Opposition research (often referred to as oppo) is:

1. The term used to classify and describe efforts of supporters or paid consultants of a political candidate to legally investigate the biographical, legal or criminal, medical, educational, financial, public and private administrative and or voting records of the opposing candidate, as well as prior media coverage. The research is usually conducted in the time period between announcement of intent to run and the actual election; however political parties maintain long-term databases that can cover several decades. The practice is both a tactical maneuver and a cost-saving measure.
2. Opposition research may also refer to illegal or unethical means of gathering potentially damaging information on candidates, such as accessing credit reports, wiretapping, theft of files, hacking computer files, and interviewing ex-spouses.
3. "Vulnerability studies" occur in the 'prebuttal' phase of campaign development, when a candidate's political consultants will amass files of potentially damaging information on their own clients, to prepare pre-emptive strategies for rebuttal at a later date.
4. Research conducted, at the request of an incumbent office-holder, often by the same staff who conducted campaign research, against political opponents or dissenters. The Hatch Act of 1939
   Hatch Act of 1939
   The Hatch Act of 1939 is a United States federal law whose main provision is to prohibit federal employees in the executive branch of the federal government, except the President and the Vice President, from engaging in partisan political activity...
   
    prohibits the use of public office for partisan political advocacy, but often the same staff who once researched private information about opponents are placed in positions of proximity to confidential government files.
5. Research on the activities of opponents conducted on behalf of advocacy groups, political action committees, churches, labor unions, management of corporations, or sports teams, as well as private individuals. Opposition researchers may work exclusively for one candidate or many, one group, or many groups that share ideologies and financial interests, or the highest bidder. Opposition research has also played a role in confirmation of nominees to the Supreme Court, and other presidential appointments.
6. Demographic research into the habits, behavior, and histories of voters likely to cast ballots for opponents, as a tool for voter suppression
   Voter suppression
   Voter suppression is a strategy to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing people from exercising their right to vote. It is distinguished from political campaigning in that campaigning attempts to change likely voting behavior by changing the opinions of potential voters...
   
   .

Origins and history

• In the 1st century B.C., Cicero
  Cicero
  Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
  
   is said to have gathered information that was damaging to opponents and using it in attacks against them. He accused one political opponent, Cataline, of murdering one wife to make room for another. He attacked Mark Antony in speeches known as the Philippics, eventually prompting Antony to chop off his head and right hand and display them at the Roman Forum.
• Opposition research also has its origins in military planning, as evident in such ancient texts as The Art of War
  The Art of War
  The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise that is attributed to Sun Tzu , a high ranking military general and strategist during the late Spring and Autumn period...
  
  , published in the 5th century B.C. by Sun Tzu
  Sun Tzu
  Sun Wu , style name Changqing , better known as Sun Tzu or Sunzi , was an ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher who is traditionally believed, and who is most likely, to have authored The Art of War, an influential ancient Chinese book on military strategy...
  
  . This manual for warriors describes the necessity for understanding an opponent's weaknesses, for using spies, and for striking in moments of weakness.
• In 18th century England, opposition research took the form of scandalmongering pamphlet wars between the Whig and Tory parties. Writers such as Daniel Defoe
  Daniel Defoe
  Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
  
  , Jonathan Swift
  Jonathan Swift
  Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
  
  , and Henry Fielding
  Henry Fielding
  Henry Fielding was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones....
  
   participated, often writing under assumed names. This tradition of robust attack was replicated later in the American colonies, when writers such as Thomas Paine
  Thomas Paine
  Thomas "Tom" Paine was an English author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States...
  
   or Benjamin Franklin
  Benjamin Franklin
  Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...
  
   conducted opposition research and published their results.

• When Thomas Jefferson's
  Thomas Jefferson
  Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
  
   rival incumbent President John Adams
  John Adams
  John Adams was an American lawyer, statesman, diplomat and political theorist. A leading champion of independence in 1776, he was the second President of the United States...
  
   accused Jefferson of planning to burn all Bibles and legalize prostitution if elected president in 1800, Jefferson countered that Adams was endowed with a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman;" and if re-elected he would crown himself king; and was "mentally deranged." The author of the attacks was a pamphleteer named James Callender funded by Jefferson. Callender spent nine months in prison under the Sedition Act for libeling a sitting president; Jefferson pardoned him immediately after defeating Adams and taking office.

• The first appearance of the phrase "opposition research" in the New York Times occurred on December 17, 1971, in an article that describes the infiltration of the Edmund Muskie
  Edmund Muskie
  Edmund Sixtus "Ed" Muskie was an American politician from Rumford, Maine. He served as Governor of Maine from 1955 to 1959, as a member of the United States Senate from 1959 to 1980, and as Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter from 1980 to 1981...
  
   presidential campaign by a female Republican volunteer: "...an article appeared in a Washington newspaper describing the 'opposition research' program at Republican headquarters..."
• Opposition research became systematized in the 1970s when Ken Khachigian
  Ken Khachigian
  Kenneth L. Khachigian is an American campaign strategist, speechwriter, and attorney. He was a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and was chief speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan....
  
  , in the Nixon Administration suggested that the GOP keep files on individuals as insurance against future races, rather than "scramble" in an ad hoc fashion race by race.

Methods in the United States

Opposition research differs immensely depending on the size and funding of a campaign, the ethics of the candidate, and the era in which it is conducted. Information gathering can be classified into three main categories: open-source research enabled by the Freedom of Information Act, covert operations or "tradecraft

Tradecraft

Tradecraft is a general term that denotes a skill acquired through experience in a trade.The term is also used within the intelligence community as a collective word for the techniques used in modern espionage...

, " and maintenance of human systems of informants. Increasingly, data-mining of electronic records is used. Information is then stored for future use, and disseminated in a variety of ways. A local election sometimes has a staff member

Political campaign staff

Political campaign staff are the people who formulate and implement the strategy needed to win an election. Many people have made careers out of working full-time for campaigns and groups that support them, but in other campaigns much of the staff might be unpaid volunteers...

 dedicated to reading through all of the opponents' public statements and their voting records; others initiate whisper campaigns that employ techniques of disinformation

Disinformation

Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. For this reason, it is synonymous with and sometimes called black propaganda. It is an act of deception and false statements to convince someone of untruth...

 or "black ops" to deliberately mislead the public by advancing a pre-determined "narrative" that will present the opponent in a negative light.

Another technique is to infiltrate the opposition's operations and position a paid informant there. "Gray propaganda" techniques are often used to release damaging information to news media outlets without its source being identified properly, a technique inherited from disinformation tactics employed by intelligence agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services

Office of Strategic Services

The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...

 during World War II. Yet another technique is to position information or personnel within media outlets. Often the information is video footage gathered in campaign-funded "tracker programs" wherein videographers use candidates' itineraries to track them and record as many remarks as possible, since anything they say can and will be used against them, as was the cased in former Senator George Allen's "macaca moment." "Far from being detached observers, reporters constantly call oppo staffs looking for tidbits and sometimes trading information," wrote three reporters, Matthew Cooper

Matthew Cooper (American journalist)

Matthew Cooper is a former reporter for Time who, along with New York Times reporter Judith Miller was held in contempt of court and threatened with imprisonment for refusing to testify before the Grand Jury regarding the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation. He currently works as the managing...

, Gloria Borger

Gloria Borger

Gloria Anne Borger is a political pundit, American journalist, and columnist. Borger is presently a contributing editor and columnist for US News and World Report magazine and a Senior Political Analyst at CNN. She was formerly the National Political Correspondent for CBS News...

, and Michael Barone

Michael Barone

Michael Barone may refer to:*Michael Barone , US political expert and conservative commentator*J. Michael Barone , host of the American Public Media programs Pipedreams, The New Releases, and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra...

, for U.S. News & World Report in 1992.

File-sharing between operatives of political parties is quite common. In the 2008 presidential election, a dossier of opposition research against Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin

Sarah Louise Palin is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice-presidency.She was...

 was posted in its entirety on a political blog site, Politico.com. The file was compiled by the staff of her opponent in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial race, Tony Knowles

Tony Knowles (politician)

Anthony Carroll Knowles is an American Democratic politician and businessman who served as the seventh Governor of Alaska from December 1994 to December 2002. Barred from seeking a third consecutive term as governor in 2002, he ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2004 and again for governor in...

