Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  But if this campaign had a new meanness to it, Bakke’s rise in the GOP didn’t just reflect it; he’d helped create it.

  Bakke had a derisive edge, a gaudy, nasty quality, like a gangster’s shiny suit. He was clearly brilliant, a poor kid who had risen to become a Supreme Court clerk and a U.S. senator. But something about him resented where his accomplishments had taken him, and he reveled in being angry about it. He was openly disliked by most of his Senate colleagues, who thought him selfish and disloyal.

  But those same qualities seemed to make him wildly popular with many people in the country—and not just the ones liberals might guess. Bakke’s cutting edge delighted supporters across a spectrum of American conservatives. He was the proud, rough-boy champion of outsiderness—of chain restaurants, gas-guzzling cars, guns, country music, cheesy Americana culture, and mean in-your-face tweets that mocked Democrats as stupid and clueless. Liberals hated Bakke more than any other Republican. He made fun of their urbanity, their snobby food, their multiculturalism, the elite colleges they strove to get their kids into, their concern for refugees suffering in countries far away, and their lack of compassion for those suffering here at home. Richard Bakke thought liberals fools, deluded, overprivileged dupes who imagined they wanted to make the world better but were just feathering their own establishment nest—and didn’t even recognize they were frauds.

  His critique had won over a good deal of the intellectual right, if not his fellow senators. “He is the rare politician who does not pander,” a conservative legal scholar Cary Holden had written in The Week Ahead magazine. “He has a vision of how America should change and how government should be dramatically rolled back. And while that vision has an underlying element of anger to it, it is distinctly honest, one not masked by glossy pictures of a false future. He frightens liberals because he is telling the truth.”

  Yet Dick Bakke had been caught off guard in the last six months by the rise of Jeff Scott. The boy hero governor of Michigan had genuine charisma Bakke lacked, and a smile that no amount of work by the California cosmetic surgeon who had fixed the flagging skin under Bakke’s chin could do anything to match. Scott did not possess anything like Dick Bakke’s legal mind or his grasp of policy. But Scott had channeled Bakke’s vision and added something Bakke could not: charm.

  Scott could never have risen, Alabama thought, had Bakke not come first. But he might take Bakkeism higher than its author ever could.

  Alabama had no inkling of the offer Bakke had made the day before to Wendy Upton. But the fear Alabama sensed Bakke might be feeling was exactly why Bakke had reached out to her. If she could be persuaded to join him, Bakke hoped it might just be enough to help him keep the nomination from Scott. Though he had doubts about whether he could trust her.

  They sat, and Aggie Tucker told stories about Biernat’s and the chaotic scenes of celebrities angling for tables—rap artists and their arm-candy girlfriends at one booth, a famous televangelist and his wife and children at the next, two booths over from the Dallas quarterback sitting with Jon Bon Jovi. They ordered, and Bakke nodded to Alabama.

  THE KID WAS IN FRONT of the window now. He could see Bakke. He just needed to get a little closer. He pulled his pack off his back and felt inside for the weight. There it was. Okay, keep walking.

  “What needs to happen for you tomorrow night, Senator?” Alabama asked.

  “In the debate?” Bakke said. He glanced at Tucker. “You can’t win a debate with eight people in it.”

  “You can lose one,” Alabama said.

  Bakke cackled a little too loudly.

  He was nervous, Alabama thought. That was rare. The man was usually all sly bluster.

  “I want to ask you something serious,” Alabama said. “Off the record. Okay? Something I don’t understand.”

  Bakke hesitated. He didn’t like to enter uncharted territory with reporters—territory that might include serious questions and possibly honest answers.

  “That fight last night at the Pena rally. Why would anyone who supports you go pick a fight wearing one of your T-shirts?”

  Bakke, bald since he was twenty-five and now fifty-two, had aged into his looks. He raised his eyebrows above his hawk nose and looked at his friend Tucker.

