A Philosophical and Investigative Essay On the Lamentable Necessity of Making Maximum Utility of Dirty Tricks in Contemporary US Politics
Part II: A month ago, it looked like Kamala Harris would cruise to victory. Here’s how Team Trump’s army of smear peddlers helped derail her campaign. (*)
Senior Campaign Advisor Alex Bruesewitz (left) with Trump and Tony Wied, who won election yesterday to represent Wisconsin in the House. Bruesewitz, a specialist in citing the Fifth Amendment during depositions to congressional investigators, reportedly had a hand in arranging the October 27 rally at Madison Square Garden featuring comedian Tony Heathcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” Bruesewitz posted the photo on social media.
Part I of this story, “Dirty tricks are immoral and illegal, but fun and effective as well. The Harris campaign's failure to build a unit of veteran smear artists may return Trump to the White House, sources say,” can be found here.
The Golden Age of Contemporary Political Dirty Tricks was born in 1960 during the presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The Republican candidate had a number of vicious strategists working on his behalf, but they were thoroughly outmaneuvered by the experts working for his opponent.
One of the especially skillful tactical maneuvers carried out by JFK’s crew of veteran dirtbags came during the now infamous televised presidential debate between the two contenders. Knowing Nixon was prone to sweating heavily, the Democratic team reportedly arranged to have the heat turned up in the TV studio, with the result that JFK looked his usual cool, debonair self while Nixon resembled a serial killer being interrogated by police detectives moments before he confessed.
Less well known is a story exposed 50 years after the fact by journalist Mark Feldstein, which detailed how JFK operatives paid Phillip Reiner, a Los Angeles accountant and Democrat who’d worked for Howard Hughes, for confidential documents it leaked to liberal columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson on the eve of the election. The material revealed that Hughes had funneled Nixon $205,000 – the equivalent of approximately $2 million today – via various intermediaries, including a brother of Nixon’s, to hide the transfers. It was “a journalistic atrocity” to conspire with “the Kennedy hawkshaws to help us get the goods on their opponent,” Anderson later admitted, but he and Pearson landed a huge scoop and their stories rocked Nixon’s campaign, which some believe was the primary factor in JFK’s victory.
Nixon long remained bitter about his defeat, by the narrowest margin in presidential history up until then, and labeled JFK’s political consultants the “the most ruthless group of political operators ever mobilized.” The loss inspired him to stock up on adept bottomfeeders for his future campaigns and no doubt indirectly led to the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Building orchestrated by CREEP, the Committee to Re-elect the President.
Numerous low-level staffers and outside advisors who worked for Nixon in 1972 later established names for themselves as some of the most prolific and accomplished sleazebag political operatives in modern American history. Collectively, they lent a hand to every Republican president elected since.
A central figure on the list was Arthur Finkelstein, a revered figure in the dirty tricks industry who was inducted into the American Association of Political Consultants Hall of Fame in 2013, four years before his death. Finkelstein’s clients over the years included Senators Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, the Twin Towers of racist and segregationist sentiment in congress for many decades, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, and foreign leaders such as Israeli mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu. He also trained or collaborated with dozens of black bag operators and smear artists who’ve practiced the craft during the past half-century, a group that’s sometimes affectionately known as “Arthur’s Kids.”
Among the best known of that motley assemblage is Roger Stone, who left college in 1972 to take a job with Nixon’s CREEP and over the following two decades worked for on the election campaign staffs of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In his spare time, Stone offered his invaluable, highly paid services to corrupt, brutal foreign leaders like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and became known as a leader of the “Washington Lobbying Industry for Dictators and Torturers.”
Stone, of course, was an unofficial advisor to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton and planned or participated in a number of impressively slimy secret operations whose full details will probably never be known. He "was in contact with one or more apparently well-connected Israelis at the height of the 2016 US presidential campaign, one of whom warned Stone that Trump was ‘going to be defeated unless we intervene, and promised "we have critical intel" that could make sure he won, the Times of Israel has reported.
Stone denies having advance knowledge of the 2016 hack of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s emails or who did it – a party connected to the Russian government is widely suspected – but he was an intermediary for the Trump campaign with WikiLeaks and certainly knew of its plans to make the material public. “Hillary Clinton is done #Wikileaks,” he tweeted five days before Podesta’s emails dropped. Stone evaded serving a 40-month stretch in the clink for witness tampering, making false statements, and otherwise impeding Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russiagate investigation because Trump commuted his sentence shortly before he was scheduled to report to prison.
