The Fixer's Template

There is a particular kind of operator that the modern American power network produces — not the candidate, not the donor, not the lawyer, not the press secretary, but the figure who appears at the moment a node is in trouble, conducts what is announced as an investigation or a review, and produces an outcome that quietly resets the institution's leadership in the network's favor. This figure usually has a long résumé in West Wing service, a private practice partnership at a major law firm, board seats at women's organizations, and a Rolodex that combines White House alumni, state attorneys general, county prosecutors, and the editors of the right magazines.

Tina Tchen is not the only such operator the Obama White House produced. She is the cleanest illustration of the type. And in the spring of 2019, while she was being installed at the Southern Poverty Law Center to conduct a "top-to-bottom review" of its workplace culture, she was simultaneously running fixer operations in two other cities, on two other matters, on behalf of two other principals — a fact that the SPLC, when it hired her, either did not know or did not care to know.

The first operation was in Chicago. It involved a Black, gay actor on the Fox television series Empire who claimed, in late January 2019, that he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime carried out by two MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters on a Chicago street at two o'clock in the morning. His name was Jussie Smollett. The hate crime was a hoax. By February 2019, Chicago police had concluded the entire incident was staged; Smollett had paid two Nigerian brothers, Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo, to fake the assault on him. He was charged in February with sixteen felony counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report. On March 26, 2019, the Cook County State's Attorney's office abruptly dropped all sixteen charges, sealed the record, and Smollett walked. The dismissal blindsided the Chicago Police Department. Mayor Rahm Emanuel — Obama's first chief of staff at the White House — called the result "a whitewash of justice." It was the most disturbing prosecutorial discretion exercise of the year, and it was reversed: a special prosecutor was appointed, Smollett was re-indicted in February 2020, and on December 9, 2021, he was convicted at trial of five felony counts.

The second operation was in Montgomery. It involved the founder of the most famous civil-rights nonprofit in the United States, Morris Dees, who had been fired by the Southern Poverty Law Center on March 13, 2019, after a senior Black attorney resigned and twenty employees signed a petition warning that "allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism threaten the moral authority of this organization." Five days later, on March 18, 2019, the SPLC announced that Tchen had been retained to conduct a workplace-culture review. Within nine days, the organization's president and legal director had also resigned. Within twenty days, an interim chief executive had been installed. The institutional architecture that emerged from Tchen's "review" — and that is the subject, in detail, of Part III of this series — is the architecture under federal indictment as of April 21, 2026.

The third operation was in Albany. It would not become public for nearly two years. It involved the Governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, who in December 2020 was first publicly accused of sexual misconduct by a former aide named Lindsey Boylan. In response, Cuomo's office drafted a letter intended to discredit Boylan publicly. The letter was reviewed, before it could be circulated, by Roberta Kaplan — the chair of the board of Time's Up, and the partner of the law firm representing Cuomo's chief of staff Melissa DeRosa. Kaplan read portions of the letter to Tchen. Tchen, then the chief executive of Time's Up, instructed her organization's staff in a text message to "stand down" from any plan to publicly support Boylan. The letter was eventually leaked. The full pattern emerged in the August 2021 New York Attorney General's report on Cuomo. Tchen resigned from Time's Up on August 26, 2021. She did not apologize.

Three operations. One operator. Sixty days, in the spring of 2019, when two of the three were running simultaneously, and the third was being put in place to be triggered the following year. This is the part of the series that establishes who Tina Tchen is, what she actually does for a living, and why the SPLC's decision to hire her in March 2019 to conduct a "top-to-bottom review" of its own workplace culture was either the most catastrophic due-diligence failure in American nonprofit governance or — and this is the alternative the series will argue is more probable — was not a due-diligence failure at all, but the desired outcome.

The Hinge, Reopened

Part I of this series ended at March 13, 2019. That date — the firing of Morris Dees by the Southern Poverty Law Center — marked the opening of a twenty-day window that, by April 2 of the same year, had produced a complete leadership turnover at the organization. Morris Dees out. Richard Cohen, the president of seventeen years, out. Rhonda Brownstein, the legal director of more than three decades, out. Karen Baynes-Dunning, a board member of less than a year, in as interim CEO. Tina Tchen, retained on March 18 to conduct the workplace-culture review whose conclusions would shape the new leadership architecture, in possession of effective control over the transition.