.

"Oppo dumps" are used by political campaigns to systemtatically supply files of damaging information to press outlets, including matters of the public record, video footage from party archives and private collections, as well as private intelligence gathered by operatives. Many prime time television and radio news commentaries rely on this supply of party-generated material because it is free, and therefore more cost-effective than paying investigative reporters.

Political strategies for campaigns often include coaching on preventive measures to avoid providing too much information in public disclosure procedures that can provide ammunition for opponents' opposition researchers, particularly in itemized expenditure reports. "To eliminate some of these potential issues your campaign should take the time to review the wording of your campaign finance reports," advises one strategist writing for The Hill

The Hill (newspaper)

The Hill, a subsidiary of News Communications Inc., is a newspaper published in Washington, D.C. since 1994.Its first editor was Martin Tolchin, a veteran correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times....

:

Instead of reporting that you spent $3,000 on a 'background check and public records search on Congressman X,' list the expenditure as 'issue research' or simply 'research'... One bonus financial filing tip: warn your candidate about spending campaign fund son fancy restaurants for 'strategy meetings.' Eating at Ruth's Chris or Morton's Steak House on your campaign's dime just looks bad. The press may poke a little fun at your candidate's expense; your donors may feel their donation in being misspent and may never give again.

Congressional and presidential opposition research is often conducted by or funded by a political party, lobbying group, political action committee

Political action committee

In the United States, a political action committee, or PAC, is the name commonly given to a private group, regardless of size, organized to elect political candidates or to advance the outcome of a political issue or legislation. Legally, what constitutes a "PAC" for purposes of regulation is a...

 (PAC), or a 527 group

527 group

A 527 organization or 527 group is a type of American tax-exempt organization named after "Section 527" of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code...

 that coalesces around a certain issue. In the U.S., both the Republican and Democratic parties employ full-time "Directors of Research" and maintain databases on opponents. In recent years the task of opposition research has been privatized in many areas. Full time companies with permanent staff specializing in media productions or "grassroots" operations have replaced volunteers and campaign officials. Political media consultants may also opt for astroturfing

Astroturfing

Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some...

 techniques, which simulate wide popular appeal for a candidate's platform.

Candidates and incumbents who benefit from opposition research often choose to remain uninformed about their campaign's operations and tactics, to insure plausible deniability

Plausible deniability

Plausible deniability is, at root, credible ability to deny a fact or allegation, or to deny previous knowledge of a fact. The term most often refers to the denial of blame in chains of command, where upper rungs quarantine the blame to the lower rungs, and the lower rungs are often inaccessible,...

 should criminal charges be brought against researchers.

In U.S. presidential elections

• Opponents of Andrew Jackson
  Andrew Jackson
  Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States . Based in frontier Tennessee, Jackson was a politician and army general who defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend , and the British at the Battle of New Orleans...
  
   in the 1824 and 1828 presidential elections unearthed his marriage records to imply that he was an adulterer
  Adultery
  Adultery is sexual infidelity to one's spouse, and is a form of extramarital sex. It originally referred only to sex between a woman who was married and a person other than her spouse. Even in cases of separation from one's spouse, an extramarital affair is still considered adultery.Adultery is...
  
   for marrying Rachel Robards before she was legally divorced from her first husband. Jackson had married her in 1791 on the strength of a statement from her husband that he had divorced her; Jackson had two wedding ceremonies, the not-recognizable one of 1791 and the legally corrective one of 1794. His political opponents used this information decades later against him, and he fought many duels over his wife's honor. Rachel Robards died before Jackson took office in his first term; he maintained that the stress of the opposition had killed her.

• In 1858, William Herndon
  William Herndon (lawyer)
  William Henry Herndon was the law partner and biographer of Abraham Lincoln.-Biography:Born in Greensburg, Kentucky, Herndon and his family moved to Illinois in 1820, and they settled in Springfield when he was five. Herndon attended Illinois College from 1836-1837. In 1840 he married Mary J....
  
  , the law partner of Abraham Lincoln
  Abraham Lincoln
  Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
  
  , did research in the Illinois State Library to collect "all the ammunition Mr. Lincoln saw fit to gather" to prepare for the run against Stephen A. Douglas
  Stephen A. Douglas
  Stephen Arnold Douglas was an American politician from the western state of Illinois, and was the Northern Democratic Party nominee for President in 1860. He lost to the Republican Party's candidate, Abraham Lincoln, whom he had defeated two years earlier in a Senate contest following a famed...
  
   in the 1860 presidential race.

• In preparation for Ronald Reagan’s debate with President Jimmy Carter
  Jimmy Carter
  James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
  
   in the presidential race 1980, Reagan’s campaign staff acquired under mysterious circumstances a 200-page briefing book, including information on Carter’s strategy, which staffers David Stockman
  David Stockman
  David Alan Stockman is a former U.S. politician and businessman, serving as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget ....
  
   and David Gergen
  David Gergen
  David Richmond Gergen is an American political consultant and former presidential advisor who served during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He is currently Director of the Center for Public Leadership and a professor of public service at Harvard Kennedy School. Gergen is...
  
   had used to prepare Reagan. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department investigated to see how the information had been obtained by the Reagan camp. Two law professors filed suit in federal district court in Washington to request a special investigation, based on the 1978 Ethics in Government Act. Carter’s staff believed the book to have been stolen from the White House, but the inquiry did not uncover any credible evidence that any law had been violated. The House of Representatives conducted its own investigation, and concluded in a 2,314 page report that the Reagan staff had two copies of the book, one from Reagan’s campaign director William J. Casey
  William J. Casey
  William Joseph Casey was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1981 to 1987. In this capacity he oversaw the entire United States Intelligence Community and personally directed the Central Intelligence Agency ....
  
  , future head of the Central Intelligence Agency. James A. Baker III attributed the acquisition of the documents to Casey, who claimed to know nothing about them, and an analysis of Carter campaign documents found in the “Afghanistan” files of Reagan aide David Gergen
  David Gergen
  David Richmond Gergen is an American political consultant and former presidential advisor who served during the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He is currently Director of the Center for Public Leadership and a professor of public service at Harvard Kennedy School. Gergen is...
  
   indicated they came from three White House offices: the National Security Council
  United States National Security Council
  The White House National Security Council in the United States is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national security advisors and Cabinet officials and is part of the Executive Office of the...
  
  , Vice President Walter Mondale
  Walter Mondale
  Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale is an American Democratic Party politician, who served as the 42nd Vice President of the United States , under President Jimmy Carter, and as a United States Senator for Minnesota...
  
   and Domestic Adviser Stuart Eizenstat. Many years afterward, Carter himself stated in a PBS interview that the book had been taken by columnist George Will
  George Will
  George Frederick Will is an American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winner best known for his conservative commentary on politics...
  
  , but Will denied it, calling Carter "a recidivist liar."

• Lee Atwater
  Lee Atwater
  Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican Party. He was an advisor of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.-Childhood and early life:...
  
   is considered to be the "father" of modern aggressive "oppo" techniques. Atwater honed his style working in his native South Carolina for Senator Strom Thurmond
  Strom Thurmond
  James Strom Thurmond was an American politician who served as a United States Senator. He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes...
  
   and to elect Congressman (later Governor) Carroll Campbell. From his posts on the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan
  Ronald Reagan
  Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
  
   and George H.W. Bush, Atwater encouraged and helped direct what was then the advanced oppo work of the Republican National Committee
  Republican National Committee
  The Republican National Committee is an American political committee that provides national leadership for the Republican Party of the United States. It is responsible for developing and promoting the Republican political platform, as well as coordinating fundraising and election strategy. It is...
  
   against Democrats Walter Mondale
  Walter Mondale
  Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale is an American Democratic Party politician, who served as the 42nd Vice President of the United States , under President Jimmy Carter, and as a United States Senator for Minnesota...
  
   and Michael Dukakis
  Michael Dukakis
  Michael Stanley Dukakis served as the 65th and 67th Governor of Massachusetts from 1975–1979 and from 1983–1991, and was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988. He was born to Greek immigrants in Brookline, Massachusetts, also the birthplace of John F. Kennedy, and was the longest serving...
  
