As 2016 begins, Sanders is drawing enthusiastic crowds and a surprising level of support among the very voters Clinton needs. But the road to the convention teaches Hillary’s Democrat-socialist challenger how tough it can be on the receiving end of well-funded smears.
First, a rumor circulates that Sanders is scheming to cheat in the upcoming Iowa caucuses by busing in kids from out of state. Sanders blames Hillary’s super PAC for the disinformation.
“Every one of you knows, you know it, that every day you’re being flooded by all of this negative stuff from Secretary Clinton’s super PAC,” Sanders tells reporters. “I don’t want my integrity and honesty being impugned. I have no idea who says this. This is a lie, an absolute lie. We will win or we’ll lose, we’ll do it honestly.”
Meanwhile, Brock’s work on behalf of Hillary continues to spark internal conflicts. After Brock is quoted in Politico predicting that Trump will win the Republican nomination, Neera Tanden of the pro-Clinton Center for American Progress emails Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, “David Brock is like a menace. I can think of no worse message for Hillary right now than she’s preparing for the general [election].” She also refers to Brock as “a conspiracy theorist.” The same month, Brock publicly issues a call for Sanders to release his medical records and immediately meets with pushback from other Clintonites. (Perhaps it’s because, as we later learned, Hillary had her own health issues.) In any event, Podesta smacks down Brock in a public tweet telling him to “chill out.” Tanden follows up by emailing Podesta, “Maybe [Brock] actually is a republican plant. Hard to think of anything more counter productive than demanding Bernie’s medical records.” Longtime Clinton ally Lanny Davis fires off his own email to Brock, copying Brock’s fundraiser Mary Pat Bonner, begging: “For God’s sake David stop—I believe this is very harmful to HRC [Hillary Clinton]. No one I know who supports HRC is anything other than repulsed and disgusted by your call for medical records release—I am talking about dozens of people all day today. Please please stop this—and apologize.”
Brock would later tell Politico, “I tried to have a strategy with regards to Senator Sanders. . . . I got in trouble when I requested his medical records. I got in trouble with the campaign—the campaign was unhappy that I did that. I never knew if they were unhappy substantively, or they were just unhappy because they didn’t control it. This was a very controlling culture.”
Sanders gets back at Clinton by highlighting her ties to the wealthy banking industry. In February 2016, Sanders supporters and Republicans launch a multipronged push for Clinton to release transcripts of her paid Wall Street speeches. A conservative super PAC called Future45 fires off negative TV ads and a digital campaign against Clinton ahead of Super Tuesday. Future45 backers include hedge fund managers Paul Singer and Ken Griffin as well as TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts (who’s simultaneously funding opposition to Trump through Our Principles super PAC).
“Hillary Clinton gave speeches to the biggest banks on Wall Street after one of the worst financial crises in American history,” says the narrator in one attack ad. “But Hillary won’t tell us what she said to those banks. They paid her over one million dollars and are contributing millions more to elect her. . . . So before you promise your vote to Hillary, don’t you deserve to know what she promised to them?”
Next, Clinton operatives lash out against Bernie through the nation’s opinion-editorial pages. (Remember, I told you earlier that op-eds are prime astroturf real estate, often amounting to little-disguised efforts to advance political or corporate agendas. Sometimes the op-eds aren’t even written by the person whose name is signed at the bottom.) Leaked campaign emails reveal the Clinton campaign asking former Obama Interior Department secretary Ken Salazar to sign an op-ed against Bernie—their idea, but written in Salazar’s name.
“Secretary, We are looking to push back on Bernie’s professed support for immigration. We would love your help on this,” writes a Clinton campaign official in an email dated February 15, 2016, and titled “Pushback on Immigration.”
Salazar expresses ready willingness. “[W]e can draft an oped that is supportive of Secretary Clinton’s approach to immigration reform, and contrast her efforts to Bernie’s. The piece can then be used in other States, besides Colorado—e.g., Nevada, Texas, Florida, etc.”
Five days later, Salazar is quoted in a Washington Post news piece “warning Nevada Latinos to beware of Bernie Sanders.” Also, Clinton surrogate Senator Claire McCaskill appears on MSNBC to label Sanders’s message “extremist,” likening it to that of Republicans Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan. (Clinton would later select Salazar to lead her transition team.)