In 1972, Lee Atwater, another future inductee into the American Association of Political Consultants Hall of Fame, was the Southern regional coordinator for the College Republican National Committee, which closely coordinated its activities with Nixon’s CREEP. Eight years later, he was the chief campaign consultant for a GOP congressional candidate named Floyd Spence, who was running against heavily favored Democrat Tom Turnipseed in Atwater’s native South Carolina.
Atwater learned Turnipseed had suffered from depression as a teenager and undergone electroshock therapy. To make sure that became a campaign issue, he planted a fake reporter at a press conference who innocently inquired if Turnipseed had ever “had psychotic treatment,” and Atwater followed up by remarking to reporters that Spence’s opponent had been “hooked up to jumper cables” one too many times. Spence won the race and Atwater landed a job at the Republican National Committee.
Atwater is best known for crafting the notorious racist ad about Willie Horton, a black convict who terrorized a white couple while out on a weekend pass from a Massachusetts prison, that’s widely credited with sealing clinching George W. Bush’s 1988 victory against Michael Dukakis.
Lee Atwater in 1983 photo when he worked as an advisor to President Reagan. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
Atwater’s boss at the College Republican National Committee in 1972 was Karl Rove, who he helped win election as the group’s National Chairman, with tactics that included surreptitiously digging through his opponent’s trash. Rove later directed George W. Bush’s twin Texas gubernatorial victories and two successful presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004. Bush rewarded Rove by making him his White House Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff.
Rove held a top position in the White House Iraq Group, which helped fabricate and propagate key narratives used to promote the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, including the bogus storylines about Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMDs and intimate ties to Al Qaeda. In July of that year, he leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame to right-wing journalist Robert Novak to retaliate against her husband, Joseph Wilson, for writing an op-ed in the New York Times that questioned the administration’s case for the invasion.
Meanwhile, Democratic political operatives were racking up impressive feats of political fraud and subterfuge during this period as well, but reached especially great heights during the Bill Clinton era, which isn’t surprising as he and wife Hillary are both well known moral reprobates. A figure whose name is largely lost to history but played a highly significant role in both of the Clintons' careers was Jim Blair, the outside counsel to Arkansas-headquartered Tyson Foods.
In the late-1970s, Blair, who was a close friend of the couple’s as was his wife, Diane, facilitated a series of complex cattle futures trades by Hillary Clinton, a topic she knew nothing about, when he was serving as her financial advisor that netted her huge profits. In 1992, when Governor Clinton was running in the Democratic presidential primaries and his campaign was threatened by an Ozark real estate investment he and his wife had made, which after he won the presidency became known as the Whitewater affair, Blair quieted persuaded – precisely how isn’t known – Bill’s business partner on the deal, James McDougal, to keep his goddamned big mouth shut and stop talking to the press or else, and the topic disappeared for the duration of the campaign.
Jim and Diane and Bill and Hillary had a White House sleepover on Clinton's first night at the White House. “Nearly every nationally successful politician has such a person in his life, valued for his discretion, friendship and canny advice,” said a 1994 New York Times article headlined “The Man Clinton Turns to in Times of Turmoil and Moments of Doubt” that explored the long, intimate relationship between Blair and the nation’s president, who’d been inaugurated the previous year. “In this instance, as in many others, the personal ties between the chief lawyer for a Fortune 500 company and an Arkansas Governor raised questions about the appearance, if not the reality, of various conflicts of interests.”
Sidney Blumenthal, a one-time liberal journalist, worked for President Clinton with the official role of senior advisor and the unofficial title of “Chief Hatchet Man.” When the Clinton inner circle believed Colin Powell planned to run for the Republican nomination in 1996 and might be the president’s opponent in the following year’s general election, a prospect that terrified his top advisors, Blumenthal worked his press contacts in hopes of getting traction for a story that painted Powell’s wife, Alma Powell, as being unfit to be a first lady because she suffered from clinical depression.
In mid-1997, after Clinton had dispensed with his former intern-paramour Monica Lewinsky, she began pressing him to help her find a job and hinted she was planning to tell her parents about their romance to explain why she wouldn’t be working at the White House any more. It was only that October – when Clinton was facing increased scrutiny over his chronic philandering, general sleazy conduct with women, and efforts to cover up his actions, which eventually led to his impeachment by the House in 1998 – that Clinton sprang into action and assigned lobbyist, Democratic donor, and close confidant Vernon Jordan to finding a means to keep Lewinsky quiet.
The solution Jordan came up with was to arrange for his friend Ronald Perelman, a billionaire investor in Revlon, where Jordan had a seat on the board of directors, to offer Lewinsky a job with the cosmetics company. “Mission accomplished,” Jordan told President Clinton upon confirming Lewinsky had accepted the position.
