David Brock

In 2019, the American Bridge PAC disclosed $250,000 in independent expenditures for anti-Trump advertisements, according to the filings posted to the FEC's website. Earlier in the year, the organisation announced it will launch a $50 million effort to "weaken" Trump in Midwest states for the 2020 presidential election. Brock's efforts against the Republican Party have been criticised and referred to as "useless" by Democratic operatives.

The New York Times reported in December 2017 that a group founded by Brock had spent $200,000 in an unsuccessful effort to bring forward accusations of sexual misconduct against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race. He was reportedly considering doing the same to congressional Republicans.

Brock was formerly the domestic partner of William Grey; Fox News reported that their relationship ended in a bitter, three-year-long legal battle in which "Brock and Grey traded angry accusations, ... replete with charges of blackmail, theft and financial malfeasance" related to a house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware that the two once shared. The news channel further reported that Grey filed a lawsuit against Brock in January 2011, and Brock countersued Grey in March 2011. The dispute was settled at the end of 2011 on confidential terms. On March 22, 2017, Brock suffered a heart attack while at work at Media Matters headquarters; he was expected to fully recover.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks criticized Brock's negative coverage of the Bernie Sanders 2016 Presidential Campaign, specifically the alleged invention of the "Bernie Bro" controversy. Uygur said that Brock's January 10, 2017 open letter of apology to Sanders and his voters was disingenuous because it was motivated by a desire to raise money from wealthy Democratic donors and to foster a perception of himself as being a member of the U.S. progressive movement.

Politico reported in January 2016 that Brock was preparing a new advertisement that would call on presidential candidate Bernie Sanders "to release his medical records before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1." Brock was subjected to a storm of criticism for this plan, and only hours after Politico's report, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta scolded Brock on Twitter.

At a campaign event in Iowa in late January 2016, Bernie Sanders denied any plans to "bus in out-of-state college students to caucus for him," charging that this was a lie and attributing it to Brock.

It was reported on February 1, 2016, that Brock was still drawing a salary from American Bridge 21st Century, which was legally prohibited from coordinating with the Clinton campaign, while also drawing a salary from Correct the Record, which was "directly working with the Clinton campaign on Internet-based pushback against the controversies that have dogged her presidential bid." This situation was described as "pushing campaign finance boundaries," with experts saying that Brock had found loopholes to circumvent campaign finance restrictions. Robert Maguire of the Center for Responsive Politics suggested that Brock was "running a shadow campaign" via a network of groups that Maguire called "the Brocktopus."

On February 8, 2016, after the near-tie in the Iowa caucuses between Clinton and Sanders, Brock told Politico that "Senator Sanders is trying to live in the purity bubble, and it needs to be burst." He described Sanders's efforts to link Clinton to Wall Street as an "artful smear," and, in a reference to the Democratic National Committee's passing of data to the Sanders campaign the previous December, said that Clinton "would've been hounded out of the race if her staff had done what his did, in stealing data and misleading the press about it, then raising money off it." Clinton's campaign, Brock insisted, "has stayed remarkably positive in the face of a relentlessly negative campaign from Sanders." As for Sanders's platform, Brock maintained that "a unanimous chorus of serious progressive commentators ... find almost nothing of any substantive value in his so-called policies."

When Brock proposed the idea of Media Matters, Hillary Clinton invited him to the Clintons' Chappaqua home to pitch the idea to potential donors. MMA, according to a 2015 article in The Daily Beast, "operates from a posh Washington office space with a multi-million-dollar budget and nearly 100 employees." In 2014, The Nation stated that "Brock, in partnership with fundraiser Mary Pat Bonner—often described as his secret weapon—has turned out to be unparalleled at maintaining rich liberals' loyalty and support." An insider told The Nation that Brock and Bonner "are probably the most effective major-individual-donor fundraising team ever assembled in the independent-expenditure progressive world."

It was reported in June 2015 that when the House Select Committee on Benghazi questioned Sidney Blumenthal, committee members asked no fewer than 45 questions about Brock and Media Matters. The committee was reportedly interested in Sidney Blumenthal's paid work for Brock's nonprofits, and in the question of "whether Blumenthal and Brock did anything improper as they helped Clinton manage the political fallout from the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, while she was secretary of State."