The argument of Part I was that this was not an accident, not a workplace-cleanup operation, and not a routine response to an internal employee petition. The argument was that it was a regime change, executed by a fourth-branch operator on a template the network had used before and would use again, and that the regime change installed the architecture currently under federal indictment for wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

That argument cannot be supported on the basis of what happened in Montgomery alone. To understand what happened in Montgomery, one must examine what was happening to the same operator, in the same window, in two other places. The Smollett affair in Chicago and the Time's Up arc in New York are not unrelated background; they are the same template. The argument of Part II is that this template — the standard fourth-branch maneuver of installing an Obama-network institutional fixer to manage the optics of a damaged principal while quietly resetting the institution's governance in the network's favor — was running, in the spring of 2019, in three places at once, all under the same hand. The Montgomery operation was the only one of the three in which the underlying conduct that justified the intervention was real misconduct by an organization's founder. The other two were not investigations of misconduct. They were defenses of misconduct, dressed in the language of investigation. The fact that the same operator ran all three is the part of the historical record that the SPLC did not weigh, the press did not surface, and the donors did not know.

March 18, 2019

The Southern Poverty Law Center's public announcement that it had retained Tina Tchen was issued on March 18, 2019. The announcement was carried, with minor variations, by the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Montgomery Advertiser, and CNN. It contained four substantive elements.

The first element was the description of Tchen's qualifications. She was identified as a partner at the law firm Buckley LLP, where she led the firm's workplace-culture practice, and as a former senior official in the Obama administration, where she had served as chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama and as executive director of the White House Council on Women and Girls. The announcement did not mention that she was, at that moment, under contemporaneous public scrutiny in Chicago over her February 1, 2019 text-message intervention with Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx in the Smollett case — an intervention that had been on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times for weeks.

The second element was the scope of the engagement. Tchen would conduct, in the language of the announcement, a "top-to-bottom review" of the SPLC's workplace culture, including reviewing past practices and recommending forward-looking institutional reforms. The announcement did not say who would have the final authority to act on her recommendations, what the relationship between her review and any internal SPLC governance process would be, or whether her recommendations would be made public.

The third element was the framing. The announcement positioned Tchen as a celebrated #MeToo-era expert on workplace culture, the co-founder of Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, and the natural choice to conduct an investigation of the kind of allegations the SPLC employees had raised in their March 2019 petition. The framing did not engage with the specific question that the SPLC employees themselves had raised — which was not whether the workplace culture was bad, but whether the organization had, for years, conducted active internal coverups of allegations against the founder. The distinction between "review the workplace culture" and "investigate the coverup of misconduct allegations against the founder" is not technical. The first is the kind of engagement a fixer conducts; the second is the kind a real investigation conducts. The SPLC announcement bought the first.

The fourth element was what the announcement did not contain. It did not contain a deadline. It did not contain a budget. It did not contain a specification of the auditing or oversight mechanism that would govern Tchen's work. It did not name the individuals who would receive her findings, the conditions under which they would be shared, or the timeline on which the institution would act. It was, in form, a press release. It was, in function, an institutional handoff.

The day the announcement was published, March 18, 2019, was a Monday. Eight days later — Tuesday, March 26, 2019 — Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx's office in Chicago dropped all sixteen felony charges against Jussie Smollett. Tchen's text-message intervention with Foxx had occurred fifty-five days earlier, on February 1. The two events did not cross-reference each other in any of the public reporting at the time. The SPLC announcement positioned Tchen as a workplace-culture expert. The Chicago story positioned her as a Smollett family friend and former Obama White House aide. The two stories, sitting on the same news pages on the same days, were never connected. They were the same operator, executing two phases of the same template, in two American cities, on two consecutive Tuesdays, in March of 2019.

Who Tina Tchen Actually Is

Tchen was born Christina M. Tchen on January 25, 1956 in Columbus, Ohio. Her parents had fled the People's Republic of China in 1949; her father Peter Chou-Yen Tchen was a psychiatrist who, in 1956, faced deportation back to China and received intervention from Ohio Senator John Bricker that allowed him to remain. Her mother Lily was a chemist. Tchen grew up in Beachwood, Ohio, attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University from which she graduated in 1978, and received her J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law in 1984. She practiced corporate law in Chicago for the next twenty-four years, primarily at the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where she became a partner. By the early 2000s she was deeply embedded in the Chicago Democratic political infrastructure that would, in the second half of the decade, produce a President of the United States.

During Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, Tchen raised approximately $200,000, placing her among the campaign's top fundraising bundlers. After Obama's inauguration in January 2009, she joined the White House as Director of the Office of Public Engagement — the office responsible for managing the relationships between the White House and external constituency groups, including civil-rights organizations, women's organizations, faith communities, and labor. In January 2011, she was elevated to a more concentrated role: Assistant to the President, Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, and Executive Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls. She held all three of these positions simultaneously, and continuously, from January 2011 until the end of the Obama administration in January 2017. Six full years inside the West Wing, with a portfolio that combined direct daily access to the First Lady, formal authority over the executive branch's coordination on women's-policy issues, and operational control over the West Wing's relationships with the same civil-society organizations that constitute the designator layer of the fourth branch this series is about.

