WASHINGTON (AP) – When President Joe Biden nominated Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission, the longtime consumer advocate expected to face criticism for her desire to expand free access on the Internet and improve competition between broadband providers.
Instead, Sohn found himself the target of an aggressive campaign funded by a conservative group that must not disclose its donors. The American Accountability Foundation called Sohn too partisan, anti-police and soft on sex trafficking. The attacks came, to the point that even some Democrats abandoned it. Sohn withdrew her nomination, abandoning her bid for a five-year term as FCC commissioner.
“Look, I’m not naive. I have been a consumer advocate my entire career. I knew there was going to be some opposition,” Sohn told The Associated Press. “Now, I expected what was coming: the dark money, the lies, the cartoons? No.”
The battle for the nomination is the latest example of how organizations with political and financial agendas have been able to sway public opinion by deploying untraceable donations. It’s also emblematic of how nominees’ missteps, even on matters unrelated to their future jobs, can become fodder for attacks.
In Sohn’s case, the stakes were high. His confirmation would have ended a 2-2 split on the commission, allowing the Biden administration to pursue its agenda of making the communications networks more equitable. Sohn has been a vocal advocate of these regulations, which have been aggressively opposed by the telecommunications industry.
Sohn was unlikely to make it to confirmation. Moderate Democrats would have trouble justifying their support for a candidate who had helped controversial liberal groups, appeared to approve of tweets critical of the police and accused Fox News of being “state-sponsored propaganda.”
When Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced his opposition to the nomination in March, the moderate Democrat cited Sohn’s “partisan activism, inflammatory statements online and work with far-left groups.”
Still, the outside groups left nothing to chance. Just two of those organizations spent at least $420,000 on ads seeking to torpedo Sohn’s confirmation, a sum that is likely a fraction of the total spent.
At the center of the advertising offensive was the American Accountability Foundation, which produced a blitz of ads attacking the candidate on Facebook as well as newspapers and billboards.
Another group, co-founded by a former Democratic senator, said it spent “six figures” on ads arguing that Sohn was “the wrong choice for the FCC and rural America.” The National Fraternal Order of Police also joined the fray, chastising Sohn for approving social media posts that were critical of law enforcement.
Opposing nominations is hardly new in American politics. But a 2010 Supreme Court ruling freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigns and nomination fights. The Citizens United ruling also opened the door to an influx of untraceable donations, known as “dark money,” to special interest groups seeking to influence politics, elections, and nominations.
Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, said these dark money groups are growing so powerful that they can “bypass or stymie an entire administration” by discouraging qualified people from accepting nominations.
Sohn’s nomination was to be historic. If confirmed, Sohn would have been the FCC’s first openly LGBTQ+ commissioner. When the White House announced her nomination in October 2021, it hailed her pioneering biography and called her a consumer advocate who would “defend and preserve the fundamental competition and innovation policies that have made Internet access broadband is more ubiquitous.”
When Congress failed to confirm Sohn during his final term, Biden didn’t give up. In January, he reappointed her to the position.
Sohn was a favorite of progressives and had served as a top adviser to Tom Wheeler, the Obama-era FCC chairman who enacted net neutrality rules that were abandoned during the Trump administration. These regulations would have required AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other Internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. The telecommunications industry has fought these rules, arguing they are illegal and unduly burdensome.
Some business groups jumped at the prospect of Sohn joining the FCC. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation, said this year it opposed Sohn’s confirmation “because of his longtime advocacy of overly aggressive and combative regulation of the industry of communications”.
Telecom companies and their trade organizations took a less combative approach, at least in public. Some even congratulated her on her nomination.
It is not known whether these companies gave dark money to groups that attacked Sohn. A spokeswoman for USTelecom, a national broadband trade association, said the group and its “members did not take a position on Ms. Sohn’s nomination.”
Behind the scenes, however, industry lobbyists worked hard to kill the nomination, according to Sohn and his allies. According to OpenSecrets, telecommunications companies are among the nation’s top spenders on lobbyists, with the industry spending $117 million last year to influence lawmakers and administration officials.
