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Early this spring, an anonymous tipster wrote and asked me to look into what happened to a friend of a friend named Jeff Thomas. Today, I have the story behind the story. I’ve spent the last few months talking with sources and obtaining texts that show the tug-of-war between Peter Thiel and a group of Democrats who have been shadow-boxing with the billionaire for almost a year. It is a tale that hopefully says something about opposition-research in the digital age, the melding of politics and media, and the stakes of information warfare.

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Teddy

Thomas was startled by the stakes of the meeting: Did he want to participate in Bury’s sprawling opposition-research project against Thiel, one that would pry into Thiel’s private life, apply pressure, and persuade him to leave national politics?

For six years, after all, ever since he appeared on stage during the 2016 Republican National Convention, Thiel had been a fixation in G.O.P. donor circles—a potential bottomless-pocketed heir to Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers. Meanwhile, he’d simultaneously developed into a fixation among Democrats, caricatured as a blood-swilling, Gawker-slaying, Trump-fluffing venture capital villain and putative Judas of the gay community, a portion of which could not square his personal orientation with his politics.

By late 2022, with the midterm elections in full tilt, Thiel’s political clout had only increased as he effectively bankrolled the Senate primary campaigns of his disciples J.D. Vance, in Ohio, and Blake Masters, in Arizona. Bury, backed by a handful of the country’s largest Democratic donors like Susie Tompkins Buell, saw an opportunity to both curb his influence and undermine his personal life.

Opposition research projects are the gruesome, dirty-nailed, and often invisible hand of politics—a staple of virtually every campaign, small and large, from Willie Horton to the George W. Bush D.W.I. to Swift Boats and more. It’s only gotten nastier and more personal in the digital age—Ashley Biden’s diary, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Billy Bush tape. In the post-Citizens United donor-empowerment era, mega-donors have found themselves in the crosshairs, too. When the Kochs began their rise, Democrats set up an entire research apparatus to probe everything from their business practices to their web of political nonprofits. Now Thiel was the target of a smaller, much more intimate guerilla crusade, one that appears to be ushering in a new frontier in our gutter politics.

Brock has also become a center of gravity in the Democratic money universe, assembling a network of mentees and allies, like Bury, that some donor-advisors like to call the “Brocktopus.” And Thiel has long been in his sights: Way back in 2012, before Thiel was a known quantity outside of Silicon Valley, Media Matters singled him out as a subject of possible scrutiny. “Thiel’s role in funding [Republican] attacks has gone completely unremarked and largely uninvestigated,” the group wrote at the time, in an internal memo obtained by The Daily Caller. “An opposition research team will serve to hold Thiel and others like him accountable.” At the beginning of the midterms, Brock’s American Bridge deployed a video tracker to try to record Thiel when he would make public appearances.

A decade later, the Brocktopus was finally attempting to encircle its white whale. In recent private conversations, Brock has mused about how satisfying it would be to go after Thiel. Brock was not directly involved in the day-to-day intelligence-gathering into Thiel, I’m told, just like he isn’t involved anymore at Media Matters or American Bridge. But he and Bury are longtime friends and professional associates: Bury earns the last line in the acknowledgments in Brock’s 2015 memoir, and they remain in the same social circle. (Brock declined to comment.) Several donors in Brock’s network who backed the anti-Thiel project, like Tompkins Buell, told me they were comforted by Bury’s connection to Brock. “It’s just gone so low—and you’ve got to fight back,” said Tompkins Buell, Hillary Clinton’s lifelong friend, taking a realpolitik view. “You’ve got to fight fire with fire.”

Tompkins Buell has been active in politics for 40 years, and while she laments the sordid state of today’s political world, she doesn’t regret what she’s backed. “So what are we going to do, sit around and talk about how much we care about the poor people and how much we want to take care and love each other?” she told me. “We’ve just got to get out there and look out for ourselves and fight for what we believe in, and stand up for ourselves, and try to defend ourselves from these people.” She continued: “This never used to happen that I know of. I didn’t get down and dirty. This is really down and this is really dirty.” But alas.