This is the foundation. It is also the part of her résumé she discusses publicly. The next chapter, which is the part that matters, she discusses less.

Buckley Sandler — The Workplace Practice

In September 2017, eight months after leaving the White House, Tchen joined the law firm Buckley Sandler LLP — later renamed Buckley LLP — as a partner. She was made head of the firm's Chicago office and was given responsibility for the firm's workplace-culture practice. The practice was, in the lawyerly language of corporate law-firm marketing, advertised as helping institutions navigate the challenges of the post-Weinstein workplace. In practical terms, it offered something more specific. It offered institutions facing internal allegations of harassment, discrimination, or governance failure a credible-seeming external review process led by an Obama White House alumna with a #MeToo brand. The product the practice sold was reputational protection during a leadership transition. The deliverable was a written report that the institution could quote selectively in its public communications. The mechanism was the conversion of an internal scandal into an opportunity for the institution to be seen as having "responded responsibly" — at a moment when the actual content of the response was being shaped, in private, by Tchen herself.

This practice is not exotic. Many large law firms offer it under different labels — "internal investigations," "workplace assessments," "culture reviews." The category is real and the work, properly conducted, is sometimes legitimate. What distinguishes Tchen's particular version is the political infrastructure she brought to it. A workplace review by a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore is a workplace review. A workplace review by Michelle Obama's former chief of staff is a workplace review with a Rolodex attached.

Time's Up — The Co-Founding

In January 2018, four months after joining Buckley Sandler, Tchen co-founded Time's Up — the post-Weinstein advocacy and legal-defense organization that, within eighteen months of its launch, became the principal institutional home of the American #MeToo movement. The Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, hosted at the National Women's Law Center, raised more than $24 million in its first year and connected approximately 3,600 women in various industries to lawyers willing to represent them in sexual-harassment cases. Tchen's co-founders included Roberta Kaplan, the New York attorney best known for arguing United States v. Windsor at the Supreme Court — the 2013 case that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and laid the legal foundation for marriage equality.

The relationship between Tchen and Kaplan, established at the founding of Time's Up in early 2018, would be the operational hinge of the August 2021 collapse. Kaplan, in addition to being Time's Up board chair, was the partner of the New York firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP. The firm represented Melissa DeRosa, Andrew Cuomo's chief of staff. When the moment arrived, in December 2020, for Cuomo's office to draft a letter discrediting Lindsey Boylan, the letter would be reviewed by Kaplan in her capacity as DeRosa's lawyer, then read to Tchen in her capacity as Time's Up CEO, and the response of the leading American #MeToo organization would be coordinated, in private, with the office of the Democratic governor whose subordinate had drafted the letter.

None of this had happened yet, in March 2019. But the relationships were in place. The firm was in place. The organizational machinery was in place. And Tchen, four months before her hire by SPLC, had already executed two of the three operations that would in the end define her career — the Smollett intervention and the Cuomo damage control — were both, by March 2019, either underway or being prepared.

The Smollett Intervention

The Smollett affair has, in the seven years since, been reduced in popular memory to a sketch. An Empire actor faked a hate crime, the prosecutor dropped the charges, the case was reopened, the actor was eventually convicted. The popular memory misses the part of the story that matters for this series — the part in which a Chicago Democratic political infrastructure consisting of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, and former Michelle Obama Chief of Staff Tina Tchen attempted, for a period of approximately fifty-five days in early 2019, to redirect the federal investigative machinery to suppress a hate-crime hoax that, if exposed, would damage the political utility of the underlying narrative.

The chronology is documentary and is reconstructed below from records produced by Foxx's own office under public-records requests filed by the Chicago Sun-Times, CNN, USA Today, and NBC Chicago in March and April 2019.

