Whatever happened to John Burton? In the fall of 2018, Burton, then 38, was highly visible in the media. Bloomberg Businessweek did a lengthy profile on this former J.P. Morgan investment banker turned “Obama opposition researcher” who had “built an anti-Republican attack machine.” It was announced that Burton would be publishing his first book: The Black Arts: How Opposition Researchers Weaponized the Truth and Changed Politics Forever. Burton was hot, a young political activist about to go supernova.

Then Burton vanished from public life. The publication of The Black Arts was delayed, and then delayed again. Burton’s last tweet was on December 20, 2018. Calls and emails to Hatchette, Burton’s publisher, were unanswered, as were attempts to reach him through Democratic operatives like Mark Penn and David Axelrod. The guy seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.

It is a very odd development for a person who was described in this way by Bloomberg:

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 returning his country to the path he’d believed it was on when he worked for Barack Obama’s campaign a decade ago.

Burton would be a great person to talk to about Kamala Harris’s nuclear weapon: opposition research. In early July, I argued that Harris, who had no qualms about advancing a false rape charge during the 2018 Justice Brett Kavanaugh hearings, wasn’t above deploying oppo against Joe Biden. Since then, Biden has been effectively deposed by Harris, so we are justified in wondering if that’s exactly what happened.

On Aug. 7, 2020, Democratic strategist David Axelrod expressed dismay 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.”

Of course, all politicians use opposition research, and have done for decades. Yet Harris seems to have brought it to a new low—exploring how to use not just uncomfortable facts about an opponent’s past, but outright lies. Kamala Harris is a prime driver of this descent to the bottom. Oppo may be an old game, but has it crossed the line into criminality?

Remember, Michael Avenatti, the “creepy porn lawyer” as Tucker Carlson dubbed him? He was the guy who represented Stormy Daniels and was deeply enmeshed in the calumny against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Since then, Avenatti has been incarcerated for extortion and will be in prison until 2035. Avenatti did not just unearth embarrassing things about people from their high school years. Avenatti lied, threatened, and extorted people. Turns out, Avenatti is also a protégé of the infamous advisor to Kamala Harris, Averall “Ace” Smith.

Smith, the son of former San Francisco District Attorney Arlo Smith, grew up in San Francisco and has worked for the country’s most prominent Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Texas Governor Ann Richards, California Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, Vermont Governor Howard Dean, the Clintons, and … Kamala Harris. At a book party in July 2018 for Smith, just weeks after Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court but before the accusations that would turn the nomination into a circus, Harris appeared with Smith, calling him “the godfather of oppo research.”

Two days before the Sept. 27, 2018, hearing featuring Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of committing sexual assault against her while they were both in high school, Harris’s staffers turned over to Senate investigators a letter from one “Jane Doe” of 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 this “Jane Doe.” She later recanted, admitting she did not know Kavanaugh and had pulled the stunt because she “just wanted to get attention.”

At one point in September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford’s own lawyers told her to drop her claims. “Christine, our final recommendation is that you don’t go forward,” Ford’s lawyers told her in September 2018, as Kavanaugh approached the finish line. “We can’t let you stand in front of an oncoming train,” her lawyers said. According to Ford’s account of the incident in her book, she “hung up the phone, crying in tears of rage and frustration.”

The late Sen. Feinstein sent Ford a letter telling her to stop advancing the false accusation. “The case is closed,” Feinstein wrote.

Harris, who was California’s other senator at the time, heard about Feinstein’s letter and her suggestion that the case was closed. In response, Harris raised holy hell. The game was supposed to be over, Ford wrote, “but other forces were at work that decided otherwise. I started getting calls and emails from journalists.” (Full disclosure: I was a central figure in the Kavanaugh war and wrote a book about it, The Devil’s Triangle.)

Now it appears that Ace Smith is tapped for a significant role in Harris’s campaign and, potentially, her administration.

Again, it would be instructive to talk to John Burton and gather his insights into all these connections, if he would share them. But Burton is nowhere to be found.

One thing Burton emphasizes in his work repeatedly (something that played out in the Kavanaugh case) is that opposition research is meant to be deployed at the last minute to destabilize the target.

As the 2018 Businessweek article explained:

Oppo works best when its target is unaware, so Burton’s project, dubbed Citizen Strong, has operated by stealth, waiting until just now to publicly declare its existence as a 501(c)4 ‘dark money’ group with three affiliated political action committees. 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.

Then this:

Burton laughs as he shares more highlights of what his researchers turned up, tidbits he’s not yet willing to put on the record. Sometimes, it’s best to spring the trap at the last moment. ‘This is what gets found when you have an army who can read every line of every document,’ he says.

So where is John Burton? Is he working behind the scenes now with Harris? Nobody knows. His tactics, however, are about to be front and center in the 2024 election. Will they work against the one opponent, Donald Trump, who seems to be impervious to this tactic? The odds are we are about to find out.