There aren’t many people on the planet who hate Donald Trump – and love Hillary Clinton – with the Savonarola intensity of a David Brock.


But the Democratic dark-arts impresario has come to believe, in the harsh light of last month’s bitter loss, that Clinton’s biggest problem was simply not being more like Trump, at least when it came to dealing with the press. But in an extended clear-the-decks session on POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast, he aired a long list of grievances against Clinton’s Brooklyn-based campaign for not defending her forcefully enough.

And he thinks Democrats should adopt another GOP strategy: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s declaration that Republicans should rebuild their party by fighting everything Barack Obama proposed to make him a one-term president.

“We're in a bad situation, the Democratic Party,” he said. “Hillary Clinton's loss has exposed the lack of Democratic power in this country at all levels. … But we won the popular vote; we ought to act like it. And so I think the strategy is — it's pretty simple. The strategy is to keep Trump unpopular and let me tell you why we need to keep him unpopular.”

Brock, an edgy former Clinton hunter-turned-defender, is expressing an opinion increasingly being shared by many on Clinton’s campaign team: They shouldn’t have bothered to defend the endless and endlessly damaging email story – they should have refused to defend it all and pivoted to a harsh, attention-grabbing attack on her real opponent: the press.

“Look, this is a lesson learned,” Brock told me for this week’s episode of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast. “Donald Trump intimidated the press and bullied the press. I’m not saying you have to intimidate and bully, but you have to be tough. The press are animals and they need to be treated that way.”

OK, that was nice. But Brock, despite his fierce reputation, is a charmer – he smiled semi-apologetically as we were sitting in a rented conference room in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood after he delivered the animals line. “Oh, present company excepted,” he added, without much evident conviction.

Brock’s particular beef is with the cable networks and the New York Times, which broke the email story in the first place (he does concede that they have been “tough” on Trump, too). But his war-on-the-biased-media approach is a throwback for him: He made his name as a right-wing hit man in the 1990s (breaking a string of deeply unflattering stories on Clinton’s Arkansas doings for the American Spectator), then jumping the wall to start a media watchdog group, Media Matters, geared at covering Clinton’s flank in the buildup to her 2008 presidential campaign.

It was in that capacity I first encountered Brock – a garrulous and social guy who had cut off contact with many of his reporter friends in service of his new gig – in 2007 when he was wearing his war paint. After I wrote a series of stories for Newsday detailing insider fundraising arrangements with deep-pocketed Democratic donors, the group came after me – and lobbied my editors in New York to rein me in (unsuccessfully).

Over the years, however, Brock has taken on a far more expansive role in the establishment of outside political groups, using his fundraising skills to create a network of Democratic-allied organizations that have supported the efforts of Clinton and her allies – Correct the Record, his opposition-research shop was allowed, under law, to coordinate with Clinton’s campaign in 2016. But Clinton’s loss – which poses an existential (and financial challenge) to all the key players in her extended political and fundraising orbit – has him rethinking the left’s relationship with the media and second-guessing Clinton’s veteran press operation.

“I say she was poorly advised,” Brock said. “There was a slow-motion swift boating of Hillary Clinton in ’15. I know you think Democrats would have learned from ’04, but no."

“What could one have done?” he went on. “The lesson the swift boating thing was to lean in.” Brock thinks it was a mistake for Clinton to have apologized for keeping a private email server.

“She should have just said, in my opinion, ‘This was allowed.’” he told me. “I wouldn’t have apologized. Once you apologize, then the press wants you to get down on your knees and say you’re sorry. They are not appeasable. Trump apologized for nothing, including the horrible tape, right? No apology.”

He speaks with grudging admiration for Trump’s team – which quickly pivoted from responding to the damning Access Hollywood tape by trotting out three women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct in the ‘90s. “My sister voted for Donald Trump and her response was, ‘It was locker room talk,’” he said. “So it worked. My sister got the talking point, OK?”

Brock’s bottom line: In 2015, when she needed to fight back early, “Hillary was not defended.”

If Brooklyn should have deflected attacks – who should have actually defended Clinton? Brock points to outside groups, especially Priorities USA, the pro-Clinton super PAC that raised nearly $200 million to run a spate of ads, many of them targeting Trump. “I don’t know where Priorities was,” said Brock, a longtime board member who was barred from decision-making at the group by federal law.

Another big problem: Brock says that the candidate endured months of attacks on the Clinton Foundation simply because no one at the campaign wanted the responsibility of defending Bill Clinton when a right-wing funded book Clinton Cash came out in 2015. “There was disagreement between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton campaign about how to mount a defense,” he told me. “My speculation is that there was a view inside that the foundation, somehow, wasn’t Hillary’s problem, even though her name was on it, and let the foundation clean up whatever they need to clean up on their own.”

He also took issue with Clinton’s digital operation, saying he laid out his case for revamping the campaign’s online and smartphone operations in a heated mid-campaign conversation with Bill Clinton.

“I talked to him about the fact that the campaign had no discernable online strategy. I talked to him probably around Iowa or New Hampshire. It’s not my area of expertise, but I said, ‘There’s something wrong in the digital operation because it’s not connecting. Sanders is connecting.’ They were slow to realize Sanders was connecting. And I said, ‘Something has to be done.’ And so nothing was done.”

And he’s still smarting over a rebuke, delivered via a tweet by campaign chairman John Podesta, when he demanded to see Sanders’ medical records as the Vermont independent was surging. “I tried to have a strategy with regards to Senator Sanders,” Brock said. “I was told by the campaign that there was none and nothing would work. 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.”

Clinton, he says, loved what he was doing. “She was asked the next morning, on the Sunday shows, about this, and she could have thrown me under the bus,” he added. “And she said that he should release his records, just like she did. And then he did release them.”

Top officials at Clinton’s campaign, it should be noted, view all a lot of this as the shoot-the-wounded pronouncements of an operative prone to excessive I-told-you-so. “David is out there for David,” said one senior Clinton campaign official – but even that person conceded, “Our hands were tied on a lot of things he’s talking about.”

For all his reputation as a merciless hired gun (and, from time to time, the boss from hell), Brock is known among his friends for loyalty and providing emotional support in times of trouble. Pizzagate – the alt-right targeting of a D.C. family restaurant Comet Ping Pong based on a made-up story that the eatery was being used as a Clinton-controlled sex-trafficking operation – was personal to him: His ex-boyfriend, James Alefantis, owns the place and has been the subject of multiple death threats, before and after a heavily armed North Carolina man shot up a closet door seeking evidence of the fictional sex plot.

“We lived together for 10 years in a relationship that ended five years ago,” Brock told me. “James has his own relationship with John Podesta and in the WikiLeaks, it came out that James had written to John about doing a Hillary fundraiser at Comet. So this was seen and a conspiracy theory was woven around it and what you had was kind of an insane crowdsourcing of the issue and they found the link to me pretty quickly. So I think it added fuel to the fire. And so it's frightening, though, because the fake news and I saw it firsthand. Has real consequences.”

Then Brock’s voice broke.

“So… James came to my house last Thursday night, so a week ago, to show me the latest death threats on his phone and they were so vile and so menacing — it's very upsetting,” he said, stopping to collect himself.

“I’m scared,” he added. It’s not quite clear if he was talking about Pizzagate or Trump, and maybe it doesn’t matter.