• January 29, 2019Jussie Smollett, an actor on the Fox television drama Empire, files a police report in Chicago claiming he was attacked by two men in MAGA hats who shouted racial and homophobic slurs, beat him, poured bleach on him, and placed a noose around his neck on a Chicago street at approximately 2:00 a.m. The temperature that morning was below zero.
• February 1, 2019, before 5:00 a.m.Tina Tchen sends a text message to Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx. The text reads: "I wanted to give you a call on behalf of Jussie Smollett and family who I know. They have concerns about the investigation." The text was sent before Tchen's 8:00 a.m. flight to New York and is documented in records released by Foxx's office under open-records requests.
• February 1, 2019, later that dayFoxx contacts Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson by phone. Foxx subsequently emails Tchen: "Spoke to Superintendent Johnson. I convinced him to reach out to FBI to ask that they take over the investigation. He is reaching out now and will get to me shortly." A separate text message that day, between Foxx and an unnamed relative of Smollett — identified by Foxx's office as a Smollett family friend — confirms that Tchen had referred the relative to Foxx.
• February 1, 2019, eveningThe Smollett relative texts Foxx: "Omg this would be a huge victory." Foxx replies: "Spoke to the superintendent earlier, he made the ask. Trying to figure out logistics. I'll keep you posted."
• February 13, 2019The text-message exchanges between Foxx and the Smollett family friend, according to Foxx's office, conclude. Around the same time, Chicago Police investigators identify the two Nigerian-American brothers — Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo — captured on surveillance footage near the alleged attack site, and detain them as suspects. The brothers, both bodybuilders Smollett knew from the Empire set, tell investigators that Smollett paid them $3,500 to stage the attack on him, that they had purchased the rope, the bleach, and the red MAGA hats themselves, and that they had rehearsed the attack with him in advance.
• February 19, 2019Foxx informally recuses herself from the investigation, citing her communications with the Smollett family. The recusal is not formalized through any written process.
• February 20, 2019Smollett is charged with one count of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report. By March 8, a Cook County grand jury has expanded the charges to sixteen felony counts.
• March 26, 2019The Cook County State's Attorney's office, under the supervision of First Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Magats — Foxx's deputy, after her informal recusal — abruptly drops all sixteen felony charges. The court record is sealed. Smollett walks out of court a free man, having forfeited a $10,000 bond and agreed to perform community service. The Chicago Police Department is given no advance notice. Mayor Rahm Emanuel calls the result "a whitewash of justice."

The structural significance of the Smollett intervention, for purposes of this series, is not whether Tchen's call to Foxx caused the charges to be dropped. The structural significance is what it reveals about the operating environment in which Tchen, eight days after her recusal-by-implication from the case, was hired by the Southern Poverty Law Center to conduct a workplace-culture review. The hire was announced on a Monday — March 18 — during a week in which Tchen's name was on the front page of every major American newspaper as the Obama-era political fixer who had, days earlier, been documented texting a county prosecutor at five o'clock in the morning to intervene on behalf of an alleged hate-crime hoaxer. The SPLC retained her anyway. Either the SPLC did not know, in March 2019, what every reader of the Chicago Sun-Times knew that week, or the SPLC knew and did not consider it disqualifying. The first possibility implies a due-diligence failure of breathtaking scale. The second implies that the SPLC was hiring exactly the operator it wanted.

Preckwinkle, Foxx, and the Soros Prosecutor

To understand why Tchen's call to Foxx was effective — why it was even possible, on a Friday morning before five o'clock, to text a county prosecutor and have her, within hours, escalating the matter to the local Police Superintendent — one must understand the political infrastructure into which Tchen was operating. Kim Foxx was not an arms-length prosecutor. Kim Foxx was the product of a specific Chicago Democratic political construction, and Tchen's access to her was a function of that construction.

Foxx had served, before her 2016 election as Cook County State's Attorney, as chief of staff to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Preckwinkle is the central figure of the Chicago Democratic Party's left-of-center wing — a former alderman, the chair of the Cook County Democratic Party, and the woman who chose to back Foxx for State's Attorney over the incumbent Anita Alvarez. Preckwinkle's coalition is the same coalition Tchen had operated within during her Chicago corporate-law years and her Obama campaign fundraising — the same network of Black and Asian Chicago Democratic operators who, between 2008 and 2016, served as the bench from which Obama drew significant portions of his Illinois political infrastructure.

Foxx's 2016 campaign for State's Attorney — the campaign that defeated Alvarez — was funded substantially by independent expenditures from the Illinois Justice & Public Safety PAC, a vehicle financed primarily by George Soros. Public records indicate that Soros-backed spending on Foxx's behalf in the 2016 cycle exceeded $400,000. The Soros-prosecutor pattern — in which George Soros's domestic philanthropic and political networks funded the campaigns of progressive district attorneys in major American jurisdictions — became, over the next several years, one of the defining political projects of the American left. Foxx was an early prototype. The pattern would later replicate in Philadelphia (Larry Krasner), in Los Angeles (George Gascón), in San Francisco (Chesa Boudin), in St. Louis (Kim Gardner), and in dozens of smaller jurisdictions. The pattern was a direct expression of the money plumbing layer of the fourth branch — Open Society Foundations and adjacent vehicles funding, at scale, the prosecutorial discretion infrastructure of the United States — and Foxx was the moment the pattern was first proven at major-jurisdiction scale.

