by David Brock
“Bengazhi flu” would go on to become a forgotten tributary of the mighty river of right-wing misinformation on Benghazi. But I was worried—first about Hillary’s medical condition, and then, when it became clear that she would be okay, about what the episode meant for her political future.
Ironically, this early unhinged right-wing attack on Hillary helped catalyze an unprecedented effort by her Democratic supporters—me included—to build an early surrogate campaign apparatus around her potential candidacy.
With Hillary hard at work at the State Department, her political operation was in a state of suspended animation. But it was no secret that Hillary’s political career was only sleeping, not dead. Many of us who had supported her in 2008 expected that once she left the State Department, she’d begin considering a second run for the White House in 2016. And, obviously, so were many on the right who had been savaging her for decades.
Benghazi, it seemed, would be their cudgel—and while there was no evidence that Hillary had anything to fear in a clear and fair examination of the facts, there was no reason to expect that a clear and fair examination was what the right had in mind.
Having failed to damage President Obama by inventing charges of negligence or mendacity, they were turning their sights to the 2016 election and hoping to pin the tail on the likely Democratic nominee.
No one should have been surprised that the Republicans would try to swift-boat Hillary in 2016, turning an accomplished diplomat into a feckless bungler who lied to cover up her own failures.
But the beginnings of the Benghazi hoax didn’t remind me of the Swift Boat days as much as they did the Whitewater hoax from back in the 1990s. Republicans would never be able to point to actual evidence of wrongdoing on Hillary’s part (and, despite myriad investigations, they haven’t). But they wouldn’t need to if they could create the appearance of scandal by confusing the public about what actually happened before, during, and after the attack.
Their strategy wouldn’t be about proving a case. It would be about throwing up enough gorilla dust to frustrate the public and make people doubt they were getting the truth from the government. It would be death by a million questions, with the goal of fostering an impression of a politically motivated cover-up on the part of the Obama administration and Hillary herself.
They would use the same machinery they had used in the 1990s—only now it was better oiled. There would be countless congressional investigations that, even though they never seemed to turn up any incriminating evidence (or any new information whatsoever), kept the issue in the headlines. Republican investigators would strategically leak to sympathetic media outlets in order to create a sense of momentum. Right-wing lawyers would sign up “whistleblowers” and lie to the press about their testimony. Hillary and her aides would be drowned in a sea of depositions and document requests.
And whether or not the Republicans managed to make Benghazi a household word, I knew that a substantial element within the Republican base would respond to these conspiracy theories—and that whipping these activists up into a frenzy could be a formidable organizing tool in and of itself. I doubt that many of the prominent Republicans who dabbled in birtherism during the early years of the Obama administration really suspected that the president was born in Kenya; they simply basked in the attention they got from the right-wing base by giving voice to their fears.
Yes, this looked like it would be Whitewater all over again—and while, in the 1990s, the Clintons had been able to rely on the White House communications and research operation to help fight back, this time, Hillary was on her own. There was no Clinton campaign—indeed, there was no Clinton fact-checking operation at all. My political Spidey sense was tingling again.
I put Media Matters on the case right away, but hewing to our mission, all we could do was repel misinformation in the press—a useful and important role, to be sure, but the right’s effort to blame Benghazi on Hillary was a full-scale political campaign, and it required a full-scale political response.
We needed to be able to go directly after the lies told by showboating Republican politicians looking for their fifteen minutes of fame (or, at the very least, for a couple of minutes on a Fox News show that might result in a bump in donations to their websites). We needed the research that could discredit them as finders of fact. We needed to contact the Democratic members of the committee, find out who the Republicans were planning to put up as witnesses, and assess the credibility of those witnesses.
In other words, we needed yet another war room: a round-the-clock political rapid response and intelligence-gathering operation of a kind that Hillary herself simply couldn’t build until she had a real campaign around her. And if we waited for that to happen, it would be too late—Hillary could be damaged by the smear campaign before she was ready to fight it.
The hearings that took place that spring only deepened my concern. Hillary’s State Department aides were roasted over the coals under the presumption that the only reason significant wrongdoing had yet to be proven was that they had covered it up. And Hillary herself faced a barrage of hostile questioning from Republican senators intent on catching her in a contradiction about any number of minute details—and thus proving that she was hiding something.
At that, they failed. But they eventually scored the gotcha moment they were looking for.
“With all due respect,” Hillary said in response to one particularly redundant line of cross-examination about the State Department’s early assessment of the motive behind the Benghazi attack, “the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Ripped from any context, Hillary’s rejoinder to committee Republicans trying to score cheap political points was replayed ad nauseum in the right-wing media—as proof of her supposedly callous attitude toward the victims of the attack. Hillary’s actual point—that the debate about Benghazi should be forward looking—was edited out in the right-wing videos. As part of the exchange, Hillary also had said, “It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.”
