GOP-LINKED DIRTY TRICKS HIT SHERRILL ON ISRAEL, ETHICS

Who’s behind the MAGA-linked ‘Florence Avenue Initiative’?

Accusing Sen. Chuck Schumer of not being pro-Israel enough and of refusing to tackle antisemitism – the guy who just wrote a book called Antisemitism in America – would seem, well, idiotic. (Of course, there’s no shortage of idiots in America, either.) But that’s a central part of a campaign underway by a shadowy dirty-tricks group, the so-called “Florence Avenue Initiative,” which for the past year has been crusading, through ads and mailers, against Schumer over his refusal to pass a questionable bill in Congress called the “Antisemitism Awareness Act.”

And the Florence Avenue group has issued a pair of mailers – supposedly targeted to New Jersey Jews – attacking Rep. Mikie Sherrill. The first one, dropped in late March, blasted Sherrill over three votes in the House or Representatives last year – all three votes, by the way, that were sensible, certainly not antisemitic, and which aligned with many of her Democratic colleagues. The second mailer, which arrived in the first week of May, attacked Sherrill for “failing to disclose her stock trades” – a charge, perhaps not coincidentally, that was launched against Sherrill by Steve Sweeney, one of her rivals in the gubernatorial campaign. Those charges against Sherrill (“Mikie Took the Money”) were thoroughly debunked, including here by The New Jersey Democrat.

Let it be noted that charges of “antisemitism” have been weaponized by the Trump administration as a cudgel in his unconstitutional and outlandish attack on U.S. universities, from Columbia to Rutgers, Princeton, and Harvard. (The pretext for that campaign was centered on campus demonstrations against Israel’s decimation of Gaza, protests that were not only overwhelmingly peaceful but often led by Jewish students.) Now, the secretive Florence Avenue group is using antisemitism to go after both Sherrill and Schumer, the Senate minority leader.

And it seems clear that the Florence Avenue Initiative is not only Republican- or MAGA-linked but that it’s singled out Sherrill because she’s the perceived Democratic front-runner in the governor’s race and who, if she wins the June 10 primary, will face off against an ultra-MAGA GOP candidate. And an investigation by The New Jersey Democrat has turned up multiple, apparent connections between the Florence Avenue group and the GOP.

Sherrill, who’s been endorsed by many of New Jersey’s establishment-linked county committees, often run by political bosses loyal to “the machine,” has emerged atop the few polls on the race, albeit by small margins. The perception that she’s in the lead, combined with the fact that she’s running a centrist, don't-rock-the-boat campaign, has made her a target for some of her opponents. In the past week or so, Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, has repeatedly gone after her, including most recently in a May 2 op-ed in the New Jersey Globe.

But Baraka’s out in the open. The Florence Avenue Initiative (FIA) is anonymous.

We’ve noted, above, how the FIA echoed Sweeney’s broadside. And the three congressional votes on which Sherrill voted in ways that the group viewed as un-kosher were a vote in support of Joe Biden’s decision to pause the delivery of 2000-lb bombs to Israel; a vote in opposition to censuring Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Congress’ only Palestinian American; and a vote of “present” on a bill that would, improperly, equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The Forward, a Jewish newspaper based in New York, noted, “Rep. Jerry Nadler, co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, and most Jewish Democrats took the same positions [as Sherrill] on all three measures.” But Gottheimer voted the other way on the three bills.

So, it’s also interesting that the media company used by the Florence Avenue Initiative, Del Cielo Media, is a subsidiary of the broader Smart Media Group, which in the past has worked in partnership with a New York-based organization, Tusk Strategies, founded by Rep. Gottheimer’s brother-in-law and whose general counsel is Marla Tusk, Rep. Gottheimer’s wife.

Little is known about FIA except that it is using a Republican-allied media group to run its ads. Last November, during the group’s onslaught against Schumer, The Forward reported:

The group that spent $2 million on the ads, the Florence Avenue Initiative, which described itself as a coalition of “concerned Jewish donors” angry that Schumer was not supporting the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to crackdown on anti-Zionism on college campuses. … Those Federal Communications Commission records, which have not been previously reported, show that the Florence Avenue Initiative is run by Howard Kenyon, Sara Lytle and David Neelley out of a UPS box outside Austin, Texas, and that the group hired Del Cielo Media to purchase its TV ads.

So TNJD is investigating all this.

We don’t know, yet, who Kenyon, Lytle and Neelley are. (When we find out, we’ll let you know.)