  . During the 1988 presidential campaign, dozens of RNC researchers worked three shifts around the clock to feed the then-burgeoning 24-hour news cycle
  24-hour news cycle
  The 24-hour news cycle arrived with the advent of television channels dedicated to news, and brought about a much faster pace of news production with increased demand for stories that can be presented as news, as opposed to the day-by-day pace of the news cycle of printed daily newspapers...
  
  . The now-infamous “Willie Horton” TV ads crafted by Floyd Brown
  Floyd Brown
  Floyd Gregory Brown is an American author, speaker and media commentator. He is president of Excellentia Inc., a consulting company specializing in non-profit organizational strategy, development and marketing. Brown has also worked as a political consultant and conducted opposition research for...
  
   helped turn voters away from Dukakis and towards the Republican, although Atwater and Bush were protected by plausible deniability
  Plausible deniability
  Plausible deniability is, at root, credible ability to deny a fact or allegation, or to deny previous knowledge of a fact. The term most often refers to the denial of blame in chains of command, where upper rungs quarantine the blame to the lower rungs, and the lower rungs are often inaccessible,...
  
   because Brown's ads were independently funded and produced. Academic research into the Bush archives decades later revealed that a Bush staffer, Candice Strother, had released a dossier of information on Willie Horton to Elizabeth Fediay, of the non-profit group that contracted for the ad. (The Horton story had been completely public for an entire year, part of news coverage that won a Pulitzer Prize
  Pulitzer Prize
  The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
  
   for the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune newspaper.) Willie Horton
  Willie Horton
  William R. "Willie" Horton is an American convicted felon who, while serving a life sentence for murder, without the possibility of parole, was the beneficiary of a Massachusetts weekend furlough program...
  
   was an African-American convicted murderer released on a weekend furlough during Governor Dukakis’s tenure, who escaped and committed a brutal rape in Maryland, also stabbing his victim's husband. Atwater is also credited with originating "push polls" and "whisper campaigns" that use disinformation strategies to alienate voters from opponents. A biography of Atwater, quotes him as saying in an interview toward the end of his life that he regretted some of his less ethical techniques.

• In the 1992 presidential campaign, Republicans reported that they spent $6 million on a "state of the art (opposition research) war machine" to investigate Bill Clinton, who was running against George H. W. Bush
  George H. W. Bush
  George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
  
  . In the same election, the Clinton campaign paid more than $100,000 to a private investigator to look into allegations about Clinton's womanizing, investigating more than two dozen women.

• In the 2000 presidential election, longtime opposition researcher and Nixon loyalist Roger Stone
  Roger Stone
  Roger J. Stone, Jr. is an American political consultant and lobbyist who specializes in opposition research for the Republican National Committee in the United States....
  
   was recruited by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III to oversee the recount of the disputed Presidential election in Miami-Dade County in 2000. Stone is credited with organizing the street demonstrations and eventual shut-down of the recount in that pivotal county.

• In the 2004 presidential race, Chris Lehane
  Chris Lehane
  Christopher Stephen Lehane is an American political consultant and crisis communications expert who has served as a lawyer, spokesperson and expert in opposition research for the Clinton White House, Democratic candidates for public office and various business, Labor, entertainment and...
  
  , a Democratic opposition researcher attracted notoriety and built a reputation not for deploying his skills against Republican opponents, but for using them against other Democrats in the primary races. Working for retired Army general Wesley Clark, Lehane sought to establish a media "narrative" that Howard Dean was hypocritical and dishonest, based on surveys of his administrative archive as governor of Vermont.

• A protege of Atwater's, Karl Rove
  Karl Rove
  Karl Christian Rove was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to former President George W. Bush until Rove's resignation on August 31, 2007. He has headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives...
  
  , is considered to be the "architect" of George W. Bush's election to the governor's office in Texas, and to the presidency in 2000 and 2004. In the 2000 race, Rove is credited with masterminding the push poll that initiated the "John McCain
  John McCain
  John Sidney McCain III is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican nominee for president in the 2008 United States election....
  
   has a black love child" whisper campaign in South Carolina. Anonymous telephone pollsters, upon determining that a voter was pro-McCain, asked the question, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered a black child out of wedlock?" The question was not overt slander, but it prompted the president of Bob Jones University
  Bob Jones University
  Bob Jones University is a private, for-profit, non-denominational Protestant university in Greenville, South Carolina.The university was founded in 1927 by Bob Jones, Sr. , an evangelist and contemporary of Billy Sunday...
  
   to launch his own internet campaign against McCain, and succeeded in crippling the trust of voters McCain had attracted. The Bush camp knew, as the general public did not, that in reality, John McCain is the adoptive father of a dark-skinned Bangladeshi refugee who was rescued by his wife Cindi.

• In the 2008 presidential election, opposition researchers for Barack Obama unearthed the fact that John Edwards had paid $400. for haircuts at campaign expense, and supplied Politico's Ben Smith with the tip, according to a memoir later published by campaign manager David Plouffe. Though the Democratic National Committee
  Democratic National Committee
  The Democratic National Committee is the principal organization governing the United States Democratic Party on a day to day basis. While it is responsible for overseeing the process of writing a platform every four years, the DNC's central focus is on campaign and political activity in support...
  
   continues to fund a research department, after the 2008 presidential election, theNew York Times reported that "The legacy of the Democratic National Committee itself is hardly clear going forward. Mr. Obama effectively subsumed all the responsibilities in his campaign: fund-raising, voter turn-out and opposition research.

Opposition research by the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government

• Franklin Roosevelt Administration: In 1940, the White House accidentally taped a conversation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt
  Franklin D. Roosevelt
  Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
  
   instructing a lower level aide to disseminate a rumor about his opponent Wendell Willkie
  Wendell Willkie
  Wendell Lewis Willkie was a corporate lawyer in the United States and a dark horse who became the Republican Party nominee for the president in 1940. A member of the liberal wing of the GOP, he crusaded against those domestic policies of the New Deal that he thought were inefficient and...
  
   having an extramarital affair: "We can't have any of our principal speakers refer to it, but the people down the line can get it out."

• Johnson Administration: In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson
  Lyndon B. Johnson
  Lyndon Baines Johnson , often referred to as LBJ, was the 36th President of the United States after his service as the 37th Vice President of the United States...
  
   sent 30 FBI agents to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., to avert assassination attempts, and to monitor his political rival Robert Kennedy and civil rights activists. Johnson later also placed his Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater
  Barry Goldwater
  Barry Morris Goldwater was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election. An articulate and charismatic figure during the first half of the 1960s, he was known as "Mr...
  
  , under FBI surveillance, with a federal wiretap.

• Nixon Administration: During the Richard Nixon
  Richard Nixon
  Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
  
   administration, White House staffers compiled lists of names of political opponents, journalists who had criticized Nixon, and artists and actors (such as Jane Fonda
  Jane Fonda
  Jane Fonda is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model, and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou. She has won two Academy Awards and received several other movie awards and nominations during more than 50 years as an...
  
   and Paul Newman
  Paul Newman
  Paul Leonard Newman was an American actor, film director, entrepreneur, humanitarian, professional racing driver and auto racing enthusiast...
  
  ) who had dissented with Nixon policy, especially on the subject of Vietnam, with the intent of prompting Internal Revenue Service investigations. The full extent of Nixon's surveillance of private citizens solely on the basis of their dissent was not known until years after Nixon was forced to resign, as former staff members such as Charles Colson
  Charles Colson
  Charles Wendell "Chuck" Colson is a Christian leader, cultural commentator, and former Special Counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973....
  
   and John Dean
  John Dean
  John Wesley Dean III is an American lawyer who served as White House Counsel to United States President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. In this position, he became deeply involved in events leading up to the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent Watergate scandal cover-up...
  
   began to disclose details. Nixon's Enemies List
  Nixon's Enemies List
  Nixon’s Enemies List is the informal name of what started as a list of President of the United States Richard Nixon’s major political opponents compiled by Charles Colson, written by George T. Bell , and sent in memorandum form to John Dean on September 9, 1971...
  
   is the informal name of what started as a list of President Richard Nixon’s major political opponents compiled by Charles Colson, written by George T. Bell [1] (assistant to Colson, special counsel to the White House) and sent in memorandum form to John Dean on September 9, 1971. The list was part of a campaign officially known as “Opponents List” and “Political Enemies Project.” The official purpose, as described by the White House Counsel’s Office, was to “screw” Nixon’s political enemies, by means of tax audits from the IRS, and by manipulating “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.”