Tchen's text to Foxx on February 1, 2019, was therefore not a stranger reaching out. It was one node of the Chicago Democratic Soros-backed-prosecutor infrastructure communicating with another node of that same infrastructure on behalf of a third node — a sympathetic Black gay actor whose claimed victimization served the political narrative the network was, at that moment, in the business of producing. This is what is meant by "the network" in the closing observation of this part. It is not a metaphor. It is a documented Rolodex of consequential people who know each other from prior shared work, who place phone calls to each other when the work is complicated by inconvenient facts, and who can, through the legitimate operation of prosecutorial discretion and independent journalism and civil-society convocations, make those inconvenient facts go away. The network does not need to issue orders. It produces, at each of its nodes, individuals who know what the network needs without being told.

The SPLC Regime Change

It is in the context of the Chicago network — which the Smollett affair had just made visible — that Tchen's hiring by SPLC on March 18, 2019 must be read.

The hiring was announced eight days before the dismissal of the Smollett charges. It was announced while the Chicago Sun-Times was actively publishing Foxx's text messages with Tchen and reporting that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police was demanding a federal investigation of Foxx's "interference" in the case. It was announced while CNN, NBC Chicago, USA Today, and the Washington Examiner were running the same story. There is no plausible scenario in which the SPLC's board of directors — which by March 2019 included multiple senior figures with substantial Washington and national-political experience — was unaware of the Smollett story when they retained Tchen.

What the SPLC did was hire, as the institutional fixer for an internal scandal involving sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and the alleged coverup of misconduct by the founder, an operator who at that exact moment was on the front page of multiple newspapers for using her institutional access to intervene on behalf of an alleged hate-crime hoaxer. This is not the kind of fact a competent governance process overlooks. It is the kind of fact a governance process notices and weighs. The SPLC weighed it and decided in favor.

The Tchen review at SPLC produced its first effects within four days. On March 22, 2019, SPLC President Richard Cohen — who had served in that role since 2003, who had been a defendant in much of the internal litigation arising from the workplace allegations, and who was, in any meaningful sense, the operational head of the institution — resigned. By the same window, SPLC Legal Director Rhonda Brownstein, a thirty-year veteran of the institution, also resigned. By April 2, 2019, board member Karen Baynes-Dunning had been installed as interim chief executive. None of these decisions were driven, in any documented way, by the substantive findings of Tchen's review. The review, if it was being conducted in any traditional investigative sense at all, had not had time to be conducted. Its function was not investigative. Its function was to provide an external imprimatur for a leadership transition that had, in essence, already been decided. The substantive question — whether the founder, Morris Dees, had run an organization that systematically covered up his own personal misconduct for decades — was never the operational question of the review. The operational question was: who replaces him, and on what timeline.

The replacement process, as documented in Part I, produced over the following thirteen months a leadership architecture composed entirely of Obama-network and adjacent-network alumni. Margaret Huang, installed as CEO in April 2020, was a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer turned Amnesty International USA executive director — a career that had passed through the Obama-era Democratic foreign-policy establishment. Ann Beeson, installed as Chief Program Officer in May 2021, had run Open Society Institute U.S. Programs at $150 million a year for six years during the Obama administration. LaShawn Warren, the Chief Policy Officer, came from the Center for American Progress and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — two institutions that functioned, throughout the Obama years, as the principal external coordinating bodies for the administration's domestic civil-rights policy. Susan Corke, the Intelligence Project director, came from the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and from Freedom House — both institutions whose budgets and policy direction were substantially shaped by Obama-era appointments and whose senior personnel were Obama-network alumni.

This is what the Tchen review actually produced. Not findings. Not reform. Not the resolution of the founder-misconduct allegations. A leadership architecture, drawn from the Obama-network bench, installed at the most prominent civil-rights designator in the country, at the moment when the political utility of that designator's product was about to be deployed in earnest against the political successor regime to the one that had produced the bench in the first place.

The Cuomo Discrediting

The third operation in the 2019 cluster did not become public until 2021. It originated, however, in 2019 — in the structural relationship between Tchen, Roberta Kaplan, and the law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, all of which were established at the founding of Time's Up in 2018 and were operationally in place when Tchen took over as chief executive of Time's Up in October 2019.

Kaplan Hecker & Fink represented Melissa DeRosa, Andrew Cuomo's chief of staff. This relationship — between the New York firm of one of Time's Up's co-founders and the Cuomo administration's senior political operator — was a defining feature of the network. It meant that when Cuomo's first public sexual-harassment accuser, Lindsey Boylan, came forward in December 2020, the entity advising the Cuomo administration on how to respond and the entity ostensibly leading the American #MeToo movement against the kind of conduct Cuomo was accused of were, at the firm-and-personnel level, the same network.