In March 2016, Brock’s continued anti-Sanders efforts come under scrutiny in the media. The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove files a story about Brock’s takeover of a liberal website called Blue Nation Review, under the category Dirty Tricks, asking, “Is a propaganda arm of Hillary Clinton’s presidential juggernaut masquerading as an independent news and opinion site?” Grove notes, “The Blue Nation Review seems to have evolved from a blog dedicated to creating ‘a place where progressives can debate’ to an attack dog for Hillary Clinton . . . [It] seems more a comfortable venue for negative Sanders stories that Brock wasn’t successful in placing with mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
Tad Devine, a top strategist for the Sanders campaign, tells the Daily Beast that Blue Nation Review is “the pond scum of American politics.” “I’m sure they’re going to do whatever it takes to throw mud at Bernie and discredit him and lie about him, and deceive people,” Devine says. “And that’s their business. That’s what they do for a living.” The article notes: “As with an increasing number of political whodunits during this election cycle, the fingerprints of Hillary hit man David Brock are all over the crime scene.”
Eight months after its inception, Blue Nation Review claims it “helped shape the national conversation” and takes credit for many political propaganda initiatives, including being “the first to call Trump’s full pivot to white nationalism,” furthering the narrative that nothing short of the Ku Klux Klan has taken control of the Republican Party.
Brock manages many other misrepresentations and successful disguising of his interests. It’s a publicity coup when the president of his Correct The Record super PAC, Brad Woodhouse, repeatedly appears in news segments with no mention of his Hillary campaign ties. In a live post-presidential-debate segment on Fox News in 2015, viewers aren’t told Correct The Record is a political super PAC founded by Brock as “a strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks.” Woodhouse is presented as if he’s a Democratic analyst with no particular horse in the race. On TV he declares that none of the GOP candidates were “all that effective” in their debate arguments against Hillary. When asked if she’ll be the official nominee, he answers, “Absolutely!” He goes on to chide Democrats Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley for having the nerve to press for more debates with Clinton.
On March 29, 2016, Woodhouse is back on TV defending Clinton (again, without the disclosure that he’s officially working on her behalf). A reporter asks him about the FBI investigation into Clinton’s email controversy. Nothing to it, says Woodhouse. On the other hand, he’s universally critical of Clinton’s opponents, whether Sanders or the vast Republican field. On May 2, 2016, Woodhouse is on TV yet again, managing to take another swipe at Sanders. Woodhouse and Correct The Record are officially in Hillary’s camp. They’ll always push the Clinton agenda. It’s the house specialty. But the public gets the false impression that Correct The Record is simply a fact-checking authority.
In April 2016, after a debate performance that’s widely viewed as disastrous for Hillary, Correct The Record is at the ready to declare the opposite: “Good Night for Hillary, Bad Night for Bernie.”
“The reviews are in,” declares Correct The Record. “Last night was a strong performance for Hillary Clinton, while Bernie Sanders reiterated his out-of-touch positions on gun violence, continued to tell the Southern half of the country their votes aren’t as important, and said President Obama should withdraw his Supreme Court nominee if he’s elected president.”
Soon, Correct The Record becomes parent to a new astroturf project called Barrier Breakers. It pledges to spend $1 million to “push back against” anyone attacking Hillary on social media. In a press release issued in spring of 2016, the group says it’s already “addressed more than 5,000 people that have personally attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter.” The impact is seen online as Correct The Record operatives bully Sanders supporters on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. The effort is designed to look like grass roots. But outraged Internet users quickly figure out it’s an organized, paid campaign.
“This explains why my inbox turned to cancer on Tuesday,” writes one user who had criticized Clinton on the social media site Reddit. “Been a member of reddit for almost 4 years and never experienced anything like it. In fact, in all my years on the internet I’ve never experienced anything like it. . . . It was a pure bombardment on my account, it went on for hours.” Another Reddit user advises, “The best tactic to use against ‘professionals’ is to simply downvote and move on. The more you argue with them, the more likely people will read the astroturfer’s posts.”
A digital consulting firm executive weighs in on the orchestrated social media pushback from Camp Hillary, remarking that it’s “meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical.”