• Ford Administration: During the Gerald Ford
  Gerald Ford
  Gerald Rudolph "Jerry" Ford, Jr. was the 38th President of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977, and the 40th Vice President of the United States serving from 1973 to 1974...
  
   presidency, Deputy Assistant Dick Cheney
  Dick Cheney
  Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney served as the 46th Vice President of the United States , under George W. Bush....
  
   suggested in a now- infamous memo to Donald Rumsfeld
  Donald Rumsfeld
  Donald Henry Rumsfeld is an American politician and businessman. Rumsfeld served as the 13th Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford, and as the 21st Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the oldest person to...
  
   that the White House use the United States Justice Department to conduct opposition research and retaliate against political opponents and critical journalists such as Seymour Hersh
  Seymour Hersh
  Seymour Myron Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters...
  
   and the New York Times, arguing that the executive branch had the power to prosecute journalists as they saw fit, under the provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917
  Espionage Act of 1917
  The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. It was originally found in Title 50 of the U.S. Code but is now found under Title 18, Crime...
  
  .

• Reagan Administration: In 1984, during the Ronald Reagan
  Ronald Reagan
  Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
  
   presidency, the Republican National Committee
  Republican National Committee
  The Republican National Committee is an American political committee that provides national leadership for the Republican Party of the United States. It is responsible for developing and promoting the Republican political platform, as well as coordinating fundraising and election strategy. It is...
  
   formed The Opposition Research Group
  The Opposition Research Group
  The Opposition Research Group refers to the division within the Republican National Committee formed in 1984 with its own budget of $1.1 million, to create a master data bank of computerized voter research and opposition research...
  
  , with its own budget of $1.1 million. These staff amassed information on eight Democratic presidential candidates based on data from voting records, Congressional Record speeches, media clippings and transcripts, campaign materials, all of which was stored on a computer for easy access. In this way the Reagan team was able to track inconsistencies and attack them. This original data base evolved into a network that linked information gleaned by Republicans in all 50 states, creating a master data base accessible to high-ranking Republican staff, even aboard Air Force One
  Air Force One
  Air Force One is the official air traffic control call sign of any United States Air Force aircraft carrying the President of the United States. In common parlance the term refers to those Air Force aircraft whose primary mission is to transport the president; however, any U.S. Air Force aircraft...
  
  . Though this RNC database was accessible to both the Reagan White House and campaign team, no evidence has surfaced that U.S. federal dollars funded The Opposition Research Group
  The Opposition Research Group
  The Opposition Research Group refers to the division within the Republican National Committee formed in 1984 with its own budget of $1.1 million, to create a master data bank of computerized voter research and opposition research...
  
   or its efforts.

• Clinton Administration: During the Bill Clinton
  Bill Clinton
  William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
  
   administration, the "Filegate" scandal erupted when White House staffers said to be acting on the directions of First Lady Hillary Clinton improperly accessed 500 FBI files compiled for security checks of Reagan and Bush staffers in previous administrations. Craig Livingstone, said to be hired by Mrs. Clinton with dubious credentials, resigned amid public outcry. In testimony under oath during the Kenneth Starr
  Kenneth Starr
  Kenneth Winston "Ken" Starr is an American lawyer and educational administrator who has also been a federal judge. He is best known for his investigation of figures during the Clinton administration....
  
   special prosecutor's investigation, Mrs. Clinton stated that she had neither hired Livingstone nor improperly perused the files.

• George W. Bush Administration: Two former opposition researchers for the RNC appointed to Justice Department posts, Timothy Griffin
  Timothy Griffin
  John Timothy Griffin is the U.S. Representative for . He is a member of the Republican Party. He was a United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas from December 2006 to June 2007, appointed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.-Early life and education:Griffin was born in...
  
   and Monica Goodling
  Monica Goodling
  Monica Marie Goodling is a former United States government lawyer and political appointee in the George W. Bush administration who became known in 2007 in the midst of a political controversy surrounding the firings of several United States Attorneys...
  
  , were implicated in efforts to use data collected on Democratic-appointed federal attorneys as ground for dismissal. See Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy
  Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy
  The dismissal of U.S. Attorneys controversy was initiated by the unprecedented midterm dismissal of seven United States Attorneys on December 7, 2006 by the George W. Bush administration's Department of Justice. Congressional investigations focused on whether the Department of Justice and the White...
  
  . See also Karl Rove
  Karl Rove
  Karl Christian Rove was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to former President George W. Bush until Rove's resignation on August 31, 2007. He has headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives...
  
  . Also during this administration, Counterintelligence Field Activity
  Counterintelligence Field Activity
  Counterintelligence Field Activity was a United States Department of Defense agency whose size and budget were classified. The CIFA was created by a directive from the Secretary of Defense on February 19, 2002...
  
   (CIFA), an intelligence gathering arm of the Pentagon
  The Pentagon
  The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the U.S. military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself.Designed by the American architect...
  
   was disbanded in 2008, after investigations into the bribery activities directed at Duke Cunningham
  Duke Cunningham
  Randall Harold Cunningham , usually known as Randy or Duke, is United States Navy veteran, convicted felon, and former Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from California's 50th Congressional District from 1991 to 2005.Cunningham resigned from the House on November 28,...
  
   revealed that the U.S. government kept a sizeable database of information about 126 domestic peace activist groups, including Quakers, about 1,500 "suspicious incidents" including peace demonstrations outside armed forces recruiter offices, even though the groups posed no specified threat to national security. The program was known as Talon. About two years elapsed between the program's disbanding and the Post report. The Washington Post quoted an unnamed "official" as saying,"On the surface, it looks like things in the database that were etermined not to be viable threats were never deleted but should have been," the official said. "You can also make the argument that these things should never have been put in the database in the first place until they were confirmed as threats."

• Barack Obama Administration: In February 2009, Shauna Daly, a former opposition researcher for the Democratic National Committee was appointed as a researcher for the White House's Office of Legal Counsel. Daly was Barack Obama
  Barack Obama
  Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
  
  's deputy research director during the presidential campaign, spent much of the cycle rebutting viral online attacks on Obama's character and biography under the rubric of "Stop the Smears." Shortly thereafter, amid speculations that she would be conducting research against political opponents, she was reassigned as Research Director to the DNC. Politico.com reported on February 27, 2009 that "the counsel's office -- which doesn't face the sort of rapid-response demands that were common in the late Clinton years -- doesn't plan to fill the research post." The American Spectator
  The American Spectator
  The American Spectator is a conservative U.S. monthly magazine covering news and politics, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and published by the non-profit American Spectator Foundation. From its founding in 1967 until the late 1980s, the small-circulation magazine featured the writings of authors...
  
  reported on its "Washington Prowler" blog that Daly was posted in the White House Counsel's Office for "about a month," and thus had access to "reams of Bush administration documents related to such things as the firing s of U.S. Attorney, the use and internal debate over the USA PATRIOT Act
  USA PATRIOT Act
  The USA PATRIOT Act is an Act of the U.S. Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001...
  
  , FISA and the Scooter Libby and Karl Rove
  Karl Rove
  Karl Christian Rove was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to former President George W. Bush until Rove's resignation on August 31, 2007. He has headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives...
  
   investigations. The "Prowler" quoted "a DNC staffer" as saying, "She realized that she could do more with all the material she saw outside of the building than inside where she'd be bound by the rules and legalities of the White House Counsel's Office. Now she isn't. She's good at what she does; her time at the White House means we've got a mother load (sic) of material that will have Republicans scrambling. At least that's what we hope."

