David Brock, whose reporting on President Bill Clinton gave rise to the word “Troopergate,” returned to Arkansas on Tuesday for the first time in nearly 20 years.
Brock was a conservative journalist in the 1990s bent on taking down Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he has since morphed into an online media operative equally dedicated to defending the pair and other like-minded Democratic candidates. He spoke to about 50 people and a cluster of journalists at the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock.
If he had been told back in the early 1990s that he would be making a speech at the Clinton School on President Clinton Avenue next to the Clinton presidential library, Brock joked, he would “have had a stroke.”
“Troopergate” was the name given to a scandal prompted by an article Brock wrote for The American Spectator, a conservative magazine, in which Arkansas State Police troopers assigned to protect Clinton while he was governor said they helped arrange sexual liaisons for him.
Clintons
Brock sees faint “echoes” of what he did against Bill Clinton 20 years ago in what’s happening today against Hillary Clinton, who may run for president in 2016. Brock referred to critical articles on such subjects as the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Libya that left an American ambassador and three other Americans dead while Clinton was U.S. secretary of state.
Even as Brock used the podium to attack Clinton critics, he called for “our political parties to call off the smut mongers” so the “truth isn’t strangled by the special interests.”
Brock first drew public attention in 1993 as the author of the best-selling book The Real Anita Hill. Hill had accused Clarence Thomas, now a U.S. Supreme Court justice, of sexually harassing her. The allegations surfaced during Thomas’ 1991 Senate confirmation hearings.
Brock later went to work for The American Spectator. He said he underwent a heartfelt change in his attitude about the Clintons while he was researching his book The Seduction of Hillary Rodham and, as a result, later repudiated and apologized for his earlier writings. Research for that book sent him to Arkansas in 1995, the last time he was in the state before Tuesday, he said.
In 2004, Brock founded Media Matters for America, which describes itself as a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation.”
He also founded American Bridge 21st Century, a political action committee that calls itself “a progressive research and communications organization committed to holding Republicans accountable for their words and actions and helping you ascertain when Republican candidates are pretending to be something they’re not.”
Together, the two organizations employ 165 people, according to a New York Times article documenting Brock’s activities. American Bridge,the newspaper reported, has received donations from a network of wealthy Clinton supporters, including George Soros, who has given $500,000 to the organization; Susie Tompkins Buell of San Francisco, who has given $400,000; and Stephen M. Silberstein, who gave $200,000.
More recently, Brock has founded the Correct the Record, which is designed to be “a dedicated research and rapid response communications project to prevent Republicans from denigrating potential Democratic candidates with baseless attacks, while potential Republican candidates reinvent themselves and their records without scrutiny.”
During a question-and-answer session after his speech, Brock said his efforts on behalf of the Clintons and progressive causes was an attempt to “make some good out of a bad experience.”
In a brief meeting with reporters, Brock declined to discuss his relationship with the Clintons.
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 03/26/2014