The full sequence emerged in the August 3, 2021 report of New York Attorney General Letitia James, which concluded that Cuomo had sexually harassed at least eleven women. The report documented the following specific facts about Tchen's role:

• December 2020: Lindsey Boylan, a former Cuomo aide, publicly accuses Cuomo of sexual harassment via Twitter. Cuomo's office, in response, drafts a letter intended to discredit Boylan.
• Late 2020 / early 2021: Roberta Kaplan, in her capacity as DeRosa's lawyer, reviews the draft letter. She reads portions of it to Tina Tchen, in Tchen's capacity as Time's Up CEO. The Attorney General's report describes the letter as part of an "unlawful retaliation" against Boylan.
• December 2020: Tchen, according to text messages obtained by the Washington Post, instructs Time's Up staff to "stand down" from any plan to publicly support Boylan or release a statement on her behalf.
• August 2021: Cuomo resigns following publication of the Attorney General's report.
• August 9, 2021: Roberta Kaplan resigns from her position as chair of the Time's Up board.
• August 26, 2021: Tina Tchen resigns from her position as CEO of Time's Up. Her resignation statement does not contain an apology.

The structural significance of the Cuomo arc is that it documents, in a New York Attorney General's investigation supported by text-message evidence, exactly the same operational template Tchen had executed in Chicago in February 2019 and in Montgomery in March 2019. The template has three components. First: identification of a damaged or vulnerable principal whose continued political utility matters to the network. Second: deployment of institutional access — a county prosecutor, an organizational board, the leadership of an advocacy nonprofit — to protect the principal or reset the institution in the network's favor. Third: production of a public-facing narrative that frames the operation as something other than what it is. In Chicago: a friend of the family with concerns about an investigation. In Montgomery: a workplace-culture review. In Albany: a #MeToo CEO's measured statement that Time's Up is taking the allegations seriously and engaging in a deliberative process.

The same operator. The same template. Three different cities. Sixty days, in March 2019, when two of the three were active simultaneously and the third was being prepared.

What Was Actually Being Bought

It is at this point that the structural argument of Part II can be stated in plain language. The Tchen template — the standard fourth-branch maneuver of installing an Obama-network institutional fixer to manage the optics of a damaged principal while quietly resetting the institution's governance in the network's favor — is not a Tchen invention. It is one of several recurring procedures the Obama-network ecosystem developed during the 2009–2017 White House years and exported, after January 2017, into the broader civil-society and progressive-political infrastructure that the post-presidency ecosystem maintains.

The procedure has the following standard form.

The template is reusable. The template is, in its operational mechanics, indifferent to the moral content of the underlying scandal. It can be deployed to suppress a hate-crime hoax, to reset a civil-rights nonprofit's leadership, to coordinate the response to a sexual-harassment investigation, or to manage the optics of any other institutional crisis the network has an interest in resolving in a particular direction. Tchen ran it three times in 2019. Other Obama-network operators have run it in dozens of other contexts. The template's reliability is what makes it valuable. Its reliability is what makes the network capable of operating, in real time, at scale, across multiple institutional theaters simultaneously.

The argument of this series is not that Tchen is unique. The argument is that Tchen is representative — that the maneuver she ran at SPLC in March 2019 is the same maneuver that has been running, with different operators and different principals, at hundreds of institutional nodes across the United States for the better part of a decade, and that the cumulative effect of these maneuvers is the construction of the fourth unelected branch this series is about.

The Obama West Wing as Standing Resource

To make the argument concrete: Tchen is not the only operator the Obama West Wing produced. She is one of a class. The class is large enough that it now functions, in the post-presidency period, as a standing institutional resource that any sufficiently connected progressive organization can draw on for crisis management, leadership transition, public-relations response, regulatory navigation, or political coordination. The class includes, but is not limited to, the following figures, each of whom has performed comparable functions in different theaters:

• Valerie Jarrett — senior advisor to the President 2009–2017, now CEO of the Obama Foundation. The Obama Foundation, formally a 501(c)(3), functions in operational practice as the post-presidency political coordinating body for the network — including the Obama Foundation Leaders program, which has by 2025 placed approximately 700 Obama-trained "civic leaders" in policy and advocacy positions across approximately 100 countries.
• Susan Rice — National Security Advisor 2013–2017, Domestic Policy Advisor 2021–2023 in the Biden White House. The figure who convened the September 15, 2022 United We Stand Summit at which the SPLC and the rest of the designator layer were integrated into the Biden administration's Initiative on Hate-Motivated Violence — the operation that formalized, at the federal level, the relationships this series traces.
• Anita Dunn — White House Communications Director 2009, senior adviser to President Biden 2021–2024. Founder, with Jen O'Malley Dillon and others, of the political consultancy SKDK, which operates as one of the principal Democratic-network public-relations firms.
• Cecilia Muñoz — Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council 2012–2017, board member of the National Democratic Institute, currently affiliated with New America and various civil-rights nonprofits.
• Jen Psaki — White House Communications Director under Obama 2015–2017, White House Press Secretary under Biden 2021–2022, currently MSNBC anchor — a direct expression of the media-amplifier layer's overlap with the political-operator layer.
• Ron Klain — Chief of Staff to Vice President Biden 2009–2011, Chief of Staff to President Biden 2021–2023, currently general counsel at Airbnb. The senior-most operator of the Obama-Biden continuity governing-staff bench.
• Jennifer Palmieri — Director of Communications at the White House under Obama, Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign communications director. Now a senior Democratic-network media figure.
• Tina Tchen — chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama 2011–2017, Time's Up CEO 2019–2021, SPLC workplace-culture investigator 2019. The subject of this part.