Opposition research and the U.S. Supreme Court

• In 1916, after President Woodrow Wilson
  Woodrow Wilson
  Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
  
   nominated Louis Brandeis
  Louis Brandeis
  Louis Dembitz Brandeis ; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939.He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents who raised him in a secular mode...
  
   for the Supreme Court, "concerned" citizens seeking to block his confirmation offered information that Brandeis was a "radical Zionist," even though he was not a practicing Jew. Brandeis aggressively outmaneuvered his detractors by mounting his own opposition research efforts, including a carefully constructed chart that exposed the social and financial connections of the group, mostly from Boston's Back Bay, and including Harvard president Lawrence Lowell, as well as a group headed by former President William Howard Taft
  William Howard Taft
  William Howard Taft was the 27th President of the United States and later the tenth Chief Justice of the United States...
  
   and a host of American Bar Association
  American Bar Association
  The American Bar Association , founded August 21, 1878, is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. The ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of academic standards for law schools, and the formulation...
  
   past presidents. Brandeis sent the chart to Walter Lippman at the New Republic
  The New Republic
  The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
  
  who penned an editorial condemning "the most homogeneous, self-centered, and self-complacent community in the United States." Brandeis was confirmed after four months of hearings, in a Senate vote of 47-22.

• Ronald Reagan
  Ronald Reagan
  Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
  
   nominated Judge Robert Bork
  Robert Bork
  Robert Heron Bork is an American legal scholar who has advocated the judicial philosophy of originalism. Bork formerly served as Solicitor General, Acting Attorney General, and judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit...
  
   for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, prompting a Senate floor speech from Democratic Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy
  Ted Kennedy
  Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy was a United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. Serving almost 47 years, he was the second most senior member of the Senate when he died and is the fourth-longest-serving senator in United States history...
  
  , which later became known as the "Robert Bork's America" speech:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is -- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

Kennedy's speech prompted a rapid-response opposition research effort from Democrats, but the White House waited two and a half months to respond. The Senate Judiciary Committee, under the direction of Delaware senator and presidential hopeful Joseph Biden, commissioned a report in response to the materials Reagan's staff had released in support of Bork's nomination. Prepared by a panel of lawyers, including two Duke University law professors, the 78-page became known as "The Biden Report." The report detailed Bork's record, and analyzed the pattern of his rulings, and deeming him to be a conservative "activist" rather than an impartial jurist. Ultimately, Bork's embattled nomination failed, and Anthony Kennedy (no relation to Ted) was later confirmed to fill the position. The fierce research-based opposition to Bork's nomination attracted significant media attention, even though a Gallup Poll on the eve of the confirmation vote showed that very few Americans could name the nominee in question, much less recall his rulings. A new verb was later coined; "to bork" a candidate or nominee by mounting such voluminous research and vocal opposition that the person in question would be forced to withdraw.

• After President George W. Bush
  George W. Bush
  George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
  
   nominated Harriet Miers
  Harriet Miers
  Harriet Ellan Miers is an American lawyer and former White House Counsel. In 2005, she was nominated by President George W. Bush to be an Associate Justice of the U.S...
  
   to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Boston Globe reported that Republican conservative advocacy groups were conducting opposition research against her: "Groups are circulating lists of questions they want members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Miers at her confirmation hearings. The activists' thinly veiled hope is that Miers will reveal ignorance of the law and give senators a reason to oppose her." Miers later withdrew her name from consideration for the court.

• On July 7, 2005, soon after the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
  Sandra Day O'Connor
  Sandra Day O'Connor is an American jurist who was the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States. She served as an Associate Justice from 1981 until her retirement from the Court in 2006. O'Connor was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981...
  
  , the Democratic National Committee
  Democratic National Committee
  The Democratic National Committee is the principal organization governing the United States Democratic Party on a day to day basis. While it is responsible for overseeing the process of writing a platform every four years, the DNC's central focus is on campaign and political activity in support...
  
   gathered and ciruclated information on the "anti-civil rights" and "anti-immigrant" rulings of Samuel A. Alito, Jr., by then nominated by President George W. Bush
  George W. Bush
  George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
  
   to replace her. Upon inspection, the documents were revealed to have been amended by Devorah Adler
  Devorah Adler
  Devorah Adler is a political consultant and opposition research specialist for the Democratic National Committee in the United States. A former Assistant Director for Health Policy during the Bill Clinton presidency, Adler later served as Director of Research for the Democratic National Committee...
  
  , research director for the DNC. Alito's "record" had been pointedly altered to present him in a negative light. While the incident was not unusual, it received publicity in prominent places because it drew attention to the "meta-data" that is often unwittingly stored in documents that are altered and forwarded electronically.

• On May 2, 2009, after Supreme Court Justice David Souter
  David Souter
  David Hackett Souter is a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from 1990 until his retirement on June 29, 2009. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J...
  
   announced his intent to retire from the court, the New York Times reported that Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, had noted that conservatives were "focusing opposition research efforts on 17 women, whom they have divided into two tiers based on their perceived chances."

Opposition research conducted by U.S. states

• See Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission
  Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission
  The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a state agency directed by the governor of Mississippi that existed from 1956 to 1977, also known as the Sov-Com...
  
  .
• Seven aides to members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives
  Pennsylvania House of Representatives
  The Pennsylvania House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Pennsylvania General Assembly, the legislature of the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. There are 203 members, elected for two year terms from single member districts....
  
   pleaded guilty on January 7, 2010, to illegal use of state resources for campaign activities, including opposition research against the political opponents of incumbent officeholders during 2007. These seven were Democrats; a total of 25 indictments have been handed down to a mix of Democrats and Republican politicians.

In state politics

• During Lamar Alexander
  Lamar Alexander
  Andrew Lamar Alexander is the senior United States Senator from Tennessee and Conference Chair of the Republican Party. He was previously the 45th Governor of Tennessee from 1979 to 1987, United States Secretary of Education from 1991 to 1993 under President George H. W...
  
  's 2002 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Alexander's campaign staff received an anonymous mailing of a photograph of opponent Bob Clement
  Bob Clement
  Robert Nelson "Bob" Clement is a Tennessee politician and a member of the Democratic Party.-Early life:Clement is the son of former Governor Frank G. Clement...
  
   obviously serving as a board member of a failed bank whose owners had been imprisoned for bank fraud. When the Alexander campaign raised the issue of Clement's financial ties with the convicted felons, Clement denied any connection. When the Alexander campaign produced the photograph as evidence, Clement claimed his role was only an informal advisory one.

• In early July 2009 Alaska governor Sarah Palin announced that she would be resigning as governor, partly due to complications from opposition research and ethics inquiries after her inclusion on the 2008 GOP presidential race ballot as John McCain's running mate. At a later news conference Palin told reporters, "Obviously conditions had changed so drastically on August 29, the day I was tapped to be VP," she said. "The opposition research and the games that began there — which I think is the new normal in Alaska politics, until I hand the reins over to Sean Parnell — have been so distracting."

• In the Pennsylvania state legislature in July 2009, former state House Democratic Campaign Committee Chair, Rep. Stephen Stetler
  Stephen Stetler
  Stephen Hays Stetler is a Democratic politician from Pennsylvania who served as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue from 2008 until his resignation on December 15, 2009 hours before he was indicted by Attorney General Tom Corbett with six criminal charges, including various charges...
  
   found himself amidst an investigation when he rejected a plan that would have shifted the job of opposition research from employees on the state payroll to private firms. Attorney General Tom Corbett
  Tom Corbett
  Thomas W. Corbett is the 46th and current Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States. He is a former Attorney General of Pennsylvania and was elected to that office in 2004 and reelected in 2008...
  
   alleged that millions in public funds were paid to state employees who did such research on the 2006 and 2004 campaigns of Democrats in the state. Stetler left the House after 2006 to become the state's revenue secretary. A former aide, Dan Wiedemer testified before grand jurors that the suggestion to remove politically motivated research from the hands of public employees "was more or less shot down." Though Stetler has not been charged, 12 former House members and members of their staff were charged with diverting public funds for political campaign work. Stetler was among those subpoenaed, said Chuck Ardo, a spokesman for Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell. The hearing will be held before President Judge Richard Lewis in September.

