AP Photo David Brock: The New York Times has 'a special place in hell' The pro-Clinton crusader accuses former D.C. bureau chief Carolyn Ryan of helping to turn the paper into a 'megaphone for conservative propaganda.'

David Brock’s war against the New York Times just went nuclear — and the paper is responding with equal fury.

Brock, the former right-wing journalist-turned-pro-Clinton crusader, takes aim at a top New York Times editor in a soon-to-be released book obtained by POLITICO. In the book, titled "Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary Clinton and Hijack Your Government,” Brock accuses senior politics editor and former Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan of helping to turn the paper into a “megaphone for conservative propaganda” by unfairly targeting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.


The founder of liberal watchdog groups Media Matters and Correct the Record casts Bill and Hillary Clinton, whom he tormented in the 1990s as a reporter with the American Spectator, as personal and political angels who offered him access to some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors.

But he uses the book as a platform to attack the Times — whose editorial board endorsed Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008 — over its approach towards the Clintons from the Whitewater investigations of the 1990s to the current coverage of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

“As it concerns Clinton coverage, the Times will have a special place in hell,” he writes, claiming that interviews with current Times employees prove his case.

The 52-year-old Brock singles out Ryan, who directs the Times’ political coverage, for refusing to publish in full a Clinton spokesman’s response to the paper’s March scoop detailing Clinton’s use of a “homebrew” email server instead of her official State Department email account.

“Ryan held forth to colleagues that the response from [spokesman Nick Merrill] had been edited down to a few stray phrases because she — Carolyn Ryan — believed it was a lie — and that the Clintons just lie,” Brock writes, citing unnamed sources inside the Times New York newsroom.

“She has a hard-on for Hillary,” Brock quotes an anonymous Times source telling him. “She wants that coonskin nailed to the wall.”

A spokesperson for the paper — responding to inquiries sent to Ryan — emphatically denied Brock’s allegations and accused him of embarking on a politically motivated crusade to discredit accurate, fair-minded reporting.

"David Brock is an opportunist and a partisan who specializes in personal attacks,” Eileen Murphy told POLITICO in an email.

“We've seen him lash out at some of our aggressive coverage of important political figures and it's unsurprising that he has now turned personal. He's wrong on all counts,” she added.

Ryan, who on Tuesday was replaced by Elisabeth Bumiller as Washington bureau chief after two years in the job, is now focusing her time solely on the paper’s 2016 coverage as senior editor for politics.

The title change was largely symbolic, since Bumiller took over the day-to-day business of running the Washington bureau in January. Ryan, known for her unapologetically aggressive coverage of the candidates, including Clinton, is now back in New York full time.

Several Times reporters interviewed in recent months say Ryan, a former editor at the Boston Globe, is simply a hard-nosed editor doing her job.

"Carolyn Ryan has edited nearly every story I've written about the Clintons since I moved to the beat in 2013. She has always been a fair-minded, inspiring and brilliant editor who has never shown even a hint of bias (for or against) any candidate we cover," Times reporter Amy Chozick said in an email. "I suppose being viciously attacked by both sides goes with the territory, but it is unfortunate that one of the best editors in the business is the target this time."

When asked for details on Brock’s newsroom sourcing, a spokesman for his publisher, the Hachette Book Group, said he’d spoken to a “handful of people in [the Times’] New York and Washington newsrooms” but wouldn’t go into specifics.

Still, it’s not the first time Ryan has been accused of being anti-Clinton by pro-Clinton allies. The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove delved into the Times/Clinton relationship and how many Clinton allies claim Ryan is out to get Clinton just last week.

"[Clinton ally and editor of the liberal-leaning National Memo Joe] Conason and others said certain unidentified Times reporters have privately expressed concern about the Washington bureau chief’s championing of aggressive, occasionally damaging reporting about the Democratic frontrunner,” Grove wrote.

The Times, led by reporter Michael Schmidt, has mostly led the pack on the server story. Clinton’s use of a private email account — which may have been used to receive classified emails — prompted a Department of Justice investigation and raised new questions about her candor, transparency and trustworthiness. Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has vaulted ahead of Clinton in recent New Hampshire polls and tied her in Iowa, where she had held a 20-plus point lead weeks ago.

Moreover, her weakness — and questions about Clinton’s viability in a general election — has enticed Vice President Joe Biden into a seriously considering another presidential run despite a lack of campaign cash or infrastructure.

Yet the Times has also committed significant missteps on this story and was called out by the paper’s own watchdog as examples of rushed but honest reporting.

In March, after Schmidt’s first story about the server appeared, Brock penned an open letter to the editors citing the use of “innuendo” throughout the piece meant to impugn Clinton’s integrity. Public editor Margaret Sullivan called his claims “over the top” but said the reporting was “not without fault” — conceding the story’s reference to State Department regulations on the email servers was unnecessarily vague.

Ryan, in an interview with Sullivan at the time, gave less ground. “There is an ardent group of readers who want her to be the next president and are reflexively skeptical of any criticism,” she said, adding that it was the responsibility of the paper’s reporters to “shut out the noise.”

The Times committed a far more serious error in late July, when Schmidt and another reporter published a story alleging that the the inspectors general had made a referral to the Justice Department, asking it to open a criminal investigation into Clinton’s use of the private server. The referral turned out to be non-criminal — rather a "security referral." The Clinton campaign demanded a correction — and the paper obliged.

In a scathing after-action report, Sullivan singled out a chain of reporting and editing errors (the story was edited by another editor with Ryan on vacation at the time) and criticized the decision to repeatedly update the story without detailed explanations of the changes. “[T]he inaccuracies and changes in the story were handled as they came along, with little explanation to readers, other than routine corrections,” she wrote. “You can’t put stories like this back in the bottle — they ripple through the entire news system. ... So it was, to put it mildly, a mess.”

To Brock, these weren’t isolated missteps by an honest newsgathering operation but evidence of a decades-long pattern of bias that also included the decision to enter a publishing agreement with the conservative author of “Clinton Cash,” which detailed the fundraising activities of the family’s charitable foundation.

Brock’s new book and his determination to defend the Clintons stems, he says, from his oft-professed desire to make amends after aggressively pursuing a slew of damaging stories about Bill Clinton’s sexual affairs, funded by conservatives, in the 1990s.

He first detailed his stunning conversion to the Clinton cause in his 2002 tell-all memoir "Blinded by the Right," which exposed a well-funded, carefully organized campaign to undermine the Clintons spearheaded by conservative activist Richard Mellon Scaife and others.

In "Killing the Messenger", due out next week, Brock describes how the Clintons quickly switched from prey to patrons, setting him on his current path as a fundraiser and progressive provocateur.

Hillary Clinton, he writes, encouraged his creation of groups geared at fighting back against Republicans — and the media — offering the services of a trusted aide, Kelly Craighead, who connected him with wealthy donors.

Shortly after "Blinded" was published, Bill Clinton called him at home to lavish praise on his expose. Later, Brock was invited to the former president’s Harlem office where he was shocked to discover Clinton had purchased dozens of copies — and stuffed them into a big cabinet.

Clinton, Brock writes, “was sending them across the country and urging friends to read it. ... I probably owe him some royalties.”



CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated the New York Times had reported the Department of Justice had opened up a criminal probe in to Clinton's use of the private server. The Times initially reported that the inspectors general had made a referral to the Justice Department, asking it to open a criminal investigation.