In September 2015, Brock and Correct the Record produced a piece on Bernie Sanders, linking him to Hugo Chavez and British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

In his 2015 book Killing the Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary Clinton and Hijack Your Government, Brock described "how the Clintons quickly switched from prey to patrons, setting him on his current path as a fundraiser and progressive provocateur." In the book, Brock accused The New York Times of being a “megaphone for conservative propaganda” directed inordinately at Clinton. He was particularly critical of the Times's senior politics editor and former Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan. At the same time, in the words of Politico, he depicted Bill and Hillary Clinton "as personal and political angels."

In October 2015, Brock gave a presentation at Georgetown University entitled "Is the Mainstream Media in Cahoots with Conservatives?".

In 2015, Brock formed an investment venture, True Blue Media, to purchase an 80 percent stake in Blue Nation Review, an online news website. Blue Nation Review was later re-branded as Shareblue.

The Los Angeles Times has described Brock as “integral to Hillary's run” for the presidency in 2016. A March 6, 2015, article in National Review noted that while other “Democratic kingmakers” were “in retreat” in the wake of the news that Hillary Clinton had “used a private e-mail account on a private server to avoid public scrutiny while secretary of state,” Brock remained fiercely loyal. Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe in 2015, Brock insisted that Clinton had violated no rules by using a private email server.

It was reported on September 1, 2015, that a batch of Hillary Clinton's emails that had been made public included one from Brock entitled "Memo on Impeaching Clarence Thomas." In the memo, Brock discussed possible ways of trying to bring down the Supreme Court justice whose cause he had championed in The Real Anita Hill.

Many readers on the left, however, greeted the book with enthusiasm, and eagerly welcomed Brock. This was especially true of the Clintons. Shortly after the book's publication, Bill Clinton phoned Brock at home and praised it lavishly. Later, according to Politico, "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, it turned out, was mailing them to friends across the country. Clinton "insisted" that Brock contact his speaking agent and give talks around the country attacking conservatives. According to The Nation, Democratic donors "loved Brock's conversion story, particularly since he'd been inside the machine they hoped to replicate." Brock's book is seen as having propelled him into a favorable position among the Democratic Party establishment.

The group has more than 80 staffers. It has researchers based in Washington, D.C., plus "a national network of professional trackers" who follow the moves and statements of every conceivable contender for the Republican nomination. The Nation has described American Bridge as "the natural next step" after MMA, explaining that "Brock took the Media Matters method—which involves monitoring virtually every word uttered by the right-wing media—and transferred it to the realm of Republican politicians." Democratic operative Paul Begala told The Nation that in 2012 American Bridge "produced for us a 950-page book of every business deal of Mitt Romney's career. We spent something like $65 million [2012 election], and I believe every single ad was in some ways informed by Brock's research."

In early 2014, Brock was named to the board of Priorities USA Action as the super PAC also announced its support for a possible Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2016. In February 2015, Brock abruptly resigned his position with the super PAC. In his resignation letter, he accused Priorities officials of conducting "an orchestrated political hit job" against MMA and American Bridge. The New York Times had run an article questioning his groups' fundraising practices, and he charged that "current and former Priorities officials were behind this specious and malicious attack on the integrity of these critical organizations." His resignation “set off panic among influential Democrats,” because his other groups' research “provides the foundation for the multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns created with Priorities cash” and because “key Priorities donors have long-standing personal ties with him.” Brock was persuaded to return to Priorities later in 2015.

In 2014, Brock relaunched the American Independent News Network, formerly a network of progressive state-based reporting outlets, into the American Independent Institute, a group which provides grants for liberal investigative journalism projects. Brock serves as the group's president. The Institute finances journalists "investigating rightwing activities." In 2014, it gave $320,000 in grants "to reporters investigating right-wing misdeeds."