“Mission Accomplished”: President Clinton dispatched lobbyist and fixer Vernon Jordan to solve his Monica Lewinsky problem. It proved to be a temporary fix. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
However, Blumenthal also helped out in the Lewinsky matter after it became a national scandal when it was revealed the president’s public denial of his relationship with her – “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” – was one of the chronic baldfaced lies that effortlessly rolled off of Clinton’s tongue at moments of political duress. With the cat out of the bag, Blumenthal spread false stories to the media that portrayed her as having stalked poor Bill, and later sought to destroy the reputation of one of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s top assistants by claiming he’d abused young boys at a Christian summer camp.
Blumenthal employed similar “Smear & Defamation” services to Hillary Clinton when supporting her failed 2008 presidential primary campaign against soon-to-be President Barack Obama as an unofficial advisor. Among his initiatives was pushing news organizations to investigate baseless conspiracy theories promoted in the right-wing press that alleged Obama was born in Kenya and therefore was ineligible under the Constitution to serve as president. The bogus story was later picked up by Obama’s GOP enemies, including Trump, and became known as “birtherism.”
This outstanding heritage of Democratic dirty trickery was burnished during Hillary’s 2016 run against Trump. Her team of official and unofficial advisors included adept black bag operators such as Blumenthal, who was back for an encore performance, her Campaign Chairman Podesta, who was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and took part in the conversations with Vernon Jordan about neutralizing Monica Lewinsky, and David Brock, the one-time right-wing hack that slimed lawyer Anita Hill – who testified, truthfully a preponderance of evidence suggests, at Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings that he’d sexually harassed her years earlier and “told me graphically of his own sexual prowess...and made embarrassing references to a porn star by the name of Long Dong Silver" – as being “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” In 2002, Brock cashed in with a bestselling book in which he apologized for his past role as "a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine" and “whore for cash,” and declared he would henceforth make an honest living by rising “above character assassination,” whereupon he immediately became a money-grubbing smear artist and cog in the Democratic sleaze machine, in particular on behalf of the Clintons, who he defamed, and that’s not easy, during his earlier days but who immediately embraced him as soon as he defected to their side of the national bipartisan divide.
Joe Biden rose through Democratic ranks during the down-and-dirty days of US politics and certainly was no prude in terms of dabbling in the dark arts. In 2001, William Oldaker, a lobbyist, banker, political donor, fixer, wheeler-dealer and key consultant for many top Democrats, Biden in particular, founded a lobbying firm with Hunter Biden the son of the current president and then-senator, who has periodically experienced setbacks while working to get ahead in life.
Five years later, Hunter and Jim Biden, Joe's brother, secured a $1 million loan from WashingtonFirst bank to buy a hedge fund despite both being poor credit risks at the time. It turned out that by some curious coincidence Oldaker co-founded WashingtonFirst, had a seat on the board at the time, and had recently set up a political account there for Joe Biden that held $500,000.
Oldaker died three years ago and didn’t play any notable role in Biden’s victory over Trump the prior year, but he counted on assistance from a variety of veteran sleaze merchants, among them Ron Klain, a political consultant and former lobbyist who served as a senior advisor to the campaign and held the post of White House chief of staff between 2021 and 2023. Do I have a single piece of evidence that shows Klain – who was widely known for his win-at-all-costs methods and belief in accumulating power for the sake of power, not in pursuit of noble objectives to improve people’s lives – murdered multiple associates of Trump’s during the 2020 race?
No, I don’t. But would it surprise me in the slightest? No, it wouldn’t. Hence, the chance Klain did exactly that – and far worse – can’t be ruled out and remains an open question that probably should be investigated by the FBI so it can be settled once and for all.
Given the copious quantities of material on the subject, I could write a multi-volume encyclopedia about political dirty tricks and operatives, but time and space restrictions dictate that I bring this section to a close, and devote the rest of this essay to the role of political scumbaggery in the 2024 campaign.
The 2024 Harris-Trump election campaign that culminated yesterday represents one of the greatest dirty tricks mismatches in recent history and a rare case where one side – Team Trump, needless to say – commanded overwhelming firepower and the other relied on the equivalent of civil disobedience and other forms of nonviolent resistance. Had Harris prevailed, it would have been an extremely rare case where such tactics proved successful, and it would have been all the more surprising given that she was running against a remorseless, conscienceless opponent like Trump. Predictably, she didn’t.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Harris and the Democrats refrained from lying, cheating, and stealing during the campaign – as sources have told me was the case and available evidence suggests – due to their side’s respect for fair play. Harris built her political career as a hard nosed prosecutor in California who ruined the lives of countless people by sending them to prison, often for long sentences on nonviolent charges, and as seen in the last section, contemporary Democratic presidential candidates have made outstanding use of dirty tricks.
