sexual harassment claims.

The tweets attacked the aide, Charlotte Bennett, in starkly personal terms. “Your life will be dissected like a frog in a HS science class,” read one of the most threatening, which also featured a photo of Ms. Bennett dancing at a bar in lingerie.

The post was part of a thread written by Anna Vavare, a leader of a small but devoted group of mostly older women who banded together online to defend Mr. Cuomo from a cascade of sexual misconduct claims that led to his resignation in August 2021. But it turns out, her tweets had secretly been ordered up by someone even closer to the former governor’s cause: Madeline Cuomo, his sister.

In the hours before the posts went live that morning, Ms. Cuomo exchanged dozens of text messages with Ms. Vavare and another leader of the pro-Cuomo group We Decide New York, Inc., pushing the activists to target Ms. Bennett, one of the first women to accuse Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment. She appeared to invoke her brother’s wishes.

Oppo and Journalism

Politico interviews Joe Pounder, co-founder of Definers Public Affairs:

What is a trend going on in the U.S. or abroad that doesn’t get enough attention? 

“The surface blurring of lines between reporting and opposition research. All information is now democratized so everyone can act like a researcher and reporter, and everyone with a smartphone can be a video tracker. Thankfully the advancement of technology has made us realize our competitive advantage is going back to basics. Only talented oppo researchers can go into the county courthouse and pull the records they need to build a narrative. Only a reporter can talk to a source and bring sometimes decades-old anecdotes to the surface.”

Advice About Research: TURN EVERY PAGE, WRITE DOWN EVERY NAME YOU SEE

At The New Yorker, Robert Caro recalls the best advice he ever got about research, from newspaper editor Alan Hathaway:

He didn’t look up. After a while, I said tentatively, “Mr. Hathway.” I couldn’t get the “Alan” out. He motioned for me to sit down, and went on reading. Finally, he raised his head. “I didn’t know someone from Princeton could do digging like this,” he said. “From now on, you do investigative work.”

I responded with my usual savoir faire: “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.”

Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.” He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left.

An episode of The Wire elaborated on similar advice:

Facebook Exec Fesses about Definers

Yesterday, Facebook's outgoing Head of Communications and Policy Elliot Schrage shared more detail  about their work with Definers:

What did we ask them to do and what did they do?

While we’re continuing to review our relationship with Definers, we know the following: We asked Definers to do what public relations firms typically do to support a company — sending us press clippings, conducting research, writing messaging documents, and reaching out to reporters.

Some of this work is being characterized as opposition research, but I believe it would be irresponsible and unprofessional for us not to understand the backgrounds and potential conflicts of interest of our critics. This work can be used internally to inform our messaging and where appropriate it can be shared with reporters. This work is also useful to help respond to unfair claims where Facebook has been singled out for criticism, and to positively distinguish us from competitors.

As the pressure on Facebook built throughout the year, the Communications team used Definers more and more. At Sheryl’s request, we’re going through all the work they did, but we have learned that as the engagement expanded, more people worked with them on more projects and the relationship was less centrally managed.

Did we ask them to do work on George Soros?

Yes. In January 2018, investor and philanthropist George Soros attacked Facebook in a speech at Davos, calling us a “menace to society.” We had not heard such criticism from him before and wanted to determine if he had any financial motivation. Definers researched this using public information.

Later, when the “Freedom from Facebook” campaign emerged as a so-called grassroots coalition, the team asked Definers to help understand the groups behind them. They learned that George Soros was funding several of the coalition members. They prepared documents and distributed these to the press to show that this was not simply a spontaneous grassroots movement.

 Did we ask them to do work on our competitors?

Yes. As I indicated above, Definers helped us respond to unfair claims where Facebook was been singled out for criticism. They also helped positively distinguish us from competitors.

Did we ask them to distribute or create fake news?

No

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg issued a statement thanking Schrage and suggesting that she had not known anything about Definers. Mike Allen at Axios:

A CNN on-screen headline captures the read-between-the-lines we heard from both coasts: "Could be interpreted as a way of saving COO Sheryl Sandberg."