Bernie also continues to take hits from the pro-Hillary-minded DNC. Leaked emails show the DNC conspired to attack him over his religion or lack thereof. In a May 2016 email, the DNC’s chief financial officer suggests they “get someone to ask” Sanders about his religious views. “It might make no difference, but for KY [Kentucky] and WVA [West Virginia] can we get someone to ask his belief,” writes the DNC’s Brad Marshall. “Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points [sic]difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”
Sanders is said to be furious at all of the smear efforts lodged against him by fellow Democrats. “Nobody has apologized,” he tells NBC in an interview after one DNC email leak. “But this does not come as a surprise to me or my supporters. There is no doubt that the DNC was on Secretary Clinton’s campaign from day one.”
Democratic operatives are also busy keeping Donald Trump embroiled in demonstrations on the road. His popularity is growing—though you’d never know it from watching the news—but he’s increasingly battling unruly protesters inside and outside his large rallies. They block roads, pelt his supporters with eggs, kick and beat them, tear at their hair, beat on their cars, rip up their signs, and call them names. Rarely, a Trump supporter gets violent with the demonstrators. Almost exclusively, the news media faults Trump for the violence wherever it occurs. In March 2016, aggressive protesters swamp the venue of his planned rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago. To those experienced in the art of the smear, it immediately smacks of an organized astroturf effort disguised as a spontaneous, grassroots movement. One giveaway: the presence of Bill Ayers, a controversial acquaintance of President Obama’s and cofounder of the communist Weather Underground revolutionary group, which conducted numerous violent attacks in the United States during the Vietnam War. Ayers was linked to the Weather Underground bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and New York City Police Department headquarters in the 1960s and 1970s. Though declared a “terrorist” by the FBI, Ayers was later hired as a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois. Now retired from the university in 2016, he can’t resist showing up at his alma mater to protest Trump’s appearance. There’s a dangerous vibe at the protests. Demonstrators appear to be trying to incite violence. They become so disruptive, Trump cancels the rally. It’s a huge victory for the organized opposition. It’s the first and only time Trump will succumb to obstruction at one of his speeches. Ayers can’t help but take partial credit on TV for getting the Chicago rally scrubbed.
“I’ve never seen anything this big at the University of Illinois at Chicago,” Ayers tells a news crew. “It’s huge. And it’s galvanized Latino students, black students, Muslim students, and white students. And everybody feels like, look, this is a university, we don’t need, you know, this kind of organized hatred to be spilling into our center.”
The George Soros–funded MoveOn.org also steps up to take credit following the Chicago success story. “We’ve been ramping up our efforts for months,” writes MoveOn in an email to supporters, “from the ‘We Are Better Than This’ ad we helped organize in The New York Times in December, to our collective advocacy for refugees under attack from the GOP, to the support we provided students in Chicago last night by printing signs and a banner and recruiting MoveOn.org members to join their peaceful protest. . . . We’ll support MoveOn.org members to call out and nonviolently protest Trump’s, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, and violent behavior and show the world that America rejects Trump’s hate.”
Later, a Democrat operative captured on undercover video by the conservative “Project Veritas” describes how party officials had trained and organized agents to attend Trump rallies and then bait Trump supporters into lashing out, knowing the media would smear Trump when it happened.
Establishment: In Denial
The nation’s first primary is the Iowa caucuses, held on February 1, 2016. Less than two weeks before the contest, on January 21, Real Clear Politics shows Trump with a polling average in the state of 29 percent. It’s an enviable number considering there are seventeen Republicans in the race sharing a piece of the pie. But Trump is about to suffer under the power and weight of negative ads. The Republican anti-Trump super PAC Our Principles drops $1 million on four anti-Trump television commercials, buys radio spots, and fires off 350,000 pieces of direct mail to try to change the minds of possible Trump supporters. One day before the caucuses, Our Principles places more ads in local newspapers. By the day of the vote, Trump has lost five percentage points. He walks away with 24 percent, nudged out of first place by Senator Ted Cruz, who takes home the win with 27 percent. Our Principles claims credit for knocking Trump down to number two.
Three days after Trump’s second-place finish in Iowa, I’m on my way from Washington, D.C., to Sarasota, Florida, to moderate a town hall debate between Jim Messina, head of the pro-Hillary Priorities USA, and Republican Karl Rove, the strategist behind the conservative super PAC American Crossroads (then a presumed backer of Jeb Bush).