They were particularly interested in men who had attended his lavish parties or hung out with him socially. Bury planned to funnel any relevant information primarily to Ryan Grim, the empowered D.C. Bureau Chief at the progressive publication The Intercept. Grim was working on a piece about Thiel that Democrats hoped would publish before the midterms.

Bury, the son of longtime ABC News correspondent Chris Bury, is hardly the most prominent person in the opposition research field. But he was aided by Jordan Cockeram, who was running for West Hollywood City Council on a platform that included supporting the LGBT community, and at times by Ryan Kenney, a popular D.J. Both of them were recruited by Bury’s sherpa, Erik Christianson, the son of a top Wall Street executive with connections to elite Democrats, political ambitions of his own, and what he told friends was an abiding hatred of Thiel. (They each declined to comment.)

It was not always a buttoned-up operation. Some people approached by the aggressive Bury team told me or their friends they felt like they were being cornered or misled about who was cooperating. The project could feel disheveled at times, even to some people involved: One person who Christianson and Bury unsuccessfully solicited for information eventually went public about the operation in a widely-seen Instagram story that was swiftly forwarded by a friend to Thiel. Bury declined to comment for this piece, but I’m told he felt he was approaching his project using the standards of journalism, in which he began his career.

That October, Bury uncovered Thomas’s relationship with Thiel, the extent of which was not well known to even some of Thomas’s close friends. (Thiel, a longtime bachelor, married his partner Matt Danzeisen in 2017.) Bury was captivated: From afar, Thomas seemed like someone he could convince to dish. Who knew, perhaps one day Thomas could go on TV and talk uncomfortably about the relationship?

And so over lunch that October afternoon at the Polo Lounge, Kenney, Bury’s frontman, encouraged Thomas to participate in the reporting process. Genuinely trying to protect his friend while also helping Bury, he attempted to persuade Thomas to cooperate with the campaign, suggesting that maybe he could get his name excised from the Grim piece if he was a useful source. Thomas, in a fragile mental state at the time, left the meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel intrigued. But he was also deeply concerned about the disclosure of his relationship, he would tell a friend.

Soon after the lunch, Bury and Thomas spoke by phone, and appeared ready to proceed. But Thomas later had an angry change of heart, just as Grim was en route to the airport to interview Thomas in L.A. So Bury upped the ante. Just before Election Day, on November 4, Bury texted Thomas directly. “Please don’t shoot the messenger,” the message began. “Ryan [Grim] proposed at least having a conversation with him about what you’re comfortable with having printed and what you want redacted. He’s an honest journalist … and being offered the option to approve a reporter’s final draft beforehand is super rare,” he wrote. “But I pushed for that because I like you & I didn’t want you to be caught off guard. Your name will be in print anyway, so why not control it and be protected?” Bury encouraged Thomas to connect with Grim in Miami the next day, and offered to chaperone the meeting. Bury was presumably speaking loosely, anything to get Thomas to cooperate. “I absolutely never promised that to him or anybody ever. Review and approve a draft? That’s absurd,” Grim told me.

Bury seemed desperate to enlist Thomas. He suggested that there was real money to be had if Thomas cooperated and extricated himself from Thiel. He texted that a New York P.R. executive “thinks you could easily get a book deal for $3-4 million if you tell an story [sic] about your past 5 years,” Bury said. “We would be willing to 100% pay for a top NYC book agent/attorney. Idk if you like writing but it would be cathartic.” The P.R. executive told me that conversation never happened.

Thomas was also in a vulnerable place in his life, according to many interviews with his friends and texts he exchanged that I saw over the last few months. He experimented with serious drugs, partied multiple nights a week all around the globe, and feasted on the vanity of social media. And he had complex emotions about Thiel—he seemed to enjoy living in a $13 million home and driving a fancy car, both of which Thiel provided, but he had also felt “kept” by him, as he would eventually tell Bury’s team in a recorded conversation. For Thomas, speaking to the researchers seemed to function as a form of therapy: it made him feel like he had control, according to people he told of the encounter, and in some ways he felt like he was speaking to Thiel, saying things aloud that he felt uncomfortable articulating to him directly.