  “Aggie and I were just wondering the same thing,” he said.

  “Maybe the man really loves you and is dumber than a rock,” Alabama said.

  “Or maybe,” Tucker interrupted, “someone is screwing with us.”

  That was what Alabama was wondering, too: whether something more complicated, more nefarious was going on. The campaign was ugly enough already. But he didn’t want to let Bakke know he wondering about that. Not yet.

  “You know, Senator, you campaign mean,” Alabama said. “Your rhetoric. It’s angry. It’s divisive. And maybe you reap what you sow.”

  Bakke smiled dryly and shook his head. “The country is angry. It’s feeling mean. For a reason. I didn’t start this.”

  Then the window shattered, Bakke ducked in fear, and a brick flew over them and landed on the table.

  Nine

  Offices of Rena, Brooks & Associates

  Washington, D.C

  Rena made two calls from the car outside Senator Burke’s house. One was to the office. “Assemble everyone,” he told Ellen Wiley. “All hands on deck.”

  The other was to an army friend named Samantha Reese, who now did occasional security work but lived in Colorado. “How soon could you get to Washington? I may need you.”

  Then he and Brooks drove back over the Chain Bridge, onto Canal Road, and cut through the backstreets of Georgetown to get to the office near Dupont Circle. When they arrived, the full investigative team of the consulting and security firm of Rena, Brooks & Associates was gathered in the attic conference room on the fourth floor of their town house offices at 1820 Jefferson Place.

  The attic had a dark wood floor that had sloped with age, and the ceilings were lower than current code would allow. But Rena loved the old townhouse, partly because Teddy Roosevelt had once lived there. And for all its age and limitations, the attic had been modernized with state-of-the-art electronic insulation and various other security additions. Anyone, government or private, attempting to eavesdrop from an adjoining building, or even a drone, would find their signals jammed. It was, in the parlance only a few thousand Americans needed to ever think about, “a hard-target environment with high-surveillance integrity.”

  The seven investigators assembled around the conference table had not so much applied for their jobs as they had been collected over the years by Peter and Randi, first as friends and then as colleagues. When each was finally asked to join the small band, their coming seemed inevitable. There was Hallie Jobe, the quietly disciplined daughter of a black Baptist minister from Alabama, whom Rena had befriended in the army. Jobe later joined the FBI and earned a law degree at night before joining her old mentor Rena here. There was Walt Smolonsky, the lumbering, bearlike former D.C. and Capitol cop, whom Rena had befriended when Smolo moved from police officer to Senate investigator. There was Maureen Conner, the meticulous former prosecutor and chief of staff to Senator Fred Blaylish of Vermont, for whom Brooks had been a Senate investigator. There was Jonathan Robinson, the young, aggressive former political consultant who specialized in crisis communications.

  The firm was particularly well known for its digital skills. That department was handled by just two people. One was Arvid Lupsa, the Romanian immigrant in his twenties who looked like a 1960s beatnik. The other was Lupsa’s boss and Randi Brooks’s great friend, Ellen Wiley, the grandmotherly woman who had once been chief librarian at the New York Times Washington bureau. With her reading glasses dangling from a gold chain around her neck and dressed in craft show outfits inspired by the aesthetics of the 1970s, Wiley was one of the most cunning experts in using the Web anywhere in the world. Though over sixty, she was a master hacker and a legend among computer forensics experts a third her age.

  There
was also a new person in the attic now, a young Chinese American woman named Ang Liu, whom Brooks had taken under her wing after meeting her at a conference in Palo Alto last year. Liu, a computer science and law school graduate of Stanford, had become disillusioned by what she saw as the insistent utopian naïveté and male-dominated arrogance of Silicon Valley in general and the digital platform company where she worked in particular. Money had become a kind of poison, Liu had told Brooks one evening during the conference. “This is the dangerous delusion of the valley, that if I get rich by selling a company or idea, I’m making the world better. Sometimes breaking shit just means you’ve broken something.”