This list is not exhaustive. It is illustrative. The point is that the Obama-network bench is deep enough, by 2026, that any major progressive institutional crisis can be staffed, within forty-eight hours, by an operator drawn from this class. The operator will arrive with credentials that progressive donors will accept, with media relationships that ensure favorable coverage, with legal-firm partnerships that provide cover and confidentiality, and with a Rolodex that connects to the rest of the network. The operator's actual function — as Tchen's three 2019 operations demonstrate — is not what the public-facing announcement says it is. The operator's actual function is to absorb the institutional crisis until the institutional change the network wants is in place. The operator then produces a written report, returns to her firm or her organization, and is available, on twenty-four hours' notice, for the next assignment.

What the Review Produced

The Tchen review at SPLC did not, in any traditional sense, conclude. There was no public report, no published findings, no methodology disclosure, and no audit trail. There was, instead, a sequence of leadership installations whose timeline and personnel composition are themselves the operational outcome of the review.

On April 2, 2019, Karen Baynes-Dunning — a former Georgia juvenile court judge and a relatively recent SPLC board member — was named interim chief executive. She had been on the board approximately one year. She had no prior senior leadership experience at any organization of comparable size or complexity. Her elevation made her the first Black woman to lead the SPLC. The framing of her appointment was, accordingly, that of a historic civil-rights milestone. The operational reality was that the institution had installed an interim CEO whose institutional knowledge of the SPLC was, by definition, less than a year old, whose external résumé did not include any equivalent executive experience, and who would, over the following twelve months, oversee a reconstruction of the SPLC's senior leadership without any of the institutional memory that would have been provided by the people Tchen's review had just removed. This is not an accident. This is the function of an interim. The interim's job is to be the bridge. The bridge's job is to absorb continuity-risk during the transition.

Baynes-Dunning served as interim CEO until April 2020. She remains, today, the chair of the SPLC's board of directors. She is the institutional figure who has continuously held one or another senior governance role at SPLC across the entire transition window, from March 2019 to April 2026. She is the person to whom Tchen's review, in the operational sense, was reporting. She is the person who has, throughout the seven-year period during which the SPLC's leadership architecture was reconstructed and during which the federal investigation that produced the April 2026 indictment was being conducted, signed off on every senior personnel decision the institution has made.

On April 8, 2020 — twelve months after Baynes-Dunning's installation, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the news cycle was almost entirely consumed by other matters — the SPLC announced the appointment of Margaret Huang as President and Chief Executive Officer. Huang's announcement was largely uncovered by the major American press; her arrival at SPLC, by design or by circumstance, occurred during a period when no national outlet was paying attention to civil-rights-nonprofit leadership transitions. Huang's career, as introduced briefly in Part I, will be the principal subject of Part III. For the purposes of closing Part II, three facts about her appointment are sufficient.

• Huang's prior position was Executive Director of Amnesty International USA — a position she had held since February 2018, having joined Amnesty USA's senior staff in 2014 and risen through it. Amnesty International USA is the American branch of an international human-rights organization whose senior personnel and policy direction overlap substantially with the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and with the broader Western democracy-promotion apparatus.
• Huang's earlier career, prior to Amnesty, was as a senior staff member of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee under the late Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. Her portfolio included Asia and Africa, and she conducted multiple Congressional Delegations (CODELs) to Kenya, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Tanzania during the 1990s.
• Huang served on the advisory committee of the Salzburg Global Seminar — a transatlantic policy convening organization that traces its origins to a 1947 founding by Harvard graduates including Henry Kissinger and Clemens Heller and that has, throughout the post-war period, operated as a meeting point between American foreign-policy elites and their European counterparts. The Salzburg connection places Huang squarely inside the same transatlantic democracy-promotion apparatus that produced Susan Corke (State Department / Freedom House / GMF), Nina Jankowicz (NDI Russia/Belarus / Wilson Center / DHS Disinformation Governance Board), and the rest of the personnel architecture this series has been mapping.