Opposition research conducted in other countries

Australia

In October 2011, a media storm erupted in Australia over the leaking of 'dirt files' compiled by the Liberal National Party

Liberal National Party

The Liberal National Party is a political party in Queensland, Australia. It was formed on 26 July 2008 by the merger of the Queensland divisions of the Liberal and National parties.-History:...

 and further revelations that a former Australian Labor Party

Australian Labor Party

The Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party. It has been the governing party of the Commonwealth of Australia since the 2007 federal election. Julia Gillard is the party's federal parliamentary leader and Prime Minister of Australia...

 operative had been engaged to help compile the dossiers.

Despite protestations that key party personnel had no knowledge of the dossiers it was later revealed an opposition research strategist had been compiling the files as part of a SWOT analysis at previous elections which formed the basis of negative attack messaging for a 'rapid response unit'.

Opposition research and mass media ethics

• In 1992, Floyd Brown
  Floyd Brown
  Floyd Gregory Brown is an American author, speaker and media commentator. He is president of Excellentia Inc., a consulting company specializing in non-profit organizational strategy, development and marketing. Brown has also worked as a political consultant and conducted opposition research for...
  
   headed up the Presidential Victory Committee, which backed the candidacy of George H. W. Bush
  George H. W. Bush
  George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
  
  . CBS Evening News
  CBS Evening News
  CBS Evening News is the flagship nightly television news program of the American television network CBS. The network has broadcast this program since 1948, and has used the CBS Evening News title since 1963....
  
  reported that Floyd Brown was observed to be in the company of NBC news producer Ira Silverman as they stalked the family of Susan Coleman, a former law student of Bush's opponent Bill Clinton
  Bill Clinton
  William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
  
  . Coleman had committed suicide, and Brown was attempting to disseminate a rumor that she had had an affair with Clinton. Brown and associate David Bossie reportedly stalked the family of a suicide victim. In April 1992, 30 news organizations received "an anonymous and untraceable letter" by fax "claiming Clinton had had an affair with a former law student who committed suicide 15 years ago." Floyd Brown attempted to link Clinton to the 1977 suicide of this "emotionally distraught young woman, seven-months pregnant," Susan Coleman. The Bush-Quayle campaign eventually filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission
  Federal Election Commission
  The Federal Election Commission is an independent regulatory agency that was founded in 1975 by the United States Congress to regulate the campaign finance legislation in the United States. It was created in a provision of the 1975 amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act...
  
   against Brown, seeking to distance itself from his tactics. The group had filed its intent to air the ad with the Republican Party, and Bush's campaign director James A. Baker III, who waited 25 days before responding to the letter, after the ad had been airing continuously. Brown has said of the incident, "If they were really interested in stopping this, do you think they would have waited that long to send us a letter?" The practice of using tips from sources such as Brown was examined in 1994 by Howard Kurtz
  Howard Kurtz
  Howard "Howie" Alan Kurtz is an American journalist and author with a special focus on the media. He is host of CNN's Reliable Sources program, and Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast. He is the former media writer for The Washington Post. He has written five books about the media...
  
  , media analyst for the Washington Post. Kurtz surveyed the major networks, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and other influential media outlets, and found varying levels of use of Brown's information on David Hale as a witness in the Whitewater controversy. At this time, Brown confirmed that he had been the source of four mainstream media stories that had received attention from the Columbia Journalism Review
  Columbia Journalism Review
  The Columbia Journalism Review is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961....
  
  because they bore striking resemblance to the opposition research being disseminated by Citizens United. In 2008, Floyd unveiled a new attack ad against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, on the Fox News network, while also appearing as a real estate investor commenting on the mortgage fraud crisis.

• A 2005 analysis of digital media strategies published by the American Academy of Political Science took the view that new technologies enable "political elites" to use database and Internet technologies to do opposition research more easily, but they use data-mining techniques that outrage privacy advocates and surreptitious technologies that few Internet users understand. Data becomes "richer" about political actors, policy options, and the diversity of actors and opinion in the public sphere, but citizenship is "thinner" by virtue of "the ease in which people can become politically expressive without being substantively engaged."

• Facebook
  Facebook
  Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
  
   photos became a tool of opposition researchers in the 32nd Congressional District special election in California
  California
  California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
  
   in 2009 to replace Hilda Solis
  Hilda Solis
  Hilda Lucia Solis is the 25th United States Secretary of Labor, serving in the Obama administration. She is a member of the Democratic Party and served in the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2009, representing the 31st and 32nd congressional districts of California that include...
  
  . Front-runner Democrat Gil Cedillo sent out mailers targeting 26-year-old Emanuel Pleitez, grouping Pleitez's Facebook photos to suggest that he parties to excess with alcohol, and fraternizes with gangs. The text of the mailer suggested Pleitez, posing with a Latino stage actress and using a Latino voter registration drive hand sign, was "flashing gang signs".

• White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said of Fox News to CNN's Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources, "They're widely viewed as, you know, a part of the Republican Party -- take their talking points, put them on the air, take their opposition research, put them on the air, and that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is."

• On October 22, 2009 Media Matters, a media watchdog group, issued a statement voicing support for the Obama administration and Anita Dunn: "Fox News is not a news operation. It now comprises all of the elements of a political campaign, including organizing, explicitly partisan advocacy, (highly dubious) opposition research, War Room-style attack communications and even fundraising for the Republican Party and the conservative movement."

Opposition research and public opinion in the United States

The Atwater-Rove style drew sharp scrutiny and criticism, and opened a new venue for study of executive management style, as scholars sought to examine to what extent incumbent politicians who used "black ops" to gain power would also deploy the same staff and techniques to maintain power and control once they are elected. The public now weighs a candidate or organization's viability by how they conduct their campaigns, and to many voters, a negative campaign means that if elected, that candidate will possibly transfer "oppo" research into retaliatory operations against dissenters.

• Polls conducted by Pew in the days after the 2004 presidential election indicated that 72% of voters perceived a dramatic increase in negative campaign tactics, and that only about 30% felt they were justified.
• In the race for the 2008 presidency, opinion polls seem to indicate that negative campaigns based on opposition research-based disinformation tends to backfire as it causes voters to "tune out" of election media coverage. Poll results from the Pew Charitable Trust in April 2008 show that 50% of voters thought presidential campaigning is "too negative," up from 28% in February 2008.

• In the 2006 election cycle, a Virginia senator, George Allen
  George Allen (U.S. politician)
  George Felix Allen is a former United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the son of former NFL head coach George Allen. Allen served Virginia in the state legislature, as the 67th Governor, and in both bodies of the U.S. Congress, winning election to the Senate in 2000...
  
  , was unseated because of videotape of the senator calling a videographer/opposition researcher as "macaca" or monkey. The name was considered to be an ethnic slur, and Allen's campaign could not overcome the damage when the incident was broadcast widely in mainstream media and on the internet.

Opposition research and political infighting

• In the spring of 2007, Roger Stone
  Roger Stone
  Roger J. Stone, Jr. is an American political consultant and lobbyist who specializes in opposition research for the Republican National Committee in the United States....
  
  , a political consultant in the employ of New York state senator Joseph Bruno
  Joseph Bruno
  Joseph L. Bruno is an American businessman, and Republican politician. He was the Temporary President of the New York State Senate and its majority leader. Most recently he also served as Lieutenant Governor of New York ....
  
  , was forced to resign after leaving threatening phone messages on the answering machine of the 85-year-old father of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, alleging that Spitzer's campaign finances were conducted improperly. In November of that same year, Stone sent a letter to the FBI detailing Spitzer's sexual preferences with prostitutes and sexual props, right down to his black calf-length socks. Stone was considered to be an authoritative source because he frequented the same prostitutes as a client himself. A subsequent Justice Department investigation produced evidence that ultimately led to Spitzer's resignation as governor. Joseph Bruno
  Joseph Bruno
  Joseph L. Bruno is an American businessman, and Republican politician. He was the Temporary President of the New York State Senate and its majority leader. Most recently he also served as Lieutenant Governor of New York ....
  
