Elections

Clinton Surrogate Accuses Media Of ‘Collusion’ Against Hillary, Takes Jab At Jeb

Chuck Ross Investigative Reporter
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One of Hillary Clinton’s most ardent defenders took aim at the Koch brothers and Jeb Bush during an interview Thursday and accused the mainstream media of being in “collusion” against the Democratic presidential candidate.

David Brock had particularly harsh words for The New York Times, which he told Politico’s Mike Allen he is more “irritated” with than Fox News, a longtime target of his media watchdog group, Media Matters.

Brock and other Clinton allies are upset with The Times over various articles it has published on the Clinton email scandal. Late last month, the paper reported that Clinton was the target of a criminal probe by the Justice Department. The Times corrected the story to reflect that Justice was inquiring about Clinton’s emails and that it was not technically looking into criminal wrongdoing.

“There’s collusion here,” Brock told Allen of the mainstream media’s coverage of Clinton.

“You’ve got Hillary Clinton as the sole target of 17 Republican candidates, of Congress and of the media, and it goes all the way back to Watergate, if you really want to get into it.”

Asked by Allen whether he thinks that mainstream journalists are right-wing conservatives, Brock said that he doesn’t think they fit into that camp ideologically.

Instead, he said that “they get used” by Republicans.

“There’s an intense competition on the Clinton beat, first of all. Everybody wants to be first,” said Brock, adding that he thinks that in the case of The Times,  it is “certainly possible that they rushed the story out.”

“She’s the big prey, and the incentive is to try to be first and to nail that prey,” Brock said of Clinton.

“Latter-day Watergate plumbers planting these stories all over the place, and the mainstream media sometimes is a vehicle for that.”

During the interview, Brock also downplayed Jeb Bush’s standing as the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination. He said that Clinton issued a “technical knockout” of the former Florida governor during an event at which both candidates appeared last week.

Clinton took specific aim at Bush during a speech at the National Urban League’s convention.

Brock asserted that during her speech, Clinton “shredded [Bush’s] reputation as a moderate, showed him to be a reactionary that he is.” Brock added that Bush is “almost Dickensian in that you’re almost waiting for him to advocate debtor’s prisons.”

But when Bush took the stage later, he did not respond to Clinton’s jabs until after the event when he complained of Clinton’s breach of civility. But the ever-aggressive Brock couldn’t resist adding even more spin by attempting to portray Clinton as a victim of Bush’s unfair attacks.

Brock said that Bush’s response “read to me as if, well you know, ‘Hillary Clinton should defer to me,’ and it read as a kind of class entitlement.”

Because of what Brock claims was Clinton’s resounding defeat of Bush, he said that what he’s looking for in Thursday’s first GOP debate is a Republican “who stands up there and says ‘I’m the guy who can stand up to Hillary.'”

“Jeb’s already failed the test,” Brock said.

Brock did criticize the entire Republican field, and focused in on an appearance many candidates made last weekend at a confab hosted by the Koch brothers, the billionaires who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting numerous conservative and libertarian candidates and causes.

Brock said that while Thursday’s debate is important, “the more important debate may have been last weekend…where [Republican candidates] were out there competing for the affections of the Koch brothers.”

“Whoever the candidate on the Republican side is will be beholden to the Koch brothers and their agenda,” said Brock, though noting that Donald Trump is the sole GOP candidate who won’t need the billionaire brothers’ support.

To nobody’s surprise, Brock also doted on Clinton during the interview. He reiterated something he wrote in 1996 in which he said that he thought it was possible someday “that [Clinton] would be as or greater a historical figure than her husband.”

“I still believe that today,” Brock said, adding that he expects Clinton to win the 2016 and 2020 elections.

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