The appointment of Margaret Huang as SPLC chief executive in April 2020 is, in formal institutional terms, the moment Tchen's "review" produced its principal substantive outcome. The civil-rights nonprofit founded by a Montgomery direct-mail entrepreneur in 1971 had been replaced, in its operational leadership, by a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer turned Amnesty USA executive turned Salzburg Global Seminar advisory committee member. The shift in the institution's effective center of gravity — from civil-rights litigation in the American South to international human-rights policy and the Western democracy-promotion network — was complete. The federal indictment that arrived six years later, in April 2026, indicted that institution. It indicted, by extension, the architecture Tchen's review put in place.

Where This Part Ends

The object of this part has been to establish, with the documentary record, that the operator the SPLC retained in March 2019 to "review" its workplace culture was not an outside investigator. She was a fourth-branch fixer, on a network template, running two other operations at the same moment, and the SPLC's decision to retain her produced a leadership architecture that is now under federal indictment.

A few facts should now be present in the mind simultaneously.

• Tina Tchen served as Assistant to President Obama, Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, and Executive Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls — three concurrent positions she held continuously from January 2011 through January 2017.
• In September 2017, eight months after leaving the White House, she became a partner at Buckley LLP and head of the firm's workplace-culture practice — a practice whose product was reputational protection for institutions navigating internal misconduct allegations during a leadership transition.
• In January 2018, four months later, she co-founded Time's Up alongside Roberta Kaplan, whose New York firm represented Andrew Cuomo's chief of staff Melissa DeRosa — a structural relationship that would become operationally consequential in late 2020 when Cuomo's first sexual-harassment accuser came forward.
• On February 1, 2019, before 5:00 a.m., she texted Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx on behalf of Jussie Smollett's family. Foxx, within hours, contacted the Chicago Police Superintendent and pressed for the case to be transferred to the FBI. A Smollett relative, given Foxx's number by Tchen, texted Foxx: "Omg this would be a huge victory."
• On March 13, 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center fired its founder Morris Dees following an internal employee petition.
• On March 18, 2019, the SPLC announced that Tchen — at that moment on the front page of multiple American newspapers for her Smollett intervention — had been retained to conduct a "top-to-bottom" workplace-culture review.
• On March 22, 2019, SPLC President Richard Cohen resigned. SPLC Legal Director Rhonda Brownstein resigned in the same window.
• On March 26, 2019, Cook County State's Attorney's office abruptly dropped all sixteen felony charges against Smollett. Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the result "a whitewash of justice."
• On April 2, 2019, Karen Baynes-Dunning was installed as SPLC interim chief executive. She continues, in 2026, as board chair.
• In October 2019, Tchen became CEO of Time's Up.
• In April 2020, the SPLC installed Margaret Huang — Senate Foreign Relations Committee veteran, Amnesty International USA executive, Salzburg Global Seminar advisory committee member — as President and CEO. Huang would serve until July 2025.
• In December 2020, when Lindsey Boylan first publicly accused Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, Roberta Kaplan reviewed Cuomo's office's draft response letter, read portions to Tchen, and Tchen instructed Time's Up staff to "stand down" from publicly supporting Boylan.
• On August 3, 2021, the New York Attorney General's report concluded Cuomo had sexually harassed at least eleven women and documented the Time's Up coordination with Cuomo's office on retaliation against Boylan.
• On August 9, 2021, Roberta Kaplan resigned as Time's Up board chair. On August 26, 2021, Tina Tchen resigned as Time's Up CEO. Her resignation statement contained no apology.
• On December 9, 2021, Jussie Smollett was convicted at trial of five felony counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report.
• On April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on eleven counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The leadership architecture that received the indictment was the architecture installed by the Tchen review.

What this sequence demonstrates is not the personal failure of one Obama White House aide. What it demonstrates is the operational template the network developed and deployed, with reusable components, across a decade in which it served as the principal institutional bridge between the Obama presidency and the institutional architecture that emerged in the post-presidency period. The template's most consequential single deployment — the one whose operational output is presently under federal indictment — was the March 2019 Montgomery operation. That operation succeeded. The leadership it installed governed the SPLC for six years, during which the organization's relationships with the Biden White House, with Marc Elias's litigation operation, with the German Marshall Fund, with the Salzburg Global Seminar, with the Open Society Institute, and with the FBI's domestic-extremism intelligence apparatus were all consolidated. The federal indictment arrived in April 2026 not because the leadership architecture was fragile, but because the leadership architecture had, by then, accumulated enough criminal exposure that the constitutional correction mechanism — a Justice Department willing to investigate and prosecute — finally operated.

The architecture itself — the people Tchen's 2019 operation actually installed, what their careers were before they arrived, and what those careers reveal about the kind of organization SPLC actually became — is the subject of Part III.