Eventually, Thomas concluded that he would be willing to meet with Grim just before Election Day. Thomas had planned to sit down with him at the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne for an in-person interview—Thomas wanted a massage and facial beforehand, which the researchers booked—but then Thomas flaked yet again at the last minute. Grim and Thomas would later chat by phone.

In the immediate aftermath of the interviews with researchers and Grim, according to people who talked with him, Thomas felt that he made a serious mistake in aiding what he described privately as a “shakedown.” At times, his apprehension veered into paranoia, with Thomas telling friends that he was having nightmares about his name appearing in the news. Several friends and his Republican family members, upon hearing about the operation and his worsening anxiety, encouraged him not to talk. By mid-November, Thomas was telling friends that Democratic operatives had tricked him and were bullying and targeting him and Thiel. Thomas even talked about how he might get revenge.

At a dinner with Thiel on November 15, he would later tell friends, Thomas confessed he had spoken with the researchers and Grim. Thomas took responsibility for what happened, and said that Thiel encouraged him to look forward, not put so much blame on himself, and move out of the house. Thomas, attempting to move on with his life, relocated to Miami.

Over the following days and weeks, meanwhile, the momentum behind the Thiel exposé appeared to peter out. Grim’s article, which Bury was pressing to get published before the midterm elections, never materialized.

Days after he died, Grim responded to the unfortunate news peg and ran a version of his reporting that highlighted Thomas’s relationship with Thiel, titled The Death of Peter Thiel’s “Kept” Romantic Partner Is Being Investigated as a Suicide. The piece ran the gamut—Thomas’s take on Thiel’s politics, his description of his personal life, etcetera—but Thiel allies felt it positioned the donor unfairly close to Thomas’s death. Grim noted that he had interviewed Thomas in November but he also interspersed the quotes from his conversation with many others that he acknowledged that he had obtained from October “recordings of interviews” with “several Democratic and progressive activists who are working to expose what they see as Thiel’s hypocrisy.” Grim did not name the activists, and only sometimes specified which quotes came from which. (None of the recordings were made illegally, according to my reporting.)

Grim also presented other details that appeared to have been oppo-procured, such as a Facebook message from Thiel’s account inviting a UCLA student to a daytime party at Thiel’s home. A few weeks later, a reporter at The Daily Mail also somehow obtained “audio transcripts” of Thomas’s interviews with a third party, although the reporter did not mention how she received them. (The piece was about a purported row between Thiel, his husband, and Thomas at a New Year’s party. Thiel’s camp and a few others in attendance have denied to me that there was a confrontation.)

Meanwhile, Thomas’s death was a personal tragedy, one that his friends and family feel should be mourned privately, without political weaponization. A friend of Thiel’s said that the billionaire remains very “distraught” by Thomas’s death. Thiel feels like just another Brock target. “I never thought I would say this, but it’s made me more sympathetic to Anita Hill,” Thiel told me. He otherwise declined to comment for this piece.

“It’s not like they don’t dig into Soros’s life,” said a Democratic donor who has followed Bury’s moves and supports them—but only if they get the goods. “Having said that, I am ultimately a believer that unless you’ve broken the law, your private life really is your private life.”
Another Democratic operative who worked against a Thiel candidate was originally aghast when they first heard about Bury’s operation last fall. “There are some folks who feel like that’s not how we should be doing things. And other folks are like ‘fuck them.’ They’re playing gutter politics. Why shouldn’t we be playing gutter politics?” the operative said. “We live in gutter world now, and that’s not going away.”

Nevertheless, Bury’s team is proud of their year of work, which successfully showed how investigations into a donor’s personal life can, consciously or not, chill their activity. Over the last few years, Thiel has come to recognize, I’m told, that he may have been naive about life as a mega-donor. For many reasons, he is not planning to be a major player in the 2024 presidential cycle.

But like much of politics, these days, that all misses the larger point. In the end, the Brocktopus didn’t hook its white whale, a game-changing pre-midterms Grim story never dropped, the billionaire somehow became a quasi-sympathetic victim of their campaign, and somewhere along the way, a young man died. Who won here?