  “You need to work for me,” Brooks told her. And now she was here.

  In the year and a half since the last midterm elections, the final interval of the Nash presidency, much had changed in Washington, a festering anger that the presidential campaign was now revealing like an untended infection. Washington had been swept up by accusations of a cover-up over the terrorist incident in Africa that resulted in the death of four Americans. Senator Richard Bakke, now running for president, had been a leading member of the congressional committee set up to investigate the incident.

  Bakke’s aggressiveness on the Oosay committee had backfired.

  But he had recouped by leading a revolt against Senate Majority Leader Susan Stroud that cast her out of her leadership role.

  In the House, the conservative Common Sense faction had risen up as well. The Speaker of the House had recently announced he would retire in November.

  All that only increased the pressure on anyone willing to risk bipartisan compromise, people like Burke and Upton. And there was even more pressure from the Shut It Down movement, the seemingly leaderless push, born in social media, for a constitutional convention to rethink how government was organized and elected.

  Brooks glanced at the faces in the room, then began. She explained the calls Sedaka and Upton had received—the two “feelers” about the vice presidency and then the threat delivered thirdhand from a donor to Upton’s Arizona office.

  “Our assignment is to find out who is blackmailing Upton and with what,” she said. “And we have almost no time to do it. Two or three days.”

  Maureen Conner made a grim face.

  Rena rose. “There are really two investigations,” he said. He moved in the direction of two easels he had asked be set up with flip charts.

  “One is to discover the blackmailer: Who hates Upton and wants to stop her? They could be a political enemy, not a personal one, someone with a grudge, a policy disagreement, someone from another wing of the party.”

  He wrote “Possible Blackmailers” on the top of the first flip chart.

  “The second inquiry is to find what in Upton’s life could be used to destroy her.”

  He wrote “Blackmail Event” on the second easel.

  Rena examined the faces in the room. “The two things may be entirely separate. The blackmailer may have nothing to do with the incident they are trying to blackmail her with. They may have just stumbled over it, looking for anything to use against her.”

  He and Brooks had worked this out on the drive back from Burke’s.

  He stood by the first easel with the words “Possible Blackmailers” written on it and flipped over the page. On the next sheet he drew four columns down and then labeled them at the top. Each one listed the kinds of enemies he and Brooks thought Upton might have. The first column was labeled “Rival Candidates,” the second “Political Organizations,” the third “Donors,” and the fourth “Other Enemies.”

  “This is an initial list of who might have motive to stop Upton becoming vice president,” Rena said. “It could be a campaign that doesn’t want her joining with Traynor or Bakke. It could be one of their PACs, or some rich donor acting on his or her own. Or it could be some other enemy who has heard about these offers.”

  Walt Smolonsky said, “Hell, that could be anybody except Traynor or Bakke.”

  Jon Robinson said, “It could even be one of them, if they heard about the other one.”

  “The second investigation,” Rena said, focusing them again, “is what she is being blackmailed about.”

  He moved to the second easel, labeled “Blackmail Event.” Rena flipped the page and wrote at the top “Key Moments in Wendy Upton’s Life.”

  “We need to try to isolate what Wendy Upton might have done that could be used against her.”

  Rena looked at his partner. And she took the cue to keep the group on task: “Here is how we will work,” she said. “We’ll start with a flash biography.”

  A “flash biography” meant they would write, probably overnight, as thorough a client history as they could produce in a few hours. To do so, Rena and Brooks would break up their staff into two-person teams and assign each team to research and write a different chapter of the target’s life.

  Then they would reassemble—probably early tomorrow morning—to discuss what they’d found and plot their path ahead. Rena and Brooks believed the first hours of an investigation were the most valuable. You assembled information more quickly at the beginning and with a more open mind than you would have later. You saw the pieces of the puzzle come together into patterns, the picture forming quickly, and you also saw the gaps. Later, when you had been staring at the puzzle longer, you often saw less of the big picture because you were looking too closely. So it was critical in these first hours, they believed, to catalog in writing any questions, suspicions, and important holes they noticed.

  Rena added: “Tonight, we look for both the blackmailer and blackmail event. As you go through Upton’s life, look for moments where she was susceptible to some temptation or mistake, where she might have made choices that could be used against her. At the same time, also look for moments where she might have made an enemy.”

  Rena waited for expressions of understanding.

  “The blackmailer is likely a person with power and money. They may not know Upton. They could be purchasing the story to use against her. It could be from someone peddling it. More likely, they’ve hired private investigators who have dug it out, probably through interviews. If it existed in public documents, it would be known already.”

  “You think she’s lying when she says she has no idea what it could be?” asked Smolonsky.

  “I don’t know,” Rena answered coolly. “She is hard to read.”

  “She has to have a book on herself,” Robinson said. “We getting our hands on that?”

  A “book” was the compilation of opposition research, or “oppo,” that Upton’s own people would have put together about her for past campaigns. That was the first rule of opposition research. You do it initially on yourself, not on your opponent.

  Once a politician today reached a certain level, say statewide or certainly federal, they would hire someone to compile a book on themselves.

  Usually the book you did on yourself was produced internally, often by a consultant or a law firm paid by the campaign directly. Often the first oppo book was produced by young lawyers based entirely on public documents. The book identified anything vulnerable about you that could be depicted in a bad light. You would use the book, as your campaign progressed, to develop rapid responses to the attacks you anticipated would be coming at you.

  Rena, Brooks & Associates had written many “books.” But they had never done so for a political campaign, holding to a vow Rena and Brooks had made to each other when they joined together—he the Republican and she the Democrat—not to do campaign work. But they had assembled books on prospective CEOs, draft choices, judges, university presidents, even a Supreme Court nominee. This new assignment pushed the limits of that vow. But they had told themselves in the car that they were protecting someone from blackmail, someone they both liked. Whatever their private thoughts, neither had raised an objection to taking the job that Rena’s mentor, Llewellyn Burke, had asked them to.

  The second step in any campaign was to develop the book
on your opponent. Often, those oppo books would be written by outside consultants or law firms. Upton had run twice for Senate and twice for the House. Certainly during her Senate campaigns, in a state as big as Arizona, her opponents, at least her Democratic opponents, would have produced opposition books on her. Could Rena and Brooks get their hands on one of these? That might be difficult, but not impossible.

  “We’ve asked for the book her campaign has produced about her,” Brooks said. “Hopefully we’ll get that this afternoon.”

  “Who was her consultant?”

  “Jones & Hurd.”

  They were regional consultants and ad makers in the Southwest. They knew Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. They hadn’t done national races. Only a few consultants had. Their books, in other words, might be less thorough than a firm that had gone through the cauldron of a presidential campaign.

  “Who ran against her?” Robinson asked. He didn’t mean what candidate. He was asking what political consulting firm had run the campaign against her.

  “Foley-Thomas,” Brooks said. “We’re on that, too.”

  Ang Liu raised her hand as if she were in school. The lawyer from Silicon Valley was new to politics.

  “Is this sort of thing common? This blackmail and opposition research. What do you call it, oppo?”

  Brooks looked at Maureen Conner. “What do you think?”

  Maureen Conner had worked in politics for more than thirty years.

  “When I started,” she said, “all this oppo—threatening someone with opposition research into their private life—was rare. You checked someone’s record, of course. But hiring private investigators or worn-out journalists to dig into their opponents’ backgrounds? That happened only occasionally—usually only if you had a tip.” She paused to see if Liu understood. “And oppo like that had risks back then,” she continued. “If you were discovered, it could really backfire on you. People were shocked. It was considered dirty politics. And, frankly, it was too expensive—unless you knew there was something specific you were looking for. You had to hire people. It could take months. It happened. But it wasn’t the norm.”