But that didn’t stop Republicans from grossly misrepresenting Hillary’s words. On ABC’s This Week, John McCain even changed what Hillary had actually said to: “Who Cares? Remember when she said, ‘Well, who cares how this happened’ in a rather emotional way?” It was a neat hat trick, suggesting at once that Hillary was both unemotional and overly emotional.
In short, Benghazi was becoming a problem. Hillary was essentially defenseless against an onslaught of utterly false charges—charges that were beginning to draw blood.
When Hillary left the State Department in early 2013, she occupied an odd position as a presumed (some tossed around the word inevitable) nominee of her party for the presidency who held no office and employed no political staffers.
Meanwhile, no fewer than eight new SuperPACs had emerged on the Republican side with the explicit mission of tarnishing Hillary’s reputation and distorting her record before the campaign even got started. Conservatives knew what we knew—that Hillary was the most formidable general-election candidate Democrats could field—and they hoped that attacking her early and often, even if they had to recycle or invent charges, would render voters skeptical about her candidacy, or at least weary of hearing her name. Or perhaps the strain of the scrutiny would wear Hillary herself out, remind her of the brutality of a presidential campaign, and cause her not to run at all.
It was a GOP strategy of preemptive disqualification—and an array of new groups soon emerged to aggressively pursue it.
Foremost among the new groups was America Rising, run by Mitt Romney’s former campaign manager Matt Rhoades, who was outmaneuvered in that race by Democratic researchers, despite the fact that he was “seen as a pipeline” to Matt Drudge, according to news reports. Now, Rhoades seemed ready to get some r
evenge. “I am convinced,” Romney himself said of the new effort, “that [Rhoades] will erase the disadvantage GOP candidates have had. And if I were a Democrat candidate, I’d sleep less soundly knowing that Matt is watching everything they have and will say and do.” With Rhoades at the helm, Rising enjoyed support from the Republican Party establishment and its donors and set its sights on Hillary Clinton in particular (one early headline: HILLARY, FLANKED BY SECURITY AND ASSISTANTS, HAS PRIVATE SHOPPING SPREE AT BERGDORF GOODMAN).
But Rising wasn’t alone. Just as a Hillary candidacy would be a stimulus package for journalists, there were plenty of conservative hucksters eager to make a buck off of the far right’s loathing of the Clintons. There was Dick Morris (whose picture you might find when you look up “conservative huckster” in the dictionary) and his Just Say No to Hillary PAC.
There was the Stop Hillary PAC, which claimed to have a database of six hundred thousand activists who aimed to ensure that “Hillary Clinton never becomes president.” They promised to target Hillary on “everything from Whitewater to Benghazi.” It was chaired by a state legislator from Colorado, Ted Harvey, who once sponsored a bill to allow teachers to carry guns in school. Harvey’s Twitter bio indentified him as “a conservative fool for Christ.” The group’s spokesman was quoted as saying, “If we could dissuade [Hillary] from running for office in the first place, then we’ll consider our effort a success.”
The Hillary Project was devoted to “wage a war on Hillary Clinton’s image.” It appeared to traffic largely in online video games that let players “slap” Hillary and childishly insulting Internet memes (like a picture of Hillary with the caption—“Favorite Movie: Kill Bill”—get it?).
The list went on and on. There was Women Against Hillary PAC. Veterans Against Hillary PAC. And the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund—a group of former special forces and intelligence operatives attacking Hillary on Benghazi.
And, of course, longtime Clinton antagonist David Bossie was still lurking in the shadows. Back in 1992, he had worked for the organization that promoted the original anti-Clinton book, Slick Willie, and went on to become an investigator for House Republicans looking into Whitewater, a position from which he was fired after getting caught leaking doctored recordings of Hillary’s phone conversations with a former law firm colleague to falsely implicate her in a cover-up. Bossie’s 2008 Hillary: The Movie described her as “a congenital liar,” “not qualified,” and “the closest thing we have to a European socialist.” The movie featured a woman who claimed the Clintons had her cat assassinated.
Naturally, Bossie was planning a sequel for 2016.
By June 2013, Democratic operatives in Washington were starting to explore what an independent SuperPAC structure around a potential Hillary candidacy should look like. Buoyed by the 2012 election, the first in which Democrats had fielded a fleet of SuperPACs that clearly impacted the race, Democrats had come a ways since their early allergy to such outside groups. Hillary seemed open to their value. And I was eager to get involved.
First out of the gate was a grassroots organizing effort called Ready for Hillary—the brainchild of a young former Clinton staffer, Adam Parkhomenko, and a college professor, Allida Black. The idea was to marshal enthusiasm for a campaign by building an e-mail list, developing a small-donor network, and engaging in social media and other political outreach—in other words, doing the basic blocking and tackling that the Obama campaign had done so well.
