Dodgy Group That Targeted Gigi Sohn FCC Nomination Now Under IRS Inquiry For Lying About Ad Spending

You might recall how popular telecom and media consumer advocate Gigi Sohn saw her nomination to the FCC scuttled after a variety of right wing and telecom-tethered lobbying groups ran a successful, year-long public smear campaign.

The campaign tried to frame Sohn as an unhinged radical extremist, giving corrupt Republican and Democrat lawmakers the flimsy justification they needed to scuttle the nomination. Attacks ran the gamut from homophobic efforts to frame her as deviant for simply being on the EFF’s board, claims she hated cops, and attacks insisting Sohn (long an advocate for rural broadband) secretly hated rural America.

One of the groups behind those attacks, The “American Accountability Foundation,” has suddenly found itself under IRS inquiry after it previously bragged about how much money it had spent to scuttle Sohn’s nomination. The organization, which has tethers to telecom and media giants looking to lobotomize the FCC, reported no spending on lobbying or advertising in 2021 and 2022.

Yet research shows the organization spent nearly a quarter a million dollars buying ads on Facebook alone that attacked Sohn in 2022:

“According to data obtained by the ad analytics company AdImpact, AAF spent over $230,000 on Meta ads alone that year to oppose Biden’s FCC nominee, Gigi Sohn. Data from Meta also confirms that the ad spending to target Sohn in 2022 was around that figure. That figure does not include other means of advertising, nor does it include spending on other issues.”

U.S. lobbying and financial disclosure laws are the technical equivalent of damp street corner cardboard, so if you’re violating them and encouraging inquiry by feckless U.S. enforcers, you’re truly screwing up.

The American Accountability Foundation calls itself a “nonprofit government oversight and research organization that uses investigative tools to educate the public on issues related to personnel, policy and spending.” But it’s the exact kind of Conservative dark money group companies like AT&T and Comcast like to use to seed lies in the discourse and scuttle any effort at consumer protection.

The New Yorker profiled the group back in 2022, noting it was a key player in numerous attacks on Biden regulatory and judicial nominees. By the time it faces anything vaguely resembling accountability, its crafters will have already moved on to creating numerous new, similar sleaze merchants.

The Sohn thing was quickly forgotten by the AI and crypto obsessed news cycle, but it really was a new high water mark for U.S. policy corruption. Sohn is broadly experienced, fiercely intelligent, and popular across both sides of the aisle; yet faced a year-long relentless assault at the hands of telecom and media companies whose lobbying tendrils extend into every last crevice of corrupt U.S. policymaking.