In 2014, Brock became the chairman of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington board of directors, in what was characterized as a more explicitly partisan stance for the organization. Brock was elected as CREW's board president after laying out a broad plan to turn the organization into a more muscular and partisan organization. Politico described this as “a major power play that aligns liberal muscle more fully behind the Democratic Party — and Hillary Clinton” and said that Brock had set forth a plan "to turn the group into a more muscular — and likely partisan — attack dog."

In late 2013 Brock founded Correct the Record, described by The New York Times as Hillary Clinton's "own personal media watchdog," keeping track of all negative news surrounding her. Brock had first come up with the idea for the group that summer. "Having left the State Department," he said, "Clinton didn't have the kind of robust operation that one would have if one was holding public office. That's where I saw the need." The organization, whose staff "is crammed into a newsroom-style bullpen in the back corner of the offices of American Bridge 21st Century," "keeps constant watch for any conceivable attacks against her, and then aggressively beats them back before they take hold."

Later in January, Brock responded to a Sanders campaign ad by telling the Associated Press: "From this ad, it seems black lives don't matter much to Bernie Sanders," Sanders aides responded by accusing Brock of "mudslinging." Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement: "Bernie Sanders, as everyone knows, has one of the strongest civil rights records in Congress. He doesn't need lectures on civil rights and racial issues from David Brock, the head of a Hillary Clinton Super Pac." Briggs added: "Twenty-five years ago it was Brock – a mud-slinging, right-wing extremist – who tried to destroy Anita Hill, a distinguished African American law professor. He later was forced to apologize for his lies about her. Today, he is lying about Sen Sanders. It's bad enough that Hillary Clinton is raising millions in special-interest money in her Super Pacs. It is worse that she would hire a mudslinger like David Brock."

Brock announced in 2010 that he was forming a Super PAC, American Bridge 21st Century, to help elect liberal Democrats, starting with the 2012 election cycle. In 2011, Brock founded the PAC, which seeks "to track every utterance of every major GOP candidate." The Los Angeles Times described him as having "reinvented the art of opposition research." The group's work reportedly "did so much damage to Republicans in the 2012 elections" that they sought to replicate Brock's efforts.

Brock was active in Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency in 2008.

In 2004, he founded Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization which describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media". He has since also founded super PACs called American Bridge 21st Century and Correct the Record, has become a board member of the super PAC Priorities USA Action and has been elected chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Brock directly addressed the right-wing "machine" in his 2004 book, The Republican Noise Machine, in which he detailed an alleged interconnected, concerted effort to raise the profile of conservative opinions in the press through false accusations of liberal media bias, dishonest and highly partisan columnists, partisan news organizations and academic studies, and other methods.

Also in 2004, he featured briefly in the BBC series The Power of Nightmares, where he stated that the Arkansas Project engaged in political terrorism.

In 2004, Brock founded the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America (MMA) which describes itself as being “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” Brock said that he founded the organization to combat the conservative journalism sector that he had once been a part of. He founded the group with help from the Center for American Progress. Initial donors included Leo Hindery, Susie Tompkins Buell, and James Hormel. Media Matters is known for its aggressive criticism of conservative journalists and media outlets, including its "War on Fox News." The New York Times, in a 2008 profile, called MMA "a highly partisan research organization" and quoted Democratic operative James Carville as saying that MMA was "more effective than any single entity" on the left. Pollster Frank Luntz called MMA "one of the most destructive organizations associated with American politics today." In a 2011 interview with Politico, Brock vowed to wage "guerrilla warfare and sabotage" against Fox News.

After the success of The Real Anita Hill, Simon & Schuster's then-conservative-focused Free Press subsidiary paid Brock a large advance to write a book about Hillary Clinton. The expectation was that it would be a takedown in the style of his writings on Anita Hill and Bill Clinton. The project, however, took a different turn, and the resulting book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, proved to be largely sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton. Given the large advance and tight one-year deadline by Free Press, Brock was under tremendous pressure to produce another bestseller. However, the book contained no major scoops. In Blinded by the Right (2002), Brock said that he had reached a turning point: he had thoroughly examined charges against the Clintons, could not find any evidence of wrongdoing and did not want to make any more misleading claims. Brock further said that his former friends in right-wing politics shunned him because Seduction did not adequately attack the Clintons. National Review proposed another theory: since "no liberal source in the world would talk to Brock", he could not collect the kind of information he was after. National Review also suggested that while writing the book, Brock had been "seduced" by Sidney Blumenthal, a champion and friend of the Clinton circle.

