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One evening in September, Tanya, a consultant at a big New
York irm, was on her laptop scrutinizing public records and
reading posts on VKontakte, the Russian social network,
involving Representative Dana Rohrabacher, the Republican
congressman from California. She was looking for dirt. On the
other side of the country, Genevieve, a science teacher in San
Diego, was doing the same. So was Vadim, an insurance rep-
resentative in Phoenix. And they weren’t alone.
Tanya, Genevieve, and Vadim have never met and probably
never will. But they have two things in common: They’re mem-
bers of the so-called Resistance, working to oust Republicans.
And they’re being directed by a former J.P. Morgan banker
named John Burton, who’s become a ield general of sorts
in the liberal opposition—and soon, he hopes, the cause of
consternation and, ultimately, unemployment for dozens of
Republican lawmakers in races from Maine to California.
Before he was a banker, Burton, 38, was a practitioner of
the dark art of opposition research, or “oppo”—digging up
and surreptitiously deploying damaging information about
politicians. As it did for so many people, Donald Trump’s
election turned Burton’s life upside down. He quit his job,
joined a Resistance group, and devoted himself to return-
ing his country to the path he’d believed it was on when he
worked for Barack Obama’s campaign a decade ago.
Some Resisters march or knock on doors; others raise
money or run for oice. Burton felt his gifts lay elsewhere:
namely, in tearing down political opponents. Over the past
year, backed by mysterious donors, he’s organized what may
be the most audacious grass-roots project in the age of Trump.
Burton has amassed an army of 16,000 amateur sleuths who,
with professional guidance, have spent months ferreting out
damaging material on scores of vulnerable Republicans in
Congress and state legislatures. Now he’s ready to unleash it
just in time for the midterms. As he told me, “We’re going to
do with real information and real Americans what the Russians
tried to do with fake information and fake Americans.”
Oppo works best when its target is unaware, so Burton’s
project, dubbed Citizen Strong, has operated by stealth, wait-
ing until just now to publicly declare its existence as a 501(c)4
“dark money” group with three ailiated political action com-
mittees. Even this step doesn’t reveal much. Dark money
donors can give unlimited sums anonymously, and Burton
won’t identify his benefactors or even the three operatives
he’s hired to help run the group.
But you needn’t know the source of his funding to see the
potential of his army to upend close races. Rohrabacher pres-
ents a ripe target. The Orange County congressman has been so
friendly to Moscow, in 2012 the FBI warned that Russian spies
were trying to recruit him. Rohrabacher is also one of the least
wealthy members of Congress, but he’s developed a pair of odd
and remunerative sidelines: He invested in an obscure biotech
company that shot up 100-fold in value; and he’s sold screen-
plays with names like
The French Doctoress
for tens of thou-
sands of dollars, including one to a man later sent to prison
for fraud. (None has been made into a movie.) In a statement,
a Rohrabacher campaign spokesman says, “It’s October and
Democratic super PACs are lush with cash. Every dirt digger
on the left has a istful of contracts and a bag of tricks and treats
they are shopping to reporters. Most of it is old news, and the
questions have been asked and answered long ago.”
Examining these windfalls for potential fraud or conlict
of interest would usually require a professional investigator
such as Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 agent who produced
the infamous dossier on Trump. Most campaigns can’t aford
that. But the main requirements for being a successful oppo
researcher—time, patience, and dogged determination—were
qualities Burton saw in abundance among his Resistance com-
patriots. Many were skilled professionals whose expertise he
thought he could weaponize for politics if they were willing to
spend their free time doing things like digging through social
media accounts and newspaper clippings or hunting down
property records and arrest ilings at the local courthouse.
When he put out a call for help on Rohrabacher, he soon had
at his disposal a forensic accountant, a team of corporate law-
yers, and a luent Russian speaker—Tanya, the New York con-
sultant. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s all hands on deck,” she
says. “If someone has a special ability, they should be using it
to help take back the House.” (She and other volunteers I spoke
to for this story asked that their full names not be used to pro-
tect their identities and prevent problems at work.)
With his Citizen Strong partners, all veteran researchers,
Burton has spent the year choosing his targets. In February he
decided to focus on districts that leaned slightly right—ones like
Rohrabacher’s that haven’t been competitive but would be if a
Democratic wave emerged. That bet looks prescient. A recent
New York Times
poll showed Rohrabacher, a 15-term incum-
bent, tied with his Democratic challenger. Control of Congress
will hinge on whether Rohrabacher and other endangered
Republicans can withstand a midterm wave. Citizen Strong’s
October surprises will make survival that much harder.
Burton has a trove of anti-Republican material. The art of
oppo lies in culling and distributing that kind of information
to tell a particular story—a negative story—that will tarnish
the incumbent and weaken his or her support. Sometimes
researchers will quietly slip it to reporters, hoping it will yield
a story and gain the imprimatur of a nonpartisan news outlet.
Other times, oppo can be the basis of an ad campaign or used
to build a website voters and the media can scrutinize—a bit
like WikiLeaks. (Burton says none of his material is obtained
through hacking or other illegal means.) With the midterms
looming, he’s begun disseminating his “citizen oppo” in three
Senate races, 22 House races, and 133 state legislative races
across 13 states. He’s hoping these last-minute attacks will
help push many of these races into the Democratic column,
lipping control of the House—and possibly even the Senate—
as well as state legislatures that will play a critical role in
redrawing congressional lines in 2020, a process that will
shape national politics for the next decade.
While the story of the Resistance tends to focus on the
positive—the revival of civic activism—Burton has the hard-bitten
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October 8, 2018