So, what accounts for the Harris campaign’s limited use of dirty tricks on the 2024 campaign trail? I can’t definitely answer that question, but I have a theory that’s partly speculative and partly based on input from knowledgeable sources as well.
First, despite the long Democratic heritage of subterfuge and fraud, the party’s ranks of experts are relatively depleted at the moment as many of its most prestigious practitioners have aged out of political crime and are in full or semi-retirement enjoying the fortunes they made during their careers. Compounding the problem, the party has failed to maintain a solid minor league farm system, which has resulted in a shortage of fresh talent. Hence, it would be unfair to lay all the blame for the seemingly inexplicable failure to wallow in the muck at Harris’s feet.
Additionally, Harris served in the senate from 2017 to 2021, when she took office as Biden’s vice president. The prior year, she ran against Biden and a host of other Democrats for the party’s nomination, which was a complete shitshow. Harris entered the race as one of the favorites and withdrew before a single caucus or primary was held because it was clear her campaign was already doomed.
Harris only became the 2024 nominee in late July after Biden was forced to pull out of the race when his rapidly advancing dementia was exposed to the country during the debate against Trump the month before, which the president's handlers and associates – including Harris – had successfully covered up until then. Hence, she neither had sufficient time nor the requisite experience on the national stage that would have been needed to build a solid campaign wing of dirtbag consultants even if she’d wanted to; instead, she mostly relied on advice of her family, including Maya Harris, her younger sister and campaign chairwoman during the 2020 primaries, who was a policy advisor to Hillary Clinton in 2016 but highly sadly inexperienced in shivving a political opponent.
However, Harris can’t be fully exonerated. Even if her advisors very reasonably concluded that dirty tricks wouldn’t work against Trump because there’s no way to further destroy his reputation, at least in a way that would matter to his supporters, they still had a multitude of viable options to steal the election, from ballot stuffing to voter suppression schemes. Her campaign’s abdication on that score was a gift-wrapped present to Trump, whose campaign operatives hit the ground running with dirty tricks in 2016 never took their collective foot off the pedal during the other two presidential campaigns he’s run in over the following eight years.
“Unfinished Business.” Depending on how that’s interpreted, it could be alarming. In fact, however that’s interpreted it’s highly alarming. Jason Miller’s Twitter profile.
(*) Important legal disclaimer: Some of the dirty tricks allegedly conducted by the Trump campaign team in the following section actually took place. Others are products of the author's imagination, yet no less plausible than the bloody murder spree Biden staffer Ron Klain committed four years ago that was detailed above.
The two primary public faces of Trump’s 2024 presidential run were co-campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who are well known consultants who I’ve heard less than flattering things about, but – if nothing else – are more discreet than the majority of highly regarded sleaze merchants, flimflam artists, criminals, race-baiters, lunatics, sociopaths and other assorted riffraff who’ve been diligently at work promoting the former president’s just successfully concluded bid to return to the White House. A short list, which barely scratches the surface, includes:
Senior Advisor Alex Bruesewitz, co-founder and CEO of X Strategies, who refused to reveal his clients or answer any questions about his involvement in the Stop the Steal movement that slithered into existence after Trump’s 2020 defeat to Biden during his deposition to the House Committee that investigated the January 6 riot at the US Capitol by citing the Fifth Amendment. Bruesewitz reportedly had a key role in arranging the October 27 appearance at Madison Square Garden of comedian Tony Heathcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” and told similar jokes about Blacks, Arabs, and Jews.
Senior Advisor Jason Miller, one of Team Trump’s leading moral paragons who when working on the 2016 campaign conducted an extramarital affair with fellow staffer AJ Delgado, initially lied about it when she reported it to senior officials before subsequently acknowledging the truth and in a related case also came clean about his private hobby of hiring prostitutes and paying to be jerked off at massage parlors. That was entirely consistent with the conduct of a roll call of scandal-plagued GOP clients Miller has worked for in the past, including, to name a single example, Jack Ryan of Illinois, who had to withdraw from his race for a Senate seat in 2004 against Obama when it was revealed his ex-wife “alleged in divorce papers he’d taken her to ‘bizarre clubs’ where he tried to get her to have sex with him in front of strangers,” in the words of a story published last month by Columbia Journalism Review.