Brock's book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative was published in 2002. In this book, an "outgrowth" of Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man, Brock charted what the Daily Beast called his "remarkable metamorphosis to ardent acolyte from sworn enemy of Bill and Hillary Clinton." Brock apologized for his attacks on the Clintons and Anita Hill and claimed that he had now risen above character assassination. He wrote that he had been "a mad dog, an emotional monster," "a whore for the cash," "a Jew in Hitler's army," and "a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine," and asserted that he hadn't known "what good reporting was."

In 2001, Brock accused one of his former sources, Terry Wooten, of leaking FBI files for use in his book about Anita Hill. Brock defended his betrayal of a confidential source by saying, "I've concluded that what I was involved in wasn't journalism, it was a political operation, and I was part of it.... So I don't think the normal rules of journalism would apply to what I was doing".

In 2001, Jonah Goldberg wrote in National Review that while Brock has been "hailed by liberals for 'coming clean,' they would never really trust him." He quoted reporter Jill Abramson as having said that "the problem with Brock's credibility" is that "once you admit you've knowingly written false things, how do you know when to believe what he writes?" Similarly, The Guardian referred in 2014 to "residual unease among some liberal operatives that Brock's conversion story fits into a pattern of opportunism and self-promotion rather than ideological transformation." Observing in 2015 that Brock had admitted to mudslinging before, The Daily Beast noted a difficulty in dispatching fears he would do it again.

Writing again for Esquire in April 1998, Brock apologized to Clinton for his muckraking journalism about Troopergate.

In July 1997, Esquire magazine published a confessional piece by Brock entitled "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man" in which he recanted much of what he said in his two best-known American Spectator articles and criticized his own reporting methods. Discouraged at the reaction his Hillary Clinton biography received, he said, "I ... want out. David Brock the Road Warrior of the Right is dead." Four months later, The American Spectator declined to renew his employment contract, under which he was being paid over $300,000 per year.

In a January 1994 The American Spectator story about Bill Clinton's time as governor of Arkansas, Brock, by then on staff at the magazine, made accusations that bred Troopergate. Among other things, the story contained the first printed reference to Paula Jones, referring to a woman named "Paula" who state troopers said offered to be Clinton's partner. Jones called Brock's account of her encounter with Clinton "totally wrong", and she later sued Clinton for sexual harassment, a case that became entangled in the independent counsel's investigation of the Whitewater controversy, and set in motion a series of developments that led to the exposure of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and, ultimately, to Clinton's impeachment trial. The story received an award later that year from Joseph Farah's Western Journalism Center, and was partially responsible for a rise in the magazine's circulation.

In March 1992, in a 17,000-word article for The American Spectator, Brock challenged the claims of Anita Hill, who had accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Shortly thereafter Brock became a full-time staff member at that publication. In 1993, Brock expanded his article into a book, The Real Anita Hill. Brock's description of Hill in the book as "a bit nutty and a bit slutty" was widely quoted.

Brock began his career as a right-wing investigative reporter during the 1990s. He wrote the book The Real Anita Hill and the Troopergate story, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. In the late-1990s, he switched sides, aligning himself with the Democratic Party and in particular with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

While he was at Berkeley, Brock contributed an op-ed to The Wall Street Journal entitled "Combating Those Campus Marxists". It drew the attention of John Podhoretz, who at the time was the editor of Insight, a weekly newsmagazine published by The Washington Times. Podhoretz flew Brock to Washington, D.C., for an interview and hired him as a writer of the weekly conservative news magazine Insight on the News, a sister publication of The Washington Times, a job Brock took up in 1986.

He graduated from Berkeley with a B.A. in history in 1985.

David Brock (born July 23, 1962) is an American liberal political consultant, author, and commentator who founded the media watchdog group Media Matters for America. He has been described by Time as "one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party".