The post-election scramble to build a liberal version of Judicial Watch is underway. The working theory: if you can't beat 'em, copy 'em.

Activists and donors on the left looking to avenge Hillary Clinton's loss have zeroed in on how the conservative watchdog peppered the Democratic nominee with lawsuits over her use of a private email server and managed to drag out the damaging story through much of the election year. Some are eager to create a similar organization to try to take a pound of political flesh out of incoming President Donald Trump.


"Judicial Watch has a $30 million budget, and they had a significant impact on the election,” Clinton ally David Brock said. “And if we’re heading into an administration that looks like it could well be as corrupt as the gilded age, we need to significantly reinforce the capacities for an aggressive ethics watchdog.”

Some liberals view the task as particularly urgent given the Democratic Party's minority status in both the House and Senate. That means Democratic lawmakers will have difficulty demanding access to government records or forcing hearings on Trump administration actions, unless Republicans decide to join in.

"Any time there's one-party rule, people should be terrified. What remains of the traditional checks and balances is evaporating, just as Trump and Pence are assuming office," said transparency activist Ryan Shapiro. "The press and transparency groups are some of the few things remaining that can make sure the public knows what government is up to."

Brock has made clear his goal is to keep up the legal pressure on Trump.

"I would like to get Trump into discovery. I would like to subpoena him. I would like to put him under oath," Brock added in an interview for POLITICO's "Off Message" podcast. "I think we need a strategy around how to use the power we have and a lot of that will be about litigation."

In a series of meetings held in the weeks since Trump's election, liberal activists have been debating how to mount that fight. Some believe it makes sense to create a new entity that can use the courts and the legal system to keep the new administration in check.

"I think there's definitely room for another organization. Whether it should be avowedly liberal is another question," said one participant in the discussions. "I'd say what you want is to have a credible organization."

Others say there's no shortage of left-leaning groups that regularly file Freedom of Information Act suits and are sure to keep it up under Trump: the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Public Citizen and more.

Some believe the alphabet soup of groups on the left muddies their focus and lessens their political punch, but others see no need to start over.

"We sort of have our liberal Judicial Watches, don't we?" said Gary Bass, a transparency advocate with the Baumann Foundation. "We have a pretty strong constellation of litigation groups, so I'm not sure there's a need for a counter to Judicial Watch. It's not just about attacking, which is what Judicial Watch is about, but I'm sure some political donors might be thinking of that."

"I don't know what task they think we need a new organization to do," said Elizabeth Goitein of the liberal Brennan Center at New York University. "There can always be more coordination and more strategizing. I'm not opposed to that but I'm not sure it requires doing something new."

For now, the leading contender to assume the role of a liberal Judicial Watch is Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an organization founded in 2003 with an announced goal of rooting out government corruption. The group quickly built a strong reputation as an ethics watchdog and transparency advocate, filing complaints against lawmakers from both parties, though the bulk of its ethics work targeted Republicans.

However, in recent years CREW faced increased questions about its credibility, stemming from a 2014 shift that brought the group under Brock's sway and—in the eyes of many observers—into the Clinton orbit. Brock and his allies joined the group's board, while several longtime employees left.

"I wouldn't call CREW liberal or progressive. It's like a Clinton thing," said one transparency and ethics advocate.

"Anything CREW does is going to be viewed as Clinton-associated," said another activist skeptical of the effort.

When Clinton became enmeshed in the email controversy last year, CREW remained silent even though the previous incarnation of the group came close to stumbling over Clinton's private email account years before it was brought to light.

In 2012, weeks before Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, CREW filed a FOIA request asking for information on all email accounts she used. (A similar request was sent to other agencies as well.) Six months later, State sent CREW a response saying the agency had no records responsive to the inquiry.

An Office of Inspector General report issued in January called that response "inaccurate and complete." But CREW did not comment on the episode.

"It was their request, but they weren't allowed to say anything," a source familiar with the group said.

In a bizarre twist, earlier this year, State was hit with a lawsuit for details on how officials handled CREW's FOIA request. The group that filed the suit: not CREW, but Judicial Watch.

Brock has moved to bolster CREW's credibility for the Trump era by stepping off the group's board and adding two other members, former Obama transparency czar Norm Eisen and a chief ethics lawyer in George W. Bush's White House, Richard Painter.

"Like-minded Republicans are a group that we're going to have to reach out to because this is now about small-d democracy. It's not about capital-D Democrats, in some ways," Brock said.

As soon as the changes were announced last week, Eisen moved quickly to insist that CREW will not be a partisan outfit.

"This watchdog is going 2 do some bipartisan barking!" Eisen wrote on Twitter shortly after it was announced he was rejoining the group he founded more than a decade ago.

But others remain doubtful about whether the group has truly escaped the Clinton orbit. While Brock has left the board, he's not cutting ties with the group and will continue to fundraise for it. Other board members will remain in place. And a top CREW official says it doesn't plan to move out of the office space it shares in Washington with about a dozen other Brock-related organizations like Media Matters and Correct the Record.

"We have appreciated the advice and the fundraising David has done in the past," CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder said. "We don't see any reason to change the infrastructure, but we want to be clear in terms of the governance and leadership of the organization that it's Norm Eisen and Richard Painter who are leading that and who are ultimately responsible and bring that clear bipartisan ethics expertise."

