We're with Nobody

WE'RE WITH NOBODY

Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics

Alan Huffman
Michael Rejebian

Dedication

In our jobs, we're with nobody.
This book is for everybody.

Contents

Chapter 1
Alan

I
t's a balmy summer night in the rural countryside near the North Carolina–South Carolina line. This guy Joey, or Jamie—I've forgotten his name—sits in the dark on the deck of his trailer, silhouetted against the flickering light of a TV that's blaring an old episode of
Married with Children
through the open door. I don't know him and he doesn't introduce himself or even get up from his chair when I approach, but I'm sure I'm in the right place because he doesn't seem surprised to see me. He just says, “Hey, how's it going?” like we're old friends. I pull up a plastic lawn chair and get out my notebook. As my eyes adjust, I notice he's got a shotgun cradled across his lap.

Until now we've spoken only by phone and our conversations have been brief and a bit cryptic, but he starts talking a blue streak before I've even pulled my pen from my pocket, and soon I'm blindly scrawling notes and don't have a chance to ask about the gun. Excited as he is, he's speaking so softly that he occasionally gets drowned out by the obnoxious laugh track on TV, like he's afraid of being overheard, though we're alone in the middle of nowhere. I'm tempted to ask him to turn down the volume because it's hard not to listen to Al Bundy's drivel, but I'm hesitant to interrupt.

I watch the red dot of his cigarette arc between the arm of his chair and his lips as he holds forth about a feared local businessman who's running for Congress. The red dot flares momentarily; he thumps his spent cigarette off the deck, then lights another. In the flick of his Bic I catch a glimpse of his face. He looks weary for his relatively young age. It appears that life has not been easy for him. I notice these things only in passing, because I'm not here to get to know the guy. I'm here to find out about the congressional candidate, and he supposedly has the goods.

My partner, Michael, and I do this for a living. We're opposition political researchers, which means we're hired by campaigns to compile potentially damning profiles of candidates. Our lives during the campaign season are a coast-to-coast series of behind-the-scenes interviews and paper chase sorties—clandestine missions that revolve around facts, truths, lies, surprises and dead ends, all bundled together with strands of strange situations, odd confrontations and the unique social scenery of the American landscape. One day we're in New Orleans, staring cross-eyed at court records in the hazy morning aftermath of a late night on Bourbon Street. The next we're in New York City, resolutely standing on the last nerve of a records clerk who frowns as she looks at the request I've just handed her.

The New York City clerk episode was typical of the way we approach our job and how our work is frequently perceived. In that case, the records clerk asked, “So, who did you say you're with?” knowing full well I hadn't said. For some reason, Michael and I live for these small moments, when someone, knowingly or not, throws the gauntlet down.

“I'm not with anybody,” I replied, knowing that if the clerk had blinked, the questioning would end. But we were in New York City, where institutional blinking is rare.

“What do you mean, you're not with anybody?” she persisted.

“Well, technically, I work with him,” I said, tilting my head toward Michael, who was leaning against a wall, texting someone and half listening to a conversation he'd heard a hundred times before. He glanced up just long enough to give her a little half-assed smile and a wave that actually looked more like he was dismissing her. She frowned again and turned back to me.

“So why do you want this?” she asked.

I just stared at her. All I was asking for were some straightforward tax documents, public records deposited in her office for anyone—for all—to see.

“I mean, what are you going to do with it?”

“It doesn't really matter, does it?” I said. Because it didn't, and she knew it. This is America. What we were looking for is part of the public record, and why we wanted it was nobody's business but our own.

Though Michael and I are, technically, with someone, in that we provide the information we compile to someone who, in most cases, is associated with the Democratic Party, that's largely immaterial to the completion of our work, and it's irrelevant to anyone else. We're essentially free agents, and how we go about doing our work is up to us. Our personal and professional ideologies are reflected only in who gets our reports. We want our guys to get elected, and achieving that involves more than uncovering damaging information about their opponents; it means doing it to our side, too. It's not only about discovering what's impolitic; it's about finding the truth.

Sometimes we focus on private clients, such as a business, but our forte is researching candidates for elective office, using documented records to flush them out into the open. People call it dirt digging, but the dirt is just one by-product of discovering what makes a candidate tick. The search also requires us to navigate the larger issues of the day—immigration, the death penalty, the outsourcing of collectible Snow Baby factories—at very close range. You think of politics as taking place in the seats of power—county courthouses; city halls; state capitals; Washington, DC—but important scenes also unfold at less obvious locales, such as mobile homes on lonely gravel roads where someone who lives on the fringes deigns to tell what he has seen and heard.

We've been doing this for the better part of two decades now, gathering political intel during a weird, extended road trip that no one else would ever take, through America's main streets and back roads. We're guided, more or less, by the conviction that no one is fit to lead unless proven otherwise. Though negative campaigning is often perceived as a bane of politics, we like to think of ourselves as seekers of the truth. In our view, documenting that truth is more crucial than ever, when today's news is prone to distortion, willful ignorance and lies; when untruths go viral in the blogosphere overnight and even conventional media sources give airtime and print space to erroneous claims and rumors; when the headline on the lead story on Yahoo! News about a descendant's account of a ship officer's experiences reads:
TITANIC RELATIVE REVEALS “TRUTH” ABOUT SINKING
. “Truth” is a word that should never be qualified. It's like pregnancy; it's yes or no. It is possible to inculcate the public with untruths or distortions, but as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly once observed, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.”