Messina and Rove are iconic establishment figures and two of the biggest names in the smear game. They’re one another’s yin and yang, their respective party’s institutional experts in the billion-dollar political data industry. They’ve perfected the game of buying, selling, and analyzing stats to their advantage, and of garnering big donations, spending money on attacks, and persuading voters—or so they thought—and they’ve both set their apparatus into motion against Trump. It’s worth briefly examining what their apparatus entails.
During our town hall debate, Messina and Rove brag that political operatives like themselves have collected dozens of pieces of data on most every voter—including you. They say that the information is gathered from websites you visit, your public records, your credit card purchases, innocent online surveys that you take, TV boxes inside your house, and your grocery store purchases as recorded by your super saver cards. Data gurus use the information to project, sell, and target. Utilizing mysterious metrics developed by bright young minds and computer algorithms, they crunch information about who in your household watches what programs on which televisions, what pets you own, what kinds of cars you drive. And from all of that, they extrapolate how you feel about social issues, who you might vote for, and how to persuade you. All of their research in 2016 leads them to laugh off Trump’s candidacy. At least, that’s what they want the public to believe as they advance their respective anti-Trump narratives. Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s successful 2012 campaign, tells reporters prior to our event that he would love nothing more than for Trump to be Hillary’s opponent. And he gives Trump a grade of “D minus” for his campaign to date.
“I think there’s a difference between having a rally and running a campaign, and I think he’s having rallies,” Messina adds. “I think he’s running a pathetic campaign and the fact that no one can tell—Karl and I have run the last two winning campaigns—we can’t tell you who’s in charge of his campaign. Because the answer is: He is.”
More than once, Messina quips that he prays that Trump will be the Republican nominee. “I’m pretty religious and I wake up every morning and drop to my knees and say please, God, give me Donald Trump,” Messina says, as the audience laughs. “But God doesn’t like me that much.”
For his part, Rove is equally dismissive of Trump. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, he predicts that if Trump were to win the Republican nomination, “the GOP will lose the White House and the Senate, and its majority in the House will fall dramatically.” In the end, Trump wins the White House, Republicans retain their Senate majority, and they do not dramatically lose House seats. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
Several months after the Sarasota town hall, when Trump does garner the Republican nomination, Messina is still singing his same tune. He happily tweets: “Proof there is a God: I prayed every night for a year for Trump to win R primary. SHE EXISTS, and she made him win! Tx God.”
Be careful what you wish for.
They don’t know it yet, but Trump will render Messina’s and Rove’s entrenched systems functionally worthless in the blink of an eye. The secretly gathered information, the well-honed political connections, the smears, the cozy Washington, D.C., alliances, the revolving door, the backscratching, the favors bought and earned, the whole darn establishment.
On February 20, 2016, shortly after Rove and Messina predict Trump’s demise at their town hall, Trump brings home a big victory in South Carolina’s primary, besting Cruz by ten points. This causes mass hysteria among the Republican establishment, particularly at the conservative Our Principles, which fires off a desperate-sounding memo to fellow GOP interests.
“It’s time for Republicans to come together and share a roadmap on how to prevent Donald Trump from hijacking our great Party,” writes Our Principles executive director Katie Packer, a former Mitt Romney staffer. “Through extensive research, we’ve learned how to do just that.” The memo continues with a point-by-point list of ways to stop the Trump train. “It’s time for all efforts aimed at exposing Donald Trump to follow the same strategy. If all of us join forces in a concerted effort to expose his record and his rhetoric, it is possible to stop him.”
Our Principles also starts up a website, TrumpQuestions.com, to disparage Trump’s positions on key conservative issues. A subtitle in a red banner reads: “How Much Do You Really Know About Donald Trump?”
Another candidate might collapse under the pressure from both left and right. Instead, Trump goes on the offensive against a major donor to Our Principles: Chicago Cubs co-owner Marlene Ricketts.
“I hear the Rickets [sic] family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me,” tweets Trump. “They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!”
Five days later, GOP smear operator Liz Mair of Make America Awesome takes to social media to, literally, “shop” dirt on Trump.
“Guys, FWIW, we have a ton of opposition research info on Trump’s business record. Have tried to shop it, many reporters too scared to use,” she tweets on February 25, 2016. “If you’re interested, email me. Understand, I have to give it to whoever I think will make the biggest splash with it.”