Building CREW into a behemoth that could rival Judicial Watch will be an uphill battle. Buoyed by its anti-Clinton work, the conservative group's contribution revenue surged to a record $35.4 million in 2015, according to a tax filing provided to POLITICO. CREW, by contrast, received just under $2.2 million in donations last year. Judicial Watch has about a dozen lawyers on staff. CREW has four.

CREW also seems to have been badly outgunned in recent years—or perhaps to have been holding its fire. Judicial Watch says it filed or re-opened more 40 FOIA lawsuits in 2015 and 34 so far this year. Court records show CREW filed 41 suits during the Bush years and nearly as many during the early years of the Obama administration.

But that slowed to a trickle after the group moved into the Clinton orbit in 2014. CREW filed only one suit in 2015 and three this year—all were cases pressing the Federal Election Commission for tougher enforcement of campaign finance laws. Brock says the group has been active in other ways, such as filing the first IRS complaint over dubious transactions at Donald Trump's personal foundation.

CREW isn't the only transparency-focused group looking to step up its activities under a Trump administration. The James Madison Project, which dates to the 1990s, says it is reconstituting and has extended an offer to represent journalists pro bono in FOIA cases. Donors have already stepped forward to cover costs and filing fees.

"We envision the James Madison Project becoming very active and mobilized, not because it's a Republican administration but because, frankly, it's a Trump administration," said Mark Zaid, a D.C. national security lawyer who founded the group. "This incoming administration obviously is unique. It has created a set of fears that at least in the 25 years, I've been here, I've never seen before."

Zaid's group may not fit the bill for some liberal advocates, because he has represented an eclectic set of organizations, including media outlets and the Republican National Committee. A decade or so ago, Clinton aide John Podesta served on the group's advisory board, but he hasn't been involved in recent years. Zaid insists his group isn't liberal or conservative, but "entirely non-partisan."

Another fledgling Trump-targeted effort underway is Operation 45, an organization launched last month by Shapiro, a Harvard and MIT national security researcher, and by Washington lawyer Jeffrey Light.

"I definitely think people are interested in an aggressive effort to hold the Trump/Pence administration accountable," Shapiro said. "As bad as the Obama administration has been on transparency, we expected Clinton would be worse, but with Donald Trump's election we're going from worse to 'Oh, my God.'"

Shapiro said Operation 45 has obtained tax-exempt status and plans to file a flurry of suits against the incoming administration. It filed one against the FBI this week, looking for still-hidden evidence of the law enforcement agency meddling in the presidential election. A GoFundMe page for the venture raised $30,000 in the past month.

"It's a moral imperative that we want to scale up our work not just in volume but in scope," he said.

Whatever form the new Trump-dogging efforts ultimately take, the drive to clone Judicial Watch seems to be driven by an outsized and perhaps even distorted view of the role of the organization's role in Clinton's email woes. While some credit the group with forcing the release of Clinton's email, the messages were actually released in response to a lawsuit filed by a journalist, Jason Leopold of Vice News.

The decision to prolong Clinton's drip, drip, drip agony with monthly email releases that stretched through much of the primary campaign was made by an Obama-appointed judge in the same reporter-filed suit.

Judicial Watch did manage to get a judge to order depositions where it could question top Clinton aides, generating more damaging headlines for Clinton. But it was far from alone in filing suits for records relating to Clinton and her team: a slew of other advocacy groups joined in, including Cause of Action, Citizens United and the Republican National Committee. So, too, did media outlets like Gawker and the Associated Press.

In short, while Judicial Watch helped clobber Clinton, it was far from alone.

Another misconception about Judicial Watch is that it has been uniformly partisan in its work. In the 1990s, under the leadership of founder Larry Klayman, it besieged President Bill Clinton's administration with FOIA lawsuits on a variety of politically sensitive issues. Sometimes, Klayman won the right to question Clinton aides and often used the sessions to harangue the officials in what they viewed a deliberate strategy to use the courts as a political weapon.

While there's no question that the group has been at its most enthusiastic and arguably its most effective in going after the Clintons, the organization has sometimes trained its legal guns on Republican officials.

During the George W. Bush years, Judicial Watch sued over access to Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, even arguing the case at the Supreme Court. Officially, the group insists it is conservative, not Republican.

"The Clinton fantasy has been we were obsessed with her and targeted her and we were doing it for partisan reasons. The reality is we had a broad investigative and legal agenda," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. "We uncovered the Clinton emails as a result of other investigations."

How vigorously Judicial Watch will pursue the Trump administration is an open question. In a New York Times op-ed this week, Fitton parted company with many Republican officials by warning that Trump "could face some very serious conflict of interest problems."

However, while many government ethics experts are calling for Trump to divest entirely in his company or place it in a blind trust, the conservative group is taking a more flexible approach. Fitton is embracing "a partial disinvestment" as one acceptable option.

For now, the staff at Judicial Watch is looking on with amusement and satisfaction as liberals try to figure out how to adopt many of the group's techniques.

"They want to imitate Judicial Watch, but they don't understand exactly what it is we do," Fitton said. "This is anger out of a partisan loss in an election, targeted at one person: Mr. Trump....If you're looking to do a hit job on someone specifically, just because you don't like the way the election turned out, that doesn't strike me as a recipe for long-term success. It sounds to me more like hackery than any serious investigative effort."

Kenneth P. Vogel and Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.