• Why this blew up, via The Guardian: "The work on Soros is sensitive because of the peculiar role that the Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist plays in rightwing conspiracy theories and among antisemites."
• Why the kerfuffle is arguably overblown, via Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley: "Em­ploy­ing PR firms to shape me­dia nar­ra­tives and chal­lenge the cred­i­bil­ity of op­po­nents ... is a stan­dard busi­ness prac­tice."

Be smart: Facebook seems to be adding a new realism to its founding idealism.

• Mark Zuckerberg, who has lost $19 billion in net worth this year (down 27% to $54 billion, according to Bloomberg), said on CNN on Tuesday: "[T]hese are complex issues that you can't fix. You manage them on an ongoing basis."

Tactics of Definers

At NYT, Jack Nicas and Matthew Rosenberg report:

A small firm called Definers Public Affairs brought the dark arts of Washington’s back-room politics to Silicon Valley when, while working for Facebook, it began disparaging other tech companies to reporters.

But a few days before Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, testified to Congress in September, Definers set its sights on a different target: the senators about to question Ms. Sandberg.

In one document circulated to reporters, Definers tallied what software the 15 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track visitors to their Senate websites. Another document detailed how much each senator spent on Facebook ads and how much they had received in campaign donations from Facebook or other big tech companies.

Known in the political business as opposition research, the documents pushed out by Definers neatly provided reporters with the ammunition they would need to suggest the senators grilling Ms. Sandberg were hypocrites for criticizing Facebook.

...
The documents obtained by The New York Times provide a deeper look at Definers’ tactics to discredit Facebook’s critics. The Times reported on Wednesday that Definers also distributed research documents to reporters that cast the liberal donor George Soros as an unacknowledged force behind activists protesting Facebook, and helped publish articles criticizing Facebook’s rivals on what was designed to look like a typical conservative news site.

 

Definers and Facebook

At The New York Times, Sheera Frankel et al. explain how Facebook managed bad publicity about privacy.

In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington-based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations — an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech.

Definers had established a Silicon Valley outpost earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush who preached the virtues of campaign-style opposition research. For tech firms, he argued in one interview, a goal should be to “have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that’s being pushed out about your competitor.”
...

On a conservative news site called the NTK Network, dozens of articles blasted Google and Apple for unsavory business practices. One story called Mr. Cook hypocritical for chiding Facebook over privacy, noting that Apple also collects reams of data from users. Another played down the impact of the Russians’ use of Facebook.

The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers, sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va. Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America Rising, the company’s political opposition-research arm, to attack their clients’ enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.

Mr. Miller acknowledged that Facebook and Apple do not directly compete. Definers’ work on Apple is funded by a third technology company, he said, but Facebook has pushed back against Apple because Mr. Cook’s criticism upset Facebook.

If the privacy issue comes up, Facebook is happy to “muddy the waters,” Mr. Miller said over drinks at an Oakland, Calif., bar last month.

On Thursday, after this article was published, Facebook said that it had ended its relationship with Definers, without citing a reason.

How Oppo Guys and Other Operatives Feed the Media

In Devil's Bargain, Joshua Green describes how Bannon uses the press.  In a 2015 report, a slightly updated version of which appears in the book, he wrote:

[Breitbart editor Wynton] Hall peppers his colleagues with slogans so familiar around the office that they’re known by their abbreviations. “ABBN — always be breaking news,” he says. Another slogan is “depth beats speed.” Time-strapped reporters squeezed for copy will gratefully accept original, fact-based research because most of what they’re inundated with is garbage. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” says Bannon. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”

The reason GAI does this is because it’s the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: “Anchor left, pivot right.” It means that “weaponizing” a story onto the front page of the New York Times(“the Left”) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com. “We don’t look at the mainstream media as enemies because we don’t want our work to be trapped in the conservative ecosystem,” says Hall. “We live and die by the media. Every time we’re launching a book, I’ll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we’re going to place, every op-ed Peter’s going to publish. Some of it is a wish list. But it usually gets done.”

Once that work has permeated the mainstream—once it’s found “a host body,” in David Brock's phrase—then comes the “pivot.” Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative. “With Clinton Cash, we never really broke a story,” says Bannon, “but you go [to Breitbart.com] and we’ve got 20 things, we’re linking to everybody else’s stuff, we’re aggregating, we’ll pull stuff from the Left. It’s a rolling phenomenon. Huge traffic. Everybody’s invested.”