Campaign Spokesman Steven Cheung, who’s been working for Trump since 2016 when he left his job as communications director with Ultimate Fighting Championship in Las Vegas to join that year’s campaign and got a job at the White House where he was one of a quartet of staffers referred to as "the killers" by Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon because, in the latter’s words, they were particularly "innovative and action oriented,” as was reported by Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng in their book Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington. “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House,” Cheung said last year after the former-and-now-future president labeled his political foes "vermin."
Arthur Schwartz, a corporate and political consultant who has no official role with the campaign, but is close to the Trump family, in particular Donald Trump, Jr., who he has worked for as an advisor. Schwartz, who onc source I spoke to compared unfavorably to Roger Stone, saying the latter “is cartoon evil but Schwartz is the real thing,” specializes in character assassination. During Trump’s first term, he was part of a network of conservative operatives that compiled files with personal and professional information on an enemies list of journalists in order to discredit and discourage critical reporting on the White House.
Meanwhile, a collection of bagmen, freaks, and conspiracy theorists have moved in an out of the 2024 campaign’s orbit: Laura Loomer, the openly racist, GOP activist who is such an obvious candidate for being forcible interned at a home for the criminally insane that some of Trump’s saner advisors, in comparison to Loomer anyway, had to stage an intervention with him to beg him to keep her out of his entourage; Elon Musk, who offered straight up bribes to voters in the key swing state of Pennsylvania via a $1 million-a-day giveaway contest sponsored by his pro-Trump America PAC; and Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, who raised the specter of birtherism Blumenthal rolled out against Obama by asking specious questions about the birthplace of Harris, who was born in Oakland, California to a Jamaican father and Indian mother.
Laura Loomer’s Twitter profile. Her current pinned tweet reads, “Western European Christian culture defined the American ethos for over two centuries. Yet, in just two decades, people of European descent are now projected to become a minority in the United States.”
Meanwhile, Trump and his crew of schemers aggressively marketed the idea that the only way he could lose the election was if the Democrats cheated, even though his campaign worked feverishly to overturn, by hook and crook, his loss to Biden in 2020 and threatened to reject the results again if he lost this time. Meanwhile, Harris already conceded defeat today, just as Hillary Clinton did in 2016 despite whining nonstop about why it wasn’t her fault she lost for approximately 2,920 days since.
The primary reason Harris lost the election was that after getting off to a strong start, including mopping the floor with Trump during their only debate, she quickly reverted to form as an abysmal campaigner and terrible communicator. She was also hampered because Biden was deeply unpopular – Trump’s favorability ratings weren’t great either, but he benefited by not being the incumbent bum voters had the choice to throw out, which Harris became after replacing Biden – was too timid to reject his stance on Gaza and other unpopular positions, even simply to lie about how she planned to if she became president, and last but not least because the Democratic Party is an abysmal collective trash heap of cowardly politicians devoid of anything but the most vapid ideas with little appeal to most voters.
The race was close until the end, though, and there’s no question that ceding the dirty tricks turf to Trump hurt her campaign, though I can’t confirm more than a few specific examples with legal safety as I only have a single source in most cases. So for now, I’ll only point to the fraudulent charges about Democrats planning to steal the vote and various racist narratives such as the birtherism bullshit, because those narratives don’t just arise by magic, but are coordinated by advisors and surrogates, and pushed out with the help of friendly hacks and influencers.
Then there were rumors that spread a few days ago that Harris was pulling ads from North Carolina because she’d given up on winning the state, which were clearly manufactured by Trump operatives. Then there was a matter first revealed by Brian Tyler Cohen on Twitter two days ago, which showed MAGA shill Ryan Fournier made up phony polls results that showed Trump had bigger leads in swing states than the actual numbers on Planet Earth show, emailed them to himself to suggest he’s received them from a legitimate campaign consultant, and sent them out as the real them, apparently as a means of encouraging GOP supporters to go to the polls in a type of reverse voter suppression scheme.
However, just as Klain might have been guilty of heinous crimes when he worked for Biden in 2020, might Loomer have buried the bodies of multiple Harris staffers she murdered and ingested during a Jeffrey Dahmer-inspired cannibal ritual beneath the floorboards of her living room? I’d say it’s far more likely and if if wasn’t something quite as lurid, there’s almost zero chance Loomer, who worship Trump, didn’t spread bogus stories to her 1.3 million Twitter followers to promote his candidacy.
Conclusion: This essay clearly shows dirty tricks are here to stay, and will only become more sophisticated and effective as new doors are opened with AI and other technological advances. If the Democratic Party hopes to remain a viable and respected force in US politics going forward, its leaders must demonstrate a renewed commitment to political scumbaggery, dream up the most ruthless possible tactics they can concoct, and unleash them at every available opportunity in order to destroy their opponents political hopes and ability to make a living in the future.