Dark Money Huge Payback

Now, an anonymously funded right-wing group is airing an ad aimed at the yet-to-be-picked nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer. The group alleges that liberal dark-money interests will guide President Biden’s choice. The music is ominous, the central claim false, and the hypocrisy thick.

In nature, some creatures develop ingenious defenses. The squid, for instance, can squirt a jet of ink into the water to create a confusing distraction. On Americans’ airwaves right now, this ad is the dark-money equivalent of squid ink.

The ad, launched by the same right-wing donor interests that captured our Supreme Court under President Donald Trump, is an effort to distract from their own dark-money operation. Their accusations of dark-money corruption are a bizarre reimagining of the very strategy that they, themselves, hatched and executed.

The group running the ad, the Judicial Crisis Network, isn’t even real. Legally speaking, the “Judicial Crisis Network” is one of several “fictitious names” created under a provision of Virginia corporations law that mask another organization called the Concord Fund. The Concord Fund and its array sit within a network of conservative groups that often share addresses, donors and staff; it was even traced to the same hallway in the same building as the Federalist Society — the gateway for conservative lawyers seeking nominations to the federal judiciary.