  , Stone's client, has been a longtime political enemy of Eliot Spitzer.

• In April 2009, Politico
  Politico (newspaper)
  The Politico is an American political journalism organization based in Arlington, Virginia, that distributes its content via television, the Internet, newspaper, and radio. Its coverage of Washington, D.C., includes the U.S. Congress, lobbying, media and the Presidency...
  
   reported that the following exchange took place between former George W. Bush
  George W. Bush
  George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
  
   administration staffer Karl Rove
  Karl Rove
  Karl Christian Rove was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to former President George W. Bush until Rove's resignation on August 31, 2007. He has headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives...
  
   and Jason Roe, former chief of staff to former Florida U.S. Representative Tom Feeney, in a Washington, D.C.
  Washington, D.C.
  Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
  
   restaurant, after Rove had criticized fellow Republican Feeney in a national broadcast on the Fox News Network

Roe: I'm offended by your comments on Fox about Tom. You guys wouldn't be in the White House without Tom. And you made these really degrading comments about him that offended a lot of people.

Rove: Well, I have a file on the things Tom Feeney said about George Bush.

Roe: That says more about you than me that you kept a file ontom Feeney. This guy was so resstrained in his desire to criticize the president--even against his staff's advice.

Rove: I have a file.

Roe: I'm right here. Tell me to my face what's in that file.

Rove: I'll send you the file.

Roe: Well, I hope the file is the beginning of the conversation and not the end. I would love to disabuse you of whatever you think of Tom Feeney's loyalty from this file.

Opposition research and Wikipedia

In 2006, the campaign manager of Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cathy Cox

Cathy Cox

Lera Catharine "Cathy" Cox is a Georgia politician, a member of the Democratic Party, the former Secretary of State of Georgia, and a candidate for Governor of Georgia in 2006...

, Morton Brilliant, resigned after Cox's opponent, Lt. Gov, Mark Taylor

Mark Taylor (politician)

Mark Fletcher Taylor is an American politician and member of the Democratic Party. He served two terms between 1999 to 2007 as the tenth Lieutenant Governor of Georgia...

, revealed Cox's campaign had added information from an opposition research dossier to a Wikipedia page on Taylor. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....

 confirmed that the material had come from an IP address affiliated with the Cox campaign. Citing an Associated Press analysis, CNN reported that Wikipedia being used as a "popular tool" for opposition researchers became so widespread a problem that Wikipedia altered its submission guidelines and set up alerts so that its operators know when Capitol Hill staffers alter Wikipedia content.

Opposition research and activism

• Opposition research is a necessary component of "grassroots" activist groups. Research on corporate or political opponents may enable activist groups to target neighborhoods from which to increase their numbers, to refine their focus or "target," to pinpoint the target's vulnerabilities, to reveal hidden sources of funding or little-known connections, to investigate scare tactics, and to augment a legislative initiative.

• In the presidential election of 2008, the blog Talking Points Memo
  Talking Points Memo
  Talking Points Memo is a web-based political journalism organization created and run by Josh Marshall, journalist and historian covering issues from a "politically left perspective,". It debuted on November 12, 2000...
  
   pioneered "collaborative citizen-reporting projects" based on groups of volunteers examining public documents that shed light on the George W. Bush administration's U.S. attorneys firings controversy. Other organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation
  Sunlight Foundation
  The Sunlight Foundation is a 501 educational organization founded in April 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability in the United States government....
  
   encouraged citizen examination of such public domain records as Mitt Romney's financial disclosure statements and Bill Clinton's income statements.

Quotes

• "When they do surveys on the most reviled professions, lawyers, HMO managers, advertisers, members of Congress, used car salesmen and Barry Bonds’ nutritionist top the list. It’s always been my opinion, though, that the only reason opposition researchers aren’t on that list is that few people know we exist." Jason Stanford, December 4, 2007

• "Opposition research, if it's true, is probably 5 or 10 times more effective than paid media." James Pinkerton
  James Pinkerton
  James Pinkerton is a columnist, author, and political analyst. A graduate of Peter Vanleslie High School and Stanford University, he served on the White House staff under both Ronald Reagan and George H.W...
  
   quoted in Center for Public Integrity's "Dirty Politics"

• "Research is a fundamental point. We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. Research digs up the ammunition. We make the bullets... It's an amazing thing when you have topline producers and reporters calling you and saying 'we trust you...we need your stuff.'" Tim Griffin, in Digging the Dirt, BBC documentary on opposition research, 2000.

• "When oppo goes transparent, it might shrivel." Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, November 13, 2007

• "Being a nerd helps; if you hunger to work with people, look elsewhere." Gary Maloney, Campaigns & Elections, 2006

• "What's garbage today is gold years later... the trick is to catalog it, retrieve it, and connect the dots." Director of Intelligence Project, Southern Poverty Law Center, U.S. News & World Report, September 6, 1999

• "Candidates will be in a fund raising frenzy to try and raise enough cash to cover the television outlets in multiple population centers of all those states. They will be spending a great deal of time in studios preparing positive life story spots with appeal to each such population center. They will be spending more time in studios with attack ads on the other candidates based on the findings of continuing "opposition research." Who got drunk? Who used drugs? Who had an affair? Who has been married multiple times and what do their exes have to say about them? Who has made a bunch of money in some quick turnaround deal that can be made to look fishy? Who has had an illegal alien mow their lawn or watch their kids, or clean their house, etc. No candidate will have enough time to present themselves to those population centers as a "real" human being with "real" ideas and a "real" set of core beliefs and principles that resonate with those voters. Some, probably most, will come across as opportunistic attack dogs who simply want the power of the presidency by persuading voters to simply deny the prize to everyone else." Jerry Fox, "The Primary Symptom is Insanity," Townhall.com, February 14, 2007.

• "[Y]ou have to plant a lot of seeds in the spring and the summer so you can capitalize on it. If you have a story that's going to hit in the middle of September, middle of October, what you really want to do is build several things that come off of the story so that it's not just a one-day hit. If the story runs on the front page of a major paper, you also want to set it up so that it hits some of the television morning shows, and from there you want to have surrogates out the next day, so that you get a second hit. On the third day, ideally, you have some additional information you've been holding back that you can feed into it, another round of stories. On the fourth or fifth day you try to hold your candidate back from saying anything, so that eventually, when he does say something about the issue, you get another round of stories. If you do it all effectively, you can basically wipe out a guy's entire week. He'll spend the entire week responding to a story that showed up on a Monday." Chris Lehane, quoted in Atlantic Monthly, June 2004.

See also

• American Association of Political Consultants
  American Association of Political Consultants
  The American Association of Political Consultants is the trade group for the political consulting profession in the United States. Founded in 1969, it is the world's largest organization of political consultants, public affairs professionals and communications specialists...
  
  
• Devorah Adler
  Devorah Adler
  Devorah Adler is a political consultant and opposition research specialist for the Democratic National Committee in the United States. A former Assistant Director for Health Policy during the Bill Clinton presidency, Adler later served as Director of Research for the Democratic National Committee...
  
  
• Roger Ailes
  Roger Ailes
  Roger Eugene Ailes is president of Fox News Channel, chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group. Ailes was a media consultant for Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W...
  
  
• Joe Allbaugh
  Joe Allbaugh
  Joe M. Allbaugh is an American political figure in the Republican Party. After spending most of his career in Oklahoma and Texas, Allbaugh came to national prominence working for Texas governor George W. Bush and helping manage his 2000 presidential election campaign...
  
  
• astroturfing
  Astroturfing
  Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some...
  
  
• Lee Atwater
  Lee Atwater
  Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican Party. He was an advisor of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.-Childhood and early life:...
  
  
• black advance
  Black advance
  black advance is a term used by political strategists to refer to an attempt to disrupt the advance operations of political opponents during an election campaign...
  
  
• Sidney Blumenthal
  Sidney Blumenthal
  Sidney Blumenthal is a former aide to President of the United States Bill Clinton and a widely published American journalist, especially on American politics and foreign policy....
  
  
• David Bossie
  David Bossie
  David N. Bossie is an American political activist. Since 2000 he has been President and Chairman of conservative advocacy organization Citizens United.-Early life:...
  