Within minutes, some in the quasi-news media take the bait. At least three supply their email addresses in rapid response and ask Mair to send the oppo research. Later Mair takes credit for providing damaging material used against Trump in a primary debate. Perhaps it’s the culture of self-centered social media, selfies, and self-absorption that makes it impossible for some smear artists to resist grabbing credit for a hatchet job.
“Very pleased to see several of the attacks we’ve used vs Trump, and which data shows work on his voters, were invoked tonight,” Mair tweets after the debate. “All we wanted.”
A group called Bask Digital Media is behind yet another Republican attack against Trump. One of its clients is the super PAC Conservative Solutions, or “CS Pac” for short, which is backing Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida for president at the time. The group has already targeted presidential candidate and New Jersey governor Chris Christie in New Hampshire and gone on to bash Trump with negative ads in Florida, Snapchat messages in Virginia declaring him to be a “Con Artist,” and websites named “trumpknowsnothing.com” and “trumpwontfoolus.com.” Before Florida’s March 15, 2016 primary, outside groups spend about $8.7 million on anti-Trump TV ads. Trump reportedly spends a paltry $2.4 million—yet ends up trouncing the competition in the Sunshine State. After that, Rubio closes the curtain on his presidential bid and Bask Digital’s anti-Trump websites disappear as quickly as they arose. Bask takes a bow for its work on behalf of Rubio, tweeting, “Marco is an honorable and inspiring leader. We are proud to have worked with @cspac in support of @marcorubio?.”
Utah is a different story for Trump after Mair’s Make America Awesome conjures up a classic smear. Just ahead of the March 22 primary in the Mormon-thick state, Make America Awesome aims below the belt, publicizing a risqué, seminude photo of Trump’s wife—a former model—from an old GQ magazine shoot, posing on a bearskin rug. The new caption reads, “Meet Melania Trump. Your next first lady. Or, you could just support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” It sparks an instant rumpus between Trump and Cruz. Trump tweets out a threatening counterpunch: “Lyin’ Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!”
Make America Awesome also inundates Mormon women with anti-Trump ads on Facebook and Instagram. Its website promotes anti-Trump talking points and interactive “Dear Don” e-cards that sport cartoonish Trump photos with insults that Trump haters can send to their friends (or Trump himself):
“Dear Donald, my financial adviser said to say no to guys with four bankruptcies. Sorry.”
And:
“I only date candidates who have the balls to debate.”
Cruz blows away Trump in Utah, taking close to 70 percent of the vote. He denies having anything to do with Make America Awesome—or the bearskin rug caper. But there does seem to be some connection. At least one news report notes that Make America Awesome and the campaign of Republican Carly Fiorina, soon to be named Cruz’s running mate, used the same Alexandria, Virginia, address. In mid-April, I search through official Federal Election Commission filings and find Make America Awesome paperwork that discloses it backs Cruz.
In terms of money, Mair’s Make America Awesome is small potatoes. All told, a check of election records shows, it only spent about $35,000 during campaign 2016. But the group brags that it got a lot of bang for the buck. It tells reporters that its low-budget strategies, radio ad buys, and social media amplification enabled it to “punch well above [its] weight.”
Mair didn’t respond to my multiple requests for an interview. But she couldn’t resist blowing her own horn in an April 2016 interview published in the Huffington Post:
[A] lot of what we do is actually collating and distributing (without our fingerprints attached—a somewhat common and highly effective political campaign practice) opposition research. Some, if not most, of the stories that have legitimately caused Donald Trump the biggest problems in recent weeks and months have been initiated by our group, which is not big or well-funded, but has a lot of staunch grassroots supporters.
Mair gets back in the mix a bit later in the election cycle when news is recirculated from 1992 where, critics say, Trump defended convicted rapist, boxer Mike Tyson. (Trump had said in interviews that “to a large extent” he thought his friend Tyson had been “railroaded” and that “what happened to him” was a “travesty.”) After the controversy resurfaces in 2016, Mair jumps in on Twitter with another credit grab and an “I told you so.”
“Dear media: Make America Awesome pitched many of you the Mike Tyson clip back in, like, February. Many of you ignored us; others rejected it,” she tweets.
A week after his Utah defeat, Trump provides more grist for the media mill during a town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, led by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Trump states that women who get abortions should be punished.
Matthews: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no as a principle?
Trump: The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.
