The Media Matters founder is back with a new organization dedicated to rebutting investigations into Biden family corruption.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we shine some sunlight on David Brock’s latest venture, take on a parody-like NBC opinion essay, and hit more media misses.
‘Facts First’
Eighteen years after founding Media Matters for America, David Brock has launched another progressive outfit aimed at combatting alleged right-wing “misinformation.”
Brock’s new group, Facts First USA, is posing as a “bipartisan organization focused on ensuring that our national discourse is grounded in facts and honest debate.” But a quick review of the group’s sparsely populated site quickly reveals its barely concealed partisan motivations:
Through research, media, digital, and paid advertising, Facts First USA will act as a Truth SWAT-team, ensuring that facts are front and center to counter bad-faith lies and misinformation. We will work to limit the reach of the right-wing rage machine – to keep it within their own echo chamber rather than allowing it to become part of the mainstream media coverage. We will proactively engage and respond to the MAGA-Majority’s abuse of the congressional oversight process by defending and counterpunching – sometimes surgically, sometimes broadly, but always methodically. And Facts First USA will win the war of public opinion by controlling the narrative – not just by defending against the partisan inquisitions but also by aggressively turning the tables on the attackers through strong counter narratives that reveal their motivations and misconduct.
The group launched in October with Brock as its president and plans to offer a Democratic response to the GOP’s planned oversight investigations into President Biden and his son Hunter. The younger Biden’s overseas business dealings and the contents of his laptop, left at a Delaware repair shop, are finally set to be the subject of much attention in the new year.
Yet Brock is perhaps the last person who should be an arbiter of facts. Brock got his start as a right-wing investigative reporter in the 1990s, before switching sides to become a Democratic attack dog.
In July 1997, he penned an essay for Esquire, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” in which he retracted much of his own prior reporting and criticized his own methods. In 2002, he wrote a book on the same topic where he suggested he had been “a whore for the cash” and a “witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine.”
After his transition from Clinton hater to Clinton defender was complete, Brock’s own delusion on the facts surrounding the Hillary Clinton email scandal led even MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski to say during an interview in 2015, “I’m not sure what planet I’m on right now.”
Brock founded Media Matters in 2004 with the mission of “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”
He left Media Matters in November 2022, but as NR reported in March 2015, the “progressive research and information center” got results:
In his 2008 Daily Caller exposé of Media Matters, Tucker Carlson noted that Media Matters in its early years had a direct line to MSNBC president Phil Griffin. “We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters employee told Carlson. It was also contributing to the content of major left-wing blogs (Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Salon) and mainstream news sources (the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, etc.). Media Matters was instrumental in the firing of shock jock Don Imus in 2007, and it has had a hand in Obama-administration decisions, working with Valerie Jarrett and the Justice Department. In November 2014, former Media Matters CEO Matthew Butler was nominated for a seat on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Now, it looks like Brock is at it again and his new group is already making inroads with the media.
The group’s co-chairman, Maria Cardona, is a Democratic political strategist and CNN political commentator, according to the Facts First website.
Cardona appeared on CNN just this weekend talking about whether Biden should run in 2024 in her capacity as a CNN political commentator. Her answer? “Hell yeah.”
CNN’s Maria Cardona – “Hell yeah” Biden should run again & McCarthy’s #CorruptBargain to get to 218 @factsfirstUSA https://t.co/TTneXYOh4W via @YouTube
— Maria Cardona (@MariaTCardona) December 18, 2022
Asked about what Republicans will do “on the appearance of legislating” with their House majority in the new year, Cardona replied:
What’s the first thing that Kevin McCarthy announces? Investigations, possible impeachments and what this tells me and we’ve actually seen him do it in the light of days is that he is involved in a corrupt bargain with the most extreme leaders members of Congress of the MAGA caucus because there’s no other way that he can get to 218 he is selling his votes left and right and what democrats are worried about and are going to try to stop every step of the way is that they are going to prioritize investigations instead of legislation in the American people deserve better.
Cardona’s comments are in the same vein as a press release Facts First published on December 7 announcing two new digital ads and a bingo card to hold House Republicans “accountable for the corrupt bargains Kevin McCarthy is striking with MAGA extremists to be Speaker.”
“Between now and January 3rd, or however long it takes, we’re going to hold Kevin McCarthy responsible for the corrupt bargains he is striking with MAGA extremists in his increasingly desperate bid to be Speaker,” Brock said in that release. “We already know he is giving free reign to Comer, Jordan, and Marjorie Taylor Greene to chase every crack pot conspiracy theory and the public has the right to know what else is being promised behind closed doors.”
Facts First USA’s team, according to its website, features former Republican congressman David Jolly as a fellow co-chairman. Jolly worked with failed Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang to co-found the new “Forward Party” in July.
The group’s executive director and counsel Michael Teter served as managing director for the 65 project, a group that aims to change bar rules of professional conduct across the U.S. to eliminate “fraudulent and malicious lawsuits” challenging election results. George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley has warned the 65 project’s efforts could “place the bar on a slippery slope where lawyers addressing novel or new legal theories can be stripped of their licenses.”
Facts First USA’s senior adviser, Melissa Moss, founded Law Works, a “bipartisan nonprofit dedicated to supporting and protecting the Mueller Investigation.”
Brock was part of a strategy meeting in September at the home of Hunter Biden’s friend and lawyer Kevin Morris in which Biden allies discussed how to fight back against the Republican investigations, according to the Washington Post. Morris reportedly suggested Hunter Biden’s team needed to be more aggressive and suggested the team could pursue defamation lawsuits against Fox News, Eric Trump, and Rudy Giuliani. He also “outlined extensive research on two potential witnesses against Hunter Biden — a spurned business partner named Tony Bobulinski and a computer repairman named John Paul Mac Isaac.”
Turley argued, “Morris’ plan could easily be taken as a declaration of all-out war on potential witnