At some point in the next 100 days, something awful and potentially career-ending is going to come out about Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick. It might involve a sexual scandal.
The accusations will not be true, but that won’t matter. Vance is now in the crosshairs of Vice President Kamala Harris, the undisputed queen of opposition research and the Democrats’ potential next pick to head the 2024 ticket. Harris is about to drop a payload on Vance. And while Trump has survived everything they’ve launched at him, Vance is untested.
Opposition research is when a political opponent digs up dirt from your past and weaponizes it against you — or, in Harris’s case, makes stuff up.
Even Democrats and liberal journalists are turned off by Harris’s oppo machine. On Aug. 7, 2020, high-ranking Democratic operative David Axelrod expressed alarm at the amount of opposition research being used in the competition to become President Joe Biden’s running mate. He was also shocked by the amount being spent by Harris. “I can’t remember any VP selection process where so much oppo research has been dumped,” Axelrod tweeted. “If I were @JoeBiden, looking for a good and loyal partner, that should be a source of concern.”
Reporter Ryan Grim of the Intercept replied: “Axelrod is being polite. But if you check @KamalaHarris FEC records, she spent more on oppo research than anybody has ever seen. When called on it, her camp said it was ‘self research’ but nobody believed it.”
I myself was once in Kamala’s crosshairs. Two days before the Sept. 27, 2018, hearing featuring Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexual assault while in high school, Harris’s staffers turned over to Senate investigators a letter from a “Jane Doe” in Oceanside, California.
From the Senate Judiciary Committee:
“On September 25, 2018, staffers for Senator Harris, a Committee member, referred an undated handwritten letter to Committee investigators that her California office had received signed under the alias ‘Jane Doe’ from Oceanside, California. The letter contained highly graphic sexual-assault accusations against Judge Kavanaugh. The anonymous accuser alleged that Justice Kavanaugh and a friend had raped her ‘several times each’ in the backseat of a car. In addition to being from an anonymous accuser, the letter listed no return address, failed to provide any timeframe, and failed to provide any location — beyond an automobile — in which these alleged incidents took place.”
A woman named Judy Munro-Leighton then claimed to be “Jane Doe.” She later recanted, admitting she did not know Kavanaugh and had pulled the stunt because she “just wanted to get attention.”
As I recount in my book The Devil’s Triangle, I was a central figure who the Left tried to destroy during the Kavanaugh nomination. They tried to entangle my life with Kavanaugh’s, using our high school friendship as a means to destroy him. For the last several years, friends and colleagues have kept telling me to move on and stop reliving the trauma that Harris inflicted upon me.
I’m happy to. Yet at the same time, my warnings to my fellow conservatives keep going unheeded, leaving them vulnerable. Six years ago, I told an old friend that the Democrats were going to start doing opposition research on the Supreme Court justices and that conservatives needed to prepare themselves. Furthermore, I argued that the lives of the justices may even be in danger, considering the salacious and hateful garbage that the media and the Left churn up.
My friend laughed in my face. You’re just reliving your own trauma, she said. Nothing that ridiculous will happen. Then, a would-be assassin showed up at Kavanaugh’s house, and oppo stories about other conservative justices, including Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, began bubbling up in the press.
I often feel like Captain Kirk in that Star Trek movie warning the crew that we are flying into a trap, fighting to be heard by those who think he’s crazy as the danger approaches.
Again, the accusations Harris will launch against her political opponents don’t even have to be true — and the vice president will gladly defy her own party to launch her attacks.
At one point in September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford’s own lawyers told her to drop her claims. The late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sent her a letter telling her to stop the false accusation. “Christine, our final recommendation is that you don’t go forward,” Ford’s own lawyers told her in September 2018 as Kavanaugh approached the finish line.
According to her “memoir,” Ford then threw a tantrum: “I was also devastated that I’d spent the last two months trying to do this the right way and now everything had turned on a dime. … How is this possible? What about all the work we’ve done? I don’t understand why you are saying this now.”
“The case is closed,” Feinstein wrote. “We can’t let you stand in front of an oncoming train,” Ford’s own lawyers said. Ford “hung up the phone, crying in tears of rage and frustration.”
Then Kamala Harris arrived. Harris heard about Feinstein’s letter and that Feinstein had closed the case, and Harris raised holy hell. The game was supposed to be over, Ford writes in her book, “but other forces were at work that decided otherwise. I started getting calls and emails from journalists.”
One person Harris has praised is the father of opposition research, a man named Averell “Ace” Smith. Smith, the son of former San Francisco District Attorney Arlo Smith, grew up in San Francisco. Smith has worked for Richard Daley, Ann Richards, Barbara Boxer, Howard Dean, Dianne Feinstein, the Clintons — and Kamala Harris. At a book party in July 2018, just weeks after Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, Harris appeared with Smith, calling him “the father of oppo research.”
So J.D. Vance is about to get hit. I do tend to relive the nightmare of 2018 too much, but the criticism will be worth it if conservatives, like Captain Kirk, know that we are blindly flying into an enemy trap.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.