The book (pp. 27-28) looks back on a 1998 incident in which Henry Waxman leveraged the media to humiliate Dan Burton:

Waxman devised something far more attention-grabbing and dramatic. The following Sunday, Burton was booked for an encore appearance on Meet the Press. The show’s host, Tim Russert, was quietly made aware of the discrepancy between the two sets of Hubbell transcripts.* On Sunday, when the cameras began rolling, Burton became an unwitting captive as Russert, the dean of Washington journalism and a maestro of the prosecutorial interview, confronted the chairman on air with evidence of the doctored transcripts. The uproar was immediate and intense. Gingrich, humiliated, condemned Burton’s committee as “the circus.” Republicans fumed at the embarrassment Burton had brought on them and demanded he atone for it.  

* Political hit jobs like the one on Burton are always disguised in order not to divert focus away from the target. The public story of Russert's triumph, detailed afterward in New York magazine, was that Russert himself discovered the divergent transcripts. He did not. He was a fine journalist, but here he had some help.

Trump Databases

At Mashable, Marcus Gilmer writes:

First up, there's the matter of Trump's many campaign promises. After all, he's already backing off threats to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server.

That's where TrumpTracker comes in. Created by Viren Mohindra, it collects Trump's numerous campaign promises, cross-referenced with sourcing from major media outlets, Trump's own website, and even video of Trump's speeches.

...
With all of the subjective spin that permeates politics, from social media to news analysts, it can be difficult to track what, exactly, is the source of a particular debate or frenzied headlines.

Which is why FactBase's Trump database is such an interesting — and essential — searchable database. As the site's mission statement heralds, there are no stories or spin here, just the words used by Trump from speeches, debates, books, and tens of thousands of tweets.

...
In a similar vein, the Internet Archive has launched its own Trump database "with 700+ televised speeches, interviews, debates, and other news broadcasts related to President-elect Donald Trump."

Featuring over 520 hours of Trump-related content going back to December 2009, the archive also features an open-sourced fact-check spreadsheet that will continue to grow as the archive does.

(Reposted from Epic Journey) 

Definers

At The Wall Street Journal, Patrick O'Connor reports that business is turning to oppo.

In a sign of how that shift has created new opportunities for political professionals, America Rising, the unofficial research arm of the Republican Party, has launched a for-profit venture aimed at helping companies, trade associations and wealthy individuals push back against detractors and navigate sensitive shareholder or public-policy fights.

As political trends seep further into the broader economy, the new company, Definers, is arming clients with the arsenal available to the most well-funded political candidates, including dossiers on their opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, tracking tools to monitor what people are saying in traditional and social media, and a rapid-response operation to shape public fights.

The company’s founders are barred from discussing specific clients, but the firm is performing much of the same type of work that its political affiliate, America Rising, does for GOP candidates. This behind-the-scenes work is often aimed at driving media coverage of an individual, issue or entity.

In one instance, the Definers team exposed a potential conflict for Connecticut’s insurance commissioner, whose approval is required to seal the merger between insurance giants Anthem Inc. and Cigna Corp., according to its marketing materials. In another, the research firm point out insurers’ larger-than-expected premium increases under the Affordable Care Act.

RNC Oppo

Elizabeth Williamson reports at The New York Times:

The vast right-wing conspiracy Hillary Rodham Clinton once cited in 1998 works from cluttered offices on Capitol Hill, led by a man who was in high school when she first made the charge.

Raj Shah runs the Republican National Committee’s opposition research arm, a beehive of two dozen tech-savvy idealists who have already spent two years searching through decades of government documents, tax filings, TV footage and news archives. One of their colleagues in Arkansas turns up every day in the Clinton presidential library to probe the Clintons’ accumulated past. More than 330 Freedom of Information Act requests have netted 11,000 pages of records, and counting. The R.N.C. has also retained Mark Zaid, an attorney who also is representing the Gawker website in suing the State Department over records from Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary of state.

Today, presidential candidates start campaigning two years before the first primary vote is cast. That gives researchers a head start in finding flip-flops, fibs and perhaps most damaging of all, moments when politicians are caught being themselves.