Considering how blithely the truth is often regarded today, Michael and I sometimes feel like relics of a simpler era, gathering our old-timey facts while everyone else obsesses over imaginary death panels and whether the president is a Muslim—a bit of “news” that Obama, regardless of what you think of him, correctly characterized as part of “a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly.” Our primary aim, aside from earning a living, is to help guide the political debate through the real, documented world, where talking points are derived from actual facts rather than from voices emanating from a planet far, far away. We do listen to those voices now and then—you never know where clues will be found—but our work is utterly dependent on locating the documentation.

Unfortunately, that's not always the thread our own campaigns are looking for. Because we usually profile both our candidates and their opponents, to ensure that our side knows how we could be attacked and what we're up against, we get to see everyone naked, for better or worse. Sometimes our guys look good going in and turn out bad; in one case we found that our young, articulate candidate had numerous arrests in his record, including a DUI and throwing a pipe bomb at a high school homecoming parade float. And sometimes the opponent looks bad going in and turns out good. We don't pull any punches in the assessments we ultimately provide to our campaigns. We present our findings, based on the records, then abdicate control and move on.

The guy with the shotgun falls into the category of a deep background source because he professes only to have leads. He has no documentation to support his allegations, which is fine with me. We mostly work under the radar, for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that the truth can be painfully shy. Leads such as these are sometimes dead ends, but they're just as likely to point us in the right direction, toward the documented truth.

Until now our research of the local candidate, a successful businessman, has been shaping up fairly routinely, but the guy with the gun used to work for him and claims that while on the job he uncovered evidence of an arson fire that garnered the man a hefty insurance settlement. According to this guy, the businessman had paid someone to burn his business for the insurance money. He describes how the business was losing money, then says, “Now, watch this . . .”—a phrase he uses frequently, though after the first false alarm I quit expecting there to be something to actually watch. It's just a conversational tic. He's trying to frame things for me, to keep me focused.

I notice that each time headlights appear on the gravel road that curves past his darkened trailer the guy sits up straight, positions his hands on the gun and watches the car or truck crunch slowly past, then picks up where he left off. Who knows if any of what he's telling me is true, but when he alleges that the candidate's social sphere is riddled with criminals, I take the opportunity to ask about the gun. He answers, almost apologetically, that he's afraid someone might try to kill him for talking to me. OK, I say, go on. I'm thinking that the presence of the gun, the anxious car-monitoring, the chain smoking and the obliviousness to the blaring of
Married with Children
could be signs of psychological disarray, but they could also mean he's on to something. It's a question Michael and I often face: Is the source knowledgeable or, well . . . crazy? The answer usually lies in the documentation, if there is any. We've learned to go with the flow even when the flow gets a little strange, because meaningful things happen out in left field, too. It pays to keep an open mind.

As newspaper reporters back in the eighties and nineties, as opposition researchers and as generally curious people, we've come across our share of misfits over the years: people obsessed with this or that conspiracy theory, or who relate some highly original fantasy that is, essentially, a nimbus of hoarded neurotrash—like the man who kept insisting that Michael come over to his house to see the pony that President Reagan had left in his yard, or the woman who believed the federal government was monitoring her movements by strategically placing a dwarf to spy on her in every restaurant she entered. Who but the federal government could afford the payroll for so many dwarves? Sometimes it's best to follow the lead wherever it takes you, at least until you know whether you're chasing the truth or Reagan's pony.

We operate on two basic premises: Only documented facts truly matter, and everyone knows something we don't know. The guys in the asylum in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
may have been clinically insane but they knew what Nurse Ratched was up to, and because no one listened to them her crimes went undetected. Everyone has a piece of the truth, and even if it's lodged alongside imaginary ponies or contradicts a piece that someone else holds, it's possible to approximate the whole, to arrive at verisimilitude, by carefully assembling the disjointed fragments into your own mosaic. If that sounds like an entirely unscientific method for proving facts, it is. But it occasionally does lead to documentation. It's like a trial. One witness says this, one witness says that, and eventually the jury picks and chooses what to believe and makes its proclamation. The verdict is afterward officially accepted as the truth. The defendant ceases to be an accused murderer. He's either acquitted or he is a murderer. It's there in print, in the local newspaper, in the courthouse records. It's documented.

There are exceptions. People get exonerated through DNA. Official records contain errors. Paper trails are intentionally hidden or even obliterated. But documented records are the closest society comes to establishing the truth, and if a source's story isn't true it almost always comes apart once you start asking how to nail the paperwork down. Without documentation, or even evidence of document tampering, our investigations go nowhere. We're oppo guys, not the FBI. As such, we're essentially a hybrid species—part investigator, part critic, part paid informant.

From our perspective, much of what passes for political debate today is arrested at the trailer-porch conversation stage. It's interesting, as far as it takes you. If it takes you only to an Internet echo chamber, it's useless for our purposes. Unfortunately, in today's political environment, the documented facts are often left backstage, where they gather dust; while half-truths and untruths—always enthusiastic, able performers—enjoy the limelight. This is nothing new. As Mark Twain observed long ago, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” But it does seem more pervasive now, when there are more and better delivery mechanisms and people seem less enthralled with honest accountability.

For all these reasons, I give the guy with the gun credit for at least having ideas about where the supposedly incriminating records can be found. He says he's willing to talk about it now because he's disturbed by the prospect of the candidate gaining significant public power. He wants people to know what this guy's really like, even if that means putting himself at risk.

The candidate, who projects the image of a familiar mainstream political persona—a camera-ready, outwardly upright, successful businessman who speaks to the values of the district's conservative voters—is, according to this guy, actually a ruthless and vindictive power monger. He concedes that some of the putative crimes would be impossible to prove, which has the effect of making his allegations more credible to me. Though none of this has come out in the media and no charges have been filed, I take his claims seriously if only because he seems to grasp the importance of proving things. Not everyone does.