But we did find out some things about Del Cielo Media. Del Cielo, it turns out, is a subsidiary of something called the Smart Media Group (“Trusted by all the top Republican committees.”). And Smart Media has been running ads for leading Republicans for years. Its president and CEO is Kyle Roberts, who the American Association of Political Consultants describes as “one of the top Republican media strategists in the nation,” adding that he started his firm “to provide GOP candidates with sophisticated traditional and digital research, faster responsiveness and tenacious negotiation.” The firm’s clients have included Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when they were elected officials, along with the Republican National Committee, the Republican Governors Association, and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Del Cielo, the Smart Media subsidiary – both headquartered at 1427 Leslie Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia – has been hired to run advertising and communications for various PACS. In the 2024 election cycle, Del Cielo oversaw $6.9 million worth of ads for America Leads Action, financed in large part by Walmart’s Rob Walton. It ran $4 million worth of ads for the National Rifle Association (NRA). But its biggest ad campaign was on behalf of Keystone Renewal PAC, which launched a $38 million campaign against Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator, Bob Casey. The money for it was provided by a slew of billionaires and Trump supporters including hedge fund mogul Ken Griffin of Citadel; Wall Street giant Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman; Antonio Gracias, Tesla board member and friend of Elon Musk; and Howard Lutnick, Trump’s billionaire secretary of commerce.

While running its multi-million-dollar campaign against Sen. Casey, Del Cielo started attacking Schumer and has now turned to Sherrill.

Finally, what we’re wondering is if there might be a connection in any of this to Gottheimer.

Here’s the story: a decade or so ago, Del Cielo was involved in a campaign against Chuck Hagel, the Republican who served as President Obama’s secretary of defense. During the fight over Hagel’s nomination, in 2013, Hagel came under fire from a group calling itself “Use Your Mandate.” Use Your Mandate sent mailers to voters in seven states, including New Jersey, and ran TV ads, charging that Hagel was “anti-woman, anti-choice, anti-Israel, [and] anti-gay.”

.According to the New York Times, Use Your Mandate had no website and only listed as its address a P.O. box in New York. But the Times reported that the group placed its media ads through Del Cielo Media. “Federal records show that Use Your Mandate uses Del Cielo Media, an arm of one of the most prominent Republican ad-buying firms in the country, Smart Media,” said the Times.

And it traced the strategy behind the campaign to a firm called Tusk Strategies.

And who, exactly, is Tusk Strategies? It’s a nationwide lobbying, communications and campaign strategy firm whose founder is Bradley Tusk, “a venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropist and writer.” A simple search by TNJD found that the general counsel for Tusk Strategies is his sister, Marla Tusk,– who just happens to be Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s wife.

Bradley Tusk confirmed to BuzzFeed News that his firm was “coordinating the ads and activities for Use Your Mandate.” (Indeed, Use Your Mandate’s president was a Tusk employee named Virginie Stujenske.) He said its “donors” included advocates for Israel. And joining the fight against Hagel were organizations tied to Sheldon Adelson, the late, hard-right billionaire backer of Israel, along with a little-known group called the Emergency Committee for Israel.

Sherrill’s campaign ridicules the Florence Avenue Initiative’s attack flyers. “This attack from a dark money Republican group is absolute bullshit and so sloppy it’s even disproven by their own citations,” Sean Higgins, Sherrill’s press aide, told TNJD. “Mikie has always supported Israel’s defense, advocated for release of the hostages at every turn, and spoken out strongly against antisemitism before and after Oct 7. MAGA Republicans are attacking Mikie because they know she’s the strongest candidate to beat [Republican] Jack Ciattarelli in the general election.”

But one question for the primary election, as well as in November, is: do voters agree that strong support for “Israel’s defense” is a net-plus or a net-minus, in the wake of Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza since 2023, which has left 52,000 Gazans dead and 118,000 injured? In 2024, the staunch support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel by Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris alienated many voters horrified by what was happening in Gaza, and may have contributed to Harris’ defeat.

Sherrill, perhaps concerned about pro-Israel Jewish voters in New Jersey, though calling for a “humanitarian pause” in the war, hasn’t uttered a word of criticism that TNJD could find about the decimation of Gaza. And, as her campaign says, Sherrill has long been seen as a supporter of Israel. As a member of Congress, she hasn’t joined progressive Democrats in calling for cutting off the American supply of offensive weapons to Israel. She has said that she does not “condone” Israel’s tactics in Gaza, but she refused to endorse the South African-led case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), saying, “I have not heard or seen evidence that there is an effort by the military – which receives its orders from the civilian government – to eradicate specific portions of or all of the Palestinian people in Gaza”.

According to Open Secrets, the 2021-2022 election cycle, her No. 1 contributor was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which gave her $54,400.

Of course, all that makes the criticism from the “Florence Avenue Initiative” even sillier.