Both political parties conduct opposition research — for proof of the Democrats’ prowess, there’s the “macaca moment” in 2006 that torpedoed the re-election of Senator George Allen in Virginia. In this political cycle Republican investigators have been given a rare gift: a clear front-runner with a long and public history.

The Positives of Going Negative

At Politico, Jack Shafer discusses The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning, by Kyle Mattes and David P. Redlawsk. 

Negative campaigning signifies competitive elections, they continue, and more competitive elections in turn attract more funding, which leads to more competition—and often to more negativity. But voters are not fragile little beings, endangered by excessive campaign negativity, they assert. Quite the opposite, they’re able to interpret the “rough and tumble of politics” and make independent choices about candidates. As for the assertion that negative campaigns turn voters off, routinely expressed by the press, the authors produce research that shows that voters “are not as negative about negativity” as is commonly believed. Besides, if negative campaigning really peeved voters, wouldn’t candidates strive to charm them by producing more and more positive advertisements instead of more and more negative ads?

Luckily for the republic, both parties love negative campaigns. According to the Wesleyan Media Project, in 2012 Barack Obama ran the most negative campaign in recent presidential history, with 58.5 percent of his broadcast and cable ads being judged negative. That eclipsed the previous leader, George W. Bush, who scored 55.4 percent negative. Academics and the occasional journalist may squeal in horror over the demise of campaign civility, but as Frank Rich wrote for New York magazine in 2012, negativity is in the great American political tradition.

Oppo and America Rising

Hannah Rosin writes at The Atlantic:

In March 2013, The Washington Post ran a story about the launch of America Rising. The coverage was unusual: opposition-research shops don’t normally seek out attention from major papers; they prefer to operate under the radar. (As a 2000 story in the New York Post put it, “Oppo research is like underwear—it works best when you don’t see it.”) But this new firm, founded by Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, planned on “instigating nothing less than a revolution in the way the right does and uses oppo research,” according toThe Washington Post. Tim Miller, the executive director of America Rising, told the paper, “Research has been people sitting in a dungeon or going through trash cans and then funneling the information up to a press person.” Miller, by contrast, issues frequent press releases and sometimes even writes op-eds. He speaks like the CEO of a public corporation. “Part of our brand is having credibility with journalists,” he told me.

Oppo shops used to be content with any nasty tidbit that got attention [not really] —for example, the infamous rumor leading up to the 2000 South Carolina presidential primary that John McCain had a black love child. But now, with constant political coverage from online media, random rumors have no staying power. The best dirt has become the kind that can help build a consistent and unappealing image of a candidate, or even an entire party. Oppo researchers today function in ways that make them almost indistinguishable from campaign strategists, just without the funding limits. They can provide one crucial piece of information—say, that John Edwards paid $400 for a haircut—that is subsequently integrated into the broader negative picture of a candidate (in Edwards’s case, that he was rich and vain). Last year, a tracker from America Rising caught Bruce Braley, a Democratic Senate candidate in Iowa, deriding the state’s senior senator, the Republican Chuck Grassley, as a “farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” This turned into a meme that made Democrats look anti-farmer and alienated from Middle America. For 2016, America Rising is building a huge database of everything Hillary Clinton has said and done, regarding everything from Little Rock to Benghazi, to try to paint a robust caricature of Hillary in the public’s mind before the real Hillary even gets started.
...
[Barbara] Comstock played a central role in the professionalization of opposition research—essentially ensuring that something like the Clinton wars would never again unfold in quite the same histrionic, gossip-laden way. In 2000, when Comstock was hired by David Israelite to take over the research shop at the Republican National Committee, she replaced most of the existing staff with lawyers and policy experts. “We wanted to develop a research operation that was fact-based and very responsible, so there would be no question about sourcing methods or where a piece of information had come from,” Israelite told me. Comstock wrote papers using open sources and footnotes. But just as important, she used what she found to “connect the dots and create a coherent story about an opposing candidate,” Israelite recalled. For example, Comstock’s team developed the story that Al Gore had been leasing some of his property in Tennessee to a zinc mine that had several times violated Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, adding to an impression of the environmentalist as pious and hypocritical. The new, methodical Barbara Comstock had rendered the old, obsessive model obsolete.