Matthews: For the woman.
Trump: Yeah, there has to be some form.
The comment draws immediate condemnation from pro-choice advocates and elicits a quick revision from the campaign, which issues a statement saying Trump meant that if abortion were outlawed, doctors who perform abortions should be punished.
Amid the fallout, I have my second interview with Trump for my Full Measure program, this time in Wisconsin. (My requests for interviews with Clinton continue to be declined.) Behind the scenes, the Trump campaign seems rattled and on edge. On camera, I ask him for more clarity on his abortion position.
“A lot of people said that my answer was a beautiful answer,” Trump insists. “You have no idea how many people. Now, I’m thinking in terms of the torment and punishment that women will give themselves. They give themselves tremendous punishment.”
Trump then deflects by attacking Chris Matthews. Honing his strategy of making the media part of his message.
“The question was asked by, you know, a guy with not good ratings, in all fairness,” Trump tells me. “I’ve actually always liked Chris, but he has lousy ratings. I did the show as sort of a favor to him. I didn’t know it was going to be such a crazy thing, what happened. But it wasn’t a very important show. Hasn’t been. Won’t be. But he asked me a question and he asked me hypothetically. He said hypothetically, if this should happen. And he mentioned the word illegal.”
I’m not the only one still probing on the abortion question. Nearly every major news outlet publishes multiple stories. The Guardian declares it to be the “biggest crisis of [Trump’s] campaign.” But the more I see Trump attacked from all sides, the more I continue to hear from a diverse group of ordinary folk who are still planning to vote for him. They think the media is biased and out of touch.
It’s against this backdrop that I make an appearance on Bret Baier’s Fox Special Report on April 1, 2016. In the “Candidate Casino” feature, I’m the first guest analyst—perhaps the only one—to predict a solid win for Trump.
“Regardless of how [the] Wisconsin [primary] turns out, all my money’s on Trump,” I say.
“Wow, a black chip!” remarks Baier. “We rarely see black chips here at this table. It’s good to have you. You are a high roller!”
“And this is not a personal vote. It’s an anticipation of what I think the voters might do,” I tell the other panelists.
Cruz wins the April 5 Wisconsin primary and the media universally declares Trump to be in “Full Meltdown Mode.” Little do they know.
Meanwhile, David Brock is now busy out west in California advancing the familiar narrative that Hillary Clinton wants to face off against Trump as the Republican pick. At an April 2016 meeting of the Soros-supported Democracy Alliance in Santa Monica, Brock says he has enough dirt to “knock Trump Tower down to the sub-basement.” He tells the donors that Trump “was not properly vetted by his rivals or the press.” His smear groups have held back damaging information, Brock says, that will be unleashed if Trump faces Clinton in the general election. The entire Brock event is reported in Politico. Where did Politico get this inside info? Why, from Brock’s super PAC American Bridge. More inside-the-Beltway reporting planted by insiders to be read by insiders.
“American Bridge is building a database of all the regular people—from unpaid vendors to harassed tenants to defrauded students at Trump University—who got screwed over for one reason only,” Brock tells the liberal megadonors in Santa Monica, according to Politico. “We sat on it all so as not to help the candidates who might have been stronger general election candidates.”
Then again, they’re not really sitting on it . . . it’s just been leaked to Politico. When messengers toss the ball in one direction, I tend to look in the other to see what we’re missing. Does Brock secretly know that a match up against Trump would be Clinton’s worst nightmare?
By early May, the conservative Our Principles super PAC has shelled out an incredible sum to try to turn voters against Trump: more than $17 million. Yet on mid-Atlantic Super Tuesday, Trump sweeps five states: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Trump’s circus act is turning out to be not that of a clown, but an acrobat. Or maybe death-defying funambulist.
With no powerful super PAC yet making surreptitious smears on his behalf, the media and the public watch as Trump conducts much of his own dirty work right out in the open. When Univision cuts ties with Trump’s Miss America and Miss Universe pageants—Trump sues. When women accuse Trump of sexual aggression—Trump evokes Bill Clinton’s history of bad behavior. When the New York Times prints excerpts from Trump’s old, stolen tax returns—Trump says Hillary is the criminal for destroying thirty-three thousand emails after they were subpoenaed. When a super PAC supporting Cruz smears Trump’s wife, Melania—Trump fires up his Twitter account, threatening to bring Cruz’s wife into the fight, and hits the reputation of Cruz’s father.