In his withdrawal letter, Sohn blamed his failed nomination on “legions of cable and media industry lobbyists, their bought and paid surrogates and deep-pocketed dark money political groups.”
“It was a perfect storm of industry interests,” Sohn told the AP in an interview last month at Georgetown Law School, where he is a fellow at its Institute for Technology Law and Policy.
At least three Democratic lawmakers agreed with Sohn’s assessment, describing his nomination as a proxy fight for the future of free broadband.
“If affordable broadband is rolled out everywhere, then somehow more affordable broadband could be rolled out everywhere,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in Sohn’s confirmation hearing in February. “So I think there’s probably billions of dollars at stake here, and that’s why the vitriol is coming your way.”
Sohn was particularly outraged by the American Accountability Foundation’s campaign. The nonprofit boasted that it had spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on advertising to “educate the American people how wrong they were in office.”
The AAF handed out more than $320,000 in Facebook advertising, according to a review of AP advertising data. Those ads criticized Sohn for his connections to two liberal groups and suggested he opposed toughening sex-trafficking laws. One ad claimed she was a “complete political ideologue”.
The organization targeted most of its advertising in states where moderate Democratic senators are running for re-election next year, including Nevada, Arizona and Montana. In the tightly divided Senate, candidates have little room for error. They can only lose one Democratic vote if every Republican senator opposes it.
It is not known how much AAF spent on traditional advertising, which included newspaper and billboard ads. One such billboard was on the Las Vegas Strip, above an illuminated sign of two girls in full feather headdresses.
The billboard called Sohn “too extreme” for the FCC and provided information for people to contact AAF. The likely target of that ad was not tourists but Sen. Jacky Rosen, a moderate Democrat seeking re-election next year.
AAF also promoted criticism of Sohn for Twitter posts in 2020 that suggested he supported the movement to “defund the police” and agreed with a tweet that assumed the police were “thugs armed with tear gas”.
Tom Jones, the group’s chief executive, declined a request for an interview. In an email, he declined to name the organization’s donors, noting only that they are “Dear Patriots!”
“We are guided by traditional American values,” wrote Jones, a veteran Republican operative who led the opposition investigation of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, during his failed 2016 presidential run. His group has led similar campaigns against other candidates who later withdrew from positions such as administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, vice chairman for oversight of the Federal Reserve Board, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Comptroller of the Currency.
Jones’ group was joined in its campaign against Sohn by other organizations, including one led by Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota.
Heitkamp’s advocacy group, the One Country Project, announced in 2022 that it was spending at least $100,000 on a campaign to oppose Sohn’s nomination by highlighting his alleged disdain for rural broadband.
The former senator, who lost her bid for re-election in 2018, did not respond to requests for comment on the source of her group’s funding. Heitkamp raised more than $106,000 in donations from the telecommunications industry during his last Senate campaign, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks U.S. election spending.
The National Fraternal Order of Police also opposed the nomination, a move that surprised Sohn and his allies because the police union has no business before the FCC. Citing Sohn’s social media posts about police, the group said in February that a vote for Sohn “would show a complete disregard for the hardworking men and women of law enforcement.”
Jim Pasco, FOP’s executive director, acknowledged that it was unusual for his organization to side with an FCC nominee. But he said Sohn’s Twitter presence was too incendiary to ignore. He said no telecommunications company influenced the union’s decision to oppose the nomination.
“You know, we don’t, we don’t go against people lightly,” Pasco said. “The more we looked into it, the more we saw that this person was really and vocally opposed to basic public safety efforts in the United States.”
Sohn said he knew his nomination was dead at his confirmation hearing in February. That’s when Rosen, D-Nevada, said police concerns about social media posts “give me pause.” Other Democrats, Sohn said, made little effort to stop Republican attacks.
“It was a bloodbath,” Sohn said.
Three weeks later, he withdrew from the fight.