Uber Oppo

Oppo guys work for interest groups, not just campaigns.

Ben Smith reports at Buzzfeed:

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.

His remarks came as Uber seeks to improve its relationship with the media and the image of its management team, who have been cast as insensitive and hyper-aggressive even as the company’s business and cultural reach have boomed.

The Washington Post reports:

That combination of vindictiveness and willingness to tap into user information provoked outrage Tuesday on social-media sites, spawning the hashtag “#ubergate” on Twitter. Critics recounted a series of Uber privacy missteps, including a 2012 blog post in which a company official analyzed anonymous ridership data in Washington and several other cities in an attempt to determine the frequency of overnight sexual liaisons by customers — which Uber dubbed “Rides of Glory.”

America Rising

Many posts have discussed opposition research. Nicholas Conferssore writes at The New York Times:

The 2014 cycle contained the emergence of a more sophisticated Republican operation for tracking Democratic candidates and scrubbing their public and personal lives for damaging information. During the 2012 campaign, Republican super PACs and outside groups were largely limited to their own in-house research, news reports and footage lifted from television broadcasts or candidates’ own video.

This time, Republicans set up a new research hub called America Rising. Created as a limited liability corporation, it could sell footage and research to anyone willing to pay. Republican candidates and super PACs, which otherwise might not coordinate with each other, could buy the same research and tracking footage, allowing their advertising to be more cohesive.

The business employed a legion of trackers to follow Democratic candidates, logging close to a half-million miles of travel and recording more than 3,000 campaign events. The group scored an early hit in Iowa, when it obtained footage of Representative Bruce Braley, the Democrats’ anointed Senate contender, disparaging Charles E. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as “a farmer from Iowa, who never went to law school.”

The footage was provided to Iowa newspapers in March, putting Mr. Braley on the defensive at time when Republicans had not yet settled on a candidate. Within two days, the video was picked up by a new Republican political nonprofit, Priorities for Iowa, and aired in statewide ads. Ultimately, footage from America Rising was used in more than a hundred Republican ads during the 2014 cycle, according to a spokesman.

At Time, Alex Altman and Zeke Miller offer more detail on America Rising:

Launched by three top party operatives after 2012, the group had a mandate to erase the opposition research edge Democrats enjoyed in past cycles. The investment paid dividends early on a cold, dark March morning. Tim Miller, the group’s executive director, was reviewing the latest clips compiled by his team of twenty-something research junkies when he came across something so juicy it might just alter the balance of the Senate. “Holy s—!” he shouted. It was a video of Braley, standing before a half-dozen bottles of liquor at a Texas fundraiser, disparaging Sen. Chuck Grassley as a farmer who “never went to law school.”

Miller’s group leaked the video to an Iowa television reporter, hoping to assure at least a single airplay on local television, which would allow it to be aired in future ads. Instead it spread like wildfire. The clip cast Braley as out of touch with his agricultural state and proved a body blow to Braley’s Iowa hopes. In the final Des Moines Register poll, 39 percent of Braley’s own supporters said his comments about Grassley were a crucial mistake.

Secret Senate Handbook

Donovan Slack and Paul Singer report at USA Today:

USA TODAY has obtained and is making available on our website a copy of the 380-page U.S. Senate Handbook, which describes itself as "a compilation of the policies and regulations governing office administration, equipment and services, security and financial management."

U.S. Senate Handbook:

• Table of Contents (PDF)
• Part I: Administration (PDF)
• Part I: Appendices (PDF)
• Part II: Equipment and Services (PDF)
• Part IV: Financial Management (PDF)
• Part IV: Appendices (PDF)

The handbook reads something like an employee manual, explaining how new senators and staff members can get ID cards and how many parking passes each senator will be issued. But it also contains detailed rules on how each senator can spend their official, multi-million-dollar, taxpayer-funded budget on things like meals and travel.

Yet, because it has not been released, it's been impossible for the public to know whether a senator has violated the rules — for example by charging taxpayers for an improper charter flight.

The handbook is referenced in rules published by the Senate Ethics Committee, Congressional Research Service reports and history books. But the Rules Committee, which produces the handbook, does not release it. The Library of Congress does not even have a copy.