In the early going, Ready for Hillary attracted its share of skeptics, both inside and outside the Clinton orbit. Some believed it was happening too early and could confer on Hillary an aura of inevitability that had not served her well in 2008. Others questioned the groups’ strategy and its leadership. Longtime Clinton political advisor Craig Smith was soon brought on board to ensure that the PAC was in seasoned hands. Smith could see the value in having the energy around Hillary’s prospective candidacy corralled under one roof; our side wouldn’t have a dozen Dick Morrises running around operating fly-by-night groups—all claiming to be the One True Hillary Super PAC.
In the end, Ready for Hillary won wide praise for giving the candidate an important leg up in low-dollar fund-raising and signing up enthusiastic volunteers. The group built an e-mail list that dwarfed the size of the one Hillary had at the end of the 2008 primary—and it raised millions of dollars, with 98 percent of contributions coming in at $100 or less, the foundation of a valuable low-dollar donor base that was transferred to the campaign.
Meanwhile, Obama’s 2012 SuperPAC, Priorities USA, backed by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg—who, in 2007, had become an early Obama supporter in the primary—was set to reorient itself around Hillary. The board was reshuffled, with the former Michigan governor and longtime Clinton ally Jennifer Granholm and Obama reelection campaign manager Jim Messina signing up as cochairs. Along with several other Clinton allies, I was named to the board, as well. The SuperPAC planned to raise several hundred million to back Hillary in the Democratic primary and take on her Republican opponent on TV in the general.
A part of progressive politics I’ve never quite gotten used to is the intense competition for money and credit—two things around which Priorities and Ready for Hillary soon clashed. By contrast, I had grown up in a culture on the conservative side where this dynamic was far less prevalent, simply because there was a lot more money—and therefore credit—to go around.
Ultimately peace was reached between the two, though some of the tactics the Messina group in Priorities used to try to bully Ready for Hillary into folding foretold a very public skirmish I would later have with the same players over—you guessed it—money and credit. But that came much later.
One point of consensus in the “peace talks” between the two groups was that there was a missing piece in the pro-Hillary structure being put into place: Everyone involved in the early planning saw a need for a research and communications shop that would operate on Hillary’s behalf until she had her campaign up and running. I’d been thinking along those same lines since the Benghazi “flu” outbreak at Christmas, so I dashed off a memo sketching out what such an effort would entail and made it known to the two groups that I was up for the challenge. I wasn’t a moment too soon. The very next day, America Rising launched a “Stop Hillary 2016” push.
That July, I hired four veterans from Hillary’s 2008 campaign and launched an effort we called Correct the Record. Although I forecast that the team would include a dozen or so staff, the volume and intensity of the attacks on Hillary were such that we soon had twice as many people devoted to this one project.
As with Media Matters and American Bridge, it didn’t take long for Correct the Record to be pressed into service. The Washington Free Beacon had hired a Republican opposition research firm to rummage through the Clinton archives in Arkansas in search of anything that could be spun up into a scandal. Among other weak leads, they found tapes from the 1980s of Hillary discussing her legal defense of an accused child rapist in the 1970s.
The scandal launderers went to work, attacking Hillary for “choosing” to take such an unsavory client and arguing that she was “soft” on rape and gender issues because she had done what, as a lawyer, was simply her job: mounting an effective defense.
Correct the Record moved quickly to thwart the attack in a variety of outlets ranging from Talking Points Memo to CNN. But we didn’t just speak in Hillary’s defense—we went out and investigated the claims ourselves. We found the original prosecutor in the case, who still lived in northwest Arkansas and confirmed to us that Hillary didn’t “choose” to defend the accused rapist; she had been appointed to the case by a judge over her objection. At our suggestion, he spoke with reporters to clarify how that process worked.
And while we were at it, we proved a link between Hillary’s experience in that case and her instrumental role in founding Arkansas’s first rape hotline. We published talking points online to arm Hillary’s defenders with hard facts to show th
at the story was based on false claims.
Meanwhile, the University of Arkansas suspended the Free Beacon from continuing to access their materials; as documents from the library proved, the website had violated rules in publishing the tapes. It was through examining these documents that we were able to discover that the Free Beacon hadn’t done its own legwork, farming out the job instead to hired guns from a GOP oppo shop. This revelation completed the circle: instead of landing a devastating blow against Hillary, the Free Beacon succeeded in embarrassing only itself.
Without an early, aggressive, and comprehensive response, this story—based on nothing—could have become part of a larger, more damaging narrative. We could have seen it pop up as a subject for discussion on Sunday shows, as Republican politicians tired of being called out for their association with the likes of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock attempted to turn this into “Hillary’s War on Women.” It could have been featured in SuperPAC ads against her (“The Washington Free Beacon has reported that…”). But not with Correct the Record now on the case.
For eighteen months before Hillary declared her candidacy for president, Correct the Record staffers got up every morning and went to work, dispelling the falsehoods and negativity surrounding her potential candidacy.
By its nature, the project’s work was partly defensive. With all the incoming attacks, defense was a vital part our mission, one that is still too often underappreciated by Democrats who think, “If we’re playing defense, we’re losing.” What they don’t understand is that without an aggressive defense, you’ll never even get out of the gate.