Tom Jones

Tom Jones is a political opposition researcher who leads a “dark money” group called the “American Accountability Foundation” (AAF), an offshoot of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). AAF was launched in December 2020 to conduct “government oversight and research.” AAF and CPI are both Project 2025 Advisory Board members. Shortly after launch, AAF made news after its staffers “infiltrated a Zoom training for congressional staffers on earmarks — and leaked video” of that session.

In Jones’ own words, AAF is targeting both high-profile and lower-level Biden nominees, for example looking at whether an executive branch appointee’s “deputy has worked on leftist issues in the past and is out of step and has deep roots within the progressive movement…”

In May 2024, AAF received the Heritage Foundation’s $100,000 Innovation Prize. As reported by the AP, with this grant, AAF is “digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security” and has the goal “to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda.” This work puts Jones in position to aid the Trump administration’s purge of civil servants under the Schedule F plan.

As Charlie Pierce of Esquire summarized: AAF has hosted a website called “bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies. And [it] hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little entrenched support.”

His targets have included Sarah Bloom Raskin, a nominee for the Federal Reserve, David Chipmann to helm the ATF, Gigi Sohn to be a commissioner on the FCC (whom he outrageously claimed was “soft on sex trafficking”), all of whom withdrew their nominations after incessant attacks. His highest profile target, however, has been a Supreme Court nominee, though he failed to take her nomination down. During Senate hearings on President Joe Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, it was Jones/AAF that put forward the claim that she had supported lighter sentences for those convicted of possessing vile child pornography, a debunked allegation. Jones’ sleazy attempted character assassination became a major line of attack against her confirmation after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) endorsed AFF’s assertion of a claimed pattern.

AAF has also focused activities on bolstering the Republican congressional agenda, such as pushing culture war claims about “woke capitalism.” In July 2023, for example, AAF published a report claiming that ESG-related shareholder resolutions at public companies are “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives and business groups,” even though such resolutions by those who own stock in publicly traded companies are focused on encouraging corporations to protect our environment, such as by helping to mitigate the climate changes that are under way. AAF is also the group that filed a complaint about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Tax the Rich” dress she wore to the Met Gala in 2021.

In 2022, AAF had total revenue of nearly $890,000, which included funding from Stephen Miller’s “American First Legal Foundation,” which is listed as a “related tax-exempt organization,” along with “Citizens for Renewing America.” AAF has also received at least $545,100 from CPI from 2021 to 2022, which also includes for-profit entities: Compass Legal Group, Compass Professional. CPI is a vehicle for Donald Trump loyalists that was launched in 2017 by Jim DeMint and it is led by Mark Meadows, Trump’s last Chief of Staff. CPI’s annual revenue skyrocketed to more than $45.7 million in 2021. Notably, in November 2023, Politico reported that AAF was being audited by the IRS after reporting it spent nothing on lobbying despite its seemingly extensive activities on the Hill.

The New Yorker’s investigative journalist Jane Mayer reported: “Records show that over the years [Jones] has worked for several of the most conservative Republicans to have served in the Senate, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an interview… he replied, ‘Ms. Meyers [sic] … Go pound sand.’”