  
• Floyd Brown
  Floyd Brown
  Floyd Gregory Brown is an American author, speaker and media commentator. He is president of Excellentia Inc., a consulting company specializing in non-profit organizational strategy, development and marketing. Brown has also worked as a political consultant and conducted opposition research for...
  
  
• James Callender
• James Carville
  James Carville
  Chester James Carville, Jr. is an American political consultant, commentator, educator, actor, attorney, media personality, and prominent liberal pundit. Carville gained national attention for his work as the lead strategist of the successful presidential campaign of then-Arkansas governor Bill...
  
  
• Center for Public Integrity
  Center for Public Integrity
  The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern. The Center is non-partisan and non-advocacy and committed to transparent and comprehensive reporting both in the United States and around...
  
  
• Church Committee
  Church Committee
  The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975. A precursor to the U.S...
  
  
• Barbara Comstock
  Barbara Comstock
  Barbara J. Comstock is an American politician, currently a Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates. She first won election to her seat in 2009, defeating Democratic incumbent Margaret Vanderhye...
  
  
• COINTELPRO
  COINTELPRO
  COINTELPRO was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological...
  
  
• disinformation
  Disinformation
  Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. For this reason, it is synonymous with and sometimes called black propaganda. It is an act of deception and false statements to convince someone of untruth...
  
  
• due diligence
  Due diligence
  "Due diligence" is a term used for a number of concepts involving either an investigation of a business or person prior to signing a contract, or an act with a certain standard of care. It can be a legal obligation, but the term will more commonly apply to voluntary investigations...
  
  
• Tony Feather
  Tony Feather
  Tony Feather is a Missouri-based American political consultant for the Republican National Committee and Republican candidates and campaign who specializes in direct voter contact. Feather is a co-founder, with fellow Republican Jeff Larson of FLSConnect, the leading Republican direct voter contact...
  
  
• Michael Gehrke
  Michael Gehrke
  Michael Gehrke is an American political consultant specializing in opposition research. He has served as the research director for the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the John Kerry presidential campaign, and in the White House during the Clinton...
  
  
• Monica Goodling
  Monica Goodling
  Monica Marie Goodling is a former United States government lawyer and political appointee in the George W. Bush administration who became known in 2007 in the midst of a political controversy surrounding the firings of several United States Attorneys...
  
  
• Tim Griffin
• Scott Howell
  Scott Howell
  Herbert Weston Scott Howell III is an American conservative political consultant, whose recent clients include Meg Whitman and Rudy Giuliani.-Personal:Married in 1994 to Julie L. Feaster). They reside in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and have two children....
  
  
• Rita Jenrette
  Rita Jenrette
  Rita Jenrette, born Rita Carpenter, November 25, 1949 in San Antonio, Texas is an American celebrity, actor, television journalist, and real estate executive. She is most famous for the interview she gave about her marriage to disgraced U.S...
  
  
• Ken Khachigian
  Ken Khachigian
  Kenneth L. Khachigian is an American campaign strategist, speechwriter, and attorney. He was a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and was chief speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan....
  
  
• Victor Kamber
  Victor Kamber
  Victor Kamber is a labor union activist and political consultant in the United States. A Democrat, he worked for the AFL-CIO in the 1970s before forming The Kamber Group, a public relations firm, in 1980....
  
  
• Cliff Kincaid
• Chris Lehane
  Chris Lehane
  Christopher Stephen Lehane is an American political consultant and crisis communications expert who has served as a lawyer, spokesperson and expert in opposition research for the Clinton White House, Democratic candidates for public office and various business, Labor, entertainment and...
  
  
• Christopher Lyon
  Christopher Lyon
  Christopher Lyon is an opposition researcher who has worked for Republican party candidates in New York, Virginia, New Jersey, and on the national level....
  
  
• Gary Maloney
  Gary Maloney
  Gary Maloney is an American political consultant specializing in research, strategy, media and debating for candidates of the Republican National Party. He is president of the Jackson-Alvarez Group, a consulting firm located in Virginia...
  
  
• Mary Matalin
  Mary Matalin
  Mary Joe Matalin is an American political consultant, well known for her work with the Republican Party. She was an assistant to President George W. Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney until 2003. Matalin has been chief editor of Threshold Editions, a conservative publishing imprint...
  
  
• Jack Minnis
  Jack Minnis
  Jack Minnis was an American activist, and the founder and director of opposition research for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Civil Rights era. Minnis researched federal expenditures and state and local subversion of racial equality...
  
  
• October surprise
  October surprise
  In American political jargon, an October surprise is a news event with the potential to influence the outcome of an election, particularly one for the U.S. presidency...
  
  
• Matt Rhoades
  Matt Rhoades
  Matt Rhoades is an American political consultant and strategist for the Republican National Committee. In the 2004 presidential election, Rhoades was director of opposition research for the campaign to re-elect President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. In the 2008 presidential bid...
  
  
• Mike Rice
• Karl Rove
  Karl Rove
  Karl Christian Rove was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to former President George W. Bush until Rove's resignation on August 31, 2007. He has headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives...
  
  
• Tracy Sefl
  Tracy Sefl
  Tracy Sefl is an American political consultant for the Democratic National Committee. She is Vice-President in the Public Affairs division of the Glover Park Group, specializing in opposition research. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago...
  
  
• Roger Stone
  Roger Stone
  Roger J. Stone, Jr. is an American political consultant and lobbyist who specializes in opposition research for the Republican National Committee in the United States....
  
  
• John Sweeney
  John Sweeney
  John Sweeney may refer to:*John E. Sweeney , U.S. Representative from New York*John Roland Sweeney , Canadian, politician and educator*John Sweeney , BBC journalist*John James Sweeney, Pennsylvania politician...
  
  
• David Tell
  David Tell
  David Tell is an American conservative political journalist. Tell served as a speechwriter in the Reagan presidency, and as an aide to William J. Bennett when he was Secretary of Education...
  
  
• Dick Tuck
  Dick Tuck
  Dick Tuck is a former American political consultant, campaign strategist, advance man, and political prankster for the Democratic National Committee.-Pranks:...
  
  
• The War Room
  The War Room
  The War Room is a 1993 American documentary film about Bill Clinton's campaign for President of the United States during the 1992 presidential election.-Background:...
  
  , documentary about 1992 Clinton campaign
• 527 group
  527 group
  A 527 organization or 527 group is a type of American tax-exempt organization named after "Section 527" of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code...
  
  

External links

• Politicians use PIs to unearth their own skeletons Associated Press, October 28 2010, United States.
• The Atlantic- Playing Dirty
• Biden Report a 1987 dossier in opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork.
• http://www.politico.com/static/PPM106_palin_doc.html Sample candidate dossier A
• http://www.politico.com/static/PPM116_final_steele_book.html Sample candidate dossier B
• http://www.politico.com/static/PPM116_kristengillibrand.html Sample candidate dossier (self-conducted)
• Digging the Dirt BBC documentary about 2000 presidential race and Hillary Clinton senatorial race
• http://www.researchops.com/Links.html Do-It-Yourself site for Opposition Research
• American Association of Political Consultants Code of Ethics
• http://campaignline.com/home/Campaigns & Elections, political research journal
• http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2005/07/sun-tzu-and-opposition-research.html opposition researcher's blog that discusses Sun Tzu's Art of War
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM0zJl9Bxk8 YouTube footage of Karl Rove and the "state of the art" opposition research data storage system in the 1972 Nixon re-election campaign
• http://google.com/search?q=cache:7NJ6cAp5vTIJ:graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/memo1.pdf+opposition+research&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=17&gl=us sample of opposition research released by the Obama 2008 campaign
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lFk78R_qYM Willie Horton ad, 1988.
• http://oppositionresearch.typepad.com/ opposition researcher's professional blog
• http://www.buyingofthepresident.org/index.php/stories/dirty_politics/ "Dirty Politics," a 4-part series originally podcast by Center for Public Integrity; includes profile of an opposition research operative
• http://www.factcheck.org/about/ Annenberg Political Fact Check
• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93351993 National Public Radio "Secret Money" database project