“I mean . . . what was [Cruz’s father] doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting [of President John F. Kennedy]?” Trump asks rhetorically in a May 3, 2016, phone interview on Fox News. He’s referring to a tabloid-published photograph that purportedly depicts Cruz’s father associating with John F. Kennedy’s assassin. “It’s horrible!” remarks Trump.
Later that day, Trump demolishes Cruz in the Indiana primary, where Cruz had been favored just a few weeks before. The New York billionaire is on a winning streak that will cement his nomination. Each time analysts, pundits, and reporters are proven wrong about Trump’s fate, they launch new projections that prove equally as misguided—as the Republican field whittles down from 17 candidates to 10, and 6 and 3, all the way to the GOP nomination.
Meanwhile, Across Town . . .
As Donald Trump pulls ahead in the Republican field, Hillary Clinton’s main super PAC gets down to serious business. Priorities USA Action jumps in with negative ads. One of them, titled “Speak,” shows women mouthing some of Trump’s derogatory comments about women. The commercial draws criticism from PolitiFact, which finds the ad wrongly implies Trump had used the F-word when he’d actually only mouthed it or said it “very softly, if at all,” and, in any case, says PolitiFact, Trump wasn’t referring to women in the first place. Priorities USA plans to spend an incredible $6 million over three weeks showing that commercial and a companion ad in the swing states of Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia.
With the rhetoric heating up, so does the shocking transactional journalism between the press and the Clinton campaign. More emails become public from the hacks into the email systems of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman Podesta. It’s fair to ask, Would hacks of emails written by the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump campaign officials reveal similarly scandalous material? There’s little doubt that embarrassing content would likely be found within GOP private exchanges, too. One can speculate that such exchanges might show Trump officials coordinating with right-leaning blogs and websites to plant stories and gain positive coverage. However, based on my experience, it’s difficult to imagine such emails would show Trump officials as able to call the shots and dictate terms of news coverage at supposedly neutral, mainstream outlets as extensively as Democrats managed to do.
In a February 2016 internal campaign email, Clinton press secretary Nick Merrill describes a friendly relationship between CNN producer Dan Merica and Clinton. “They are basically courting each other at this point,” Merrill quips.
The following month, emails reveal CNN and ABC contributor Donna Brazile, then vice chair at the Democratic National Committee, feeding the Clinton campaign an advance question prior to a CNN primary debate.
“One of the questions directed to HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] tomorrow is from a woman with a rash,” Brazile writes to the campaign on March 5, 2016. “Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint [Michigan].” At the debate the next day, a woman fitting the description Brazile gave asks a similar question.
A week later, emails indicate Brazile is at it again: she obtains and feeds an advance CNN town hall question to the Clinton campaign. The subject line of the email on March 12, 2016, reads, “From time to time I get the questions in advance.” Brazile then passes along the text of a lengthy question about the death penalty, commenting, “Here’s one that worries me about HRC.” The next day, an audience member asks the question in CNN’s town hall with Clinton and Sanders.
When emails revealing the apparent collusion become public in fall of 2016, both CNN and Brazile claim she couldn’t have possibly gotten her hands on advance material. However, Politico obtains an internal CNN email from one of its moderators reflecting the very death penalty question Brazile passed along to the campaign prior to the town hall—identical in wording, spacing, and capitalization. CNN points the finger of blame for the leak at its town hall partner, TV One cable network, and severs its ties with Brazile.
Why political operatives like Brazile are invited so integrally into the fold at news organizations in the first place is part of a crucial transformation that’s taken place in the news business. Largely as a result of efforts like those of Media Matters—its media training of pundits, its outreach to journalists, and its paid efforts to train and hire “reporters” who write for and go on to work in the press—partisan operators have quite literally infiltrated newsrooms in a significant way. They’re included in planning and discussions. Invited in as guests. Hired on as paid analysts, anchors, and reporters. Political operatives are becoming journalists and vice versa. Newsrooms are, in some respects, becoming political operations and vice versa. This helps explain why shocking displays of bias, and even the reporting of blatantly false information, are often allowed to go unpunished. Sometimes they’re even rewarded.
As the campaign marches forward, news reporters engage in increasingly brazen editorial attacks against Trump. On March 29, 2016, at a CNN town hall, reporter Anderson Cooper asks Trump about a squabble he’s having with fellow Republican Ted Cruz. When Trump responds, quite correctly, that Cruz had lashed out first, Cooper responds, “With all due respect, sir, that is the argument of a five-year-old.” Cooper’s remark is covered, as if news, by the likes of Salon, Gawker, Variety, Media Matters, and U.S. News & World Report. “Anderson Cooper Shuts Down Donald Trump,” declares Salon.
It seems Donna Brazile isn’t the only direct nexus between CNN and the Clinton campaign. April 2016 emails indicate the Democratic National Committee is plugged in when it comes to CNN’s interviews with Republican candidates. On April 25, a DNC official circulates an email titled “Trump Questions for CNN.” The official tells colleagues, “[CNN anchor] Wolf Blitzer is interviewing Trump on Tues ahead of his foreign policy address on Wed. Please send me thoughts by 10:30 AM tomorrow.” On April 28, there’s another DNC internal email, titled “Cruz on CNN.” This time a DNC official emails party colleagues that “CNN is looking for questions. Please send some topical/interesting ones. Maybe a couple on [Republican candidate Carly] Fiorina. Someone please take point and send them all together by 3pm. Thank you!”
During the same time period, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post apparently turns to the DNC to obtain opposition research on Trump. In an April 21, 2016, email, a DNC official writes colleagues, “research request: top 10 worst Trump quotes? Milbank doing a Passover-themed 10 plagues of Trump. Off top of my head, I’m thinking: · Punish women · Mexicans as rapists · Ban Muslims · Shoot someone in middle of 5th ave · Rough up BLM protestor · Anchor baby · Do a lot worse than waterboarding · Blood coming out of her wherever · Spill beans on ted’s wife · Talked about penis on stage at debate[.] Any other big things I’m missing? And can you pull bullets for these?” The resulting Milbank article, titled “The Ten Plagues of Trump,” cites eight of the DNC suggestions.
Politico’s chief investigative reporter, Ken Vogel, gets caught in a compromising position on April 30, 2016, when he emails one of his soon-to-be-published stories to DNC communications official Mark Paustenbach.
“[P]er agreement . . . any thoughts appreciated,” Vogel writes.
Paustenbach then passes along Vogel’s draft to the DNC’s head of communications, Luis Miranda.
“Vogel gave me his story ahead of time/before it goes to his editors as long as I didn’t share it,” Paustenbach writes.
News flash: Paustenbach is in the act of “sharing it.”
Paustenbach continues: “Let me know if you see anything that’s missing and I’ll push back.”
Vogel would later defend the act of sending prepublication material to the DNC as a sort of fact-checking exercise. Let me clarify: this goes way beyond checking facts, in my view. Normal accepted practices may include reading back specific quotes to a source for accuracy or verifying a particular fact. But sharing an advance copy of an entire story about a campaign controversy with one of the interested parties is strictly verboten in honest journalism.
At least it used to be.
Perhaps the most shocking admission by a transactional journalist comes in an email on April 30, 2015. Chief Politico political correspondent Glenn Thrush sends an advance draft of part of an article to the Clinton campaign’s Podesta for approval.
“Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this,” Thrush writes. “Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. . . . Tell me if I fucked up anything.”
Podesta signs off and the article is published.
The same month, Thrush sends eight paragraphs from another as-yet-unpublished article to the Clinton campaign’s Palmieri with the title “please read asap . . . don’t share.” Palmieri immediately shares, forwarding to colleagues and writing, “Glenn Thrush is doing a story about how well launch went and some part of it will be about me—which I hate. He did me the courtesy of sending what he is going to say about me. Seems fine.”
(On December 12, 2016, the New York Times announces it has hired “I-have-become-a-hack” Thrush, referring to him as a “stellar addition” and “premier political journalist.” Thrush joins Maggie “friendly-journalist” Haberman and Peter Baker, husband of Politico editor Susan Glasser, who will be on the Times team assigned to cover the Trump White House fairly and impartially. A Huffington Post article about the announcement refers to Haberman as a “former Politico star” and omits mention of the high-profile controversies over the reporters’ partisan ties.)
These are some of the connections that Donald Trump must face and fight as he and Hillary Clinton move toward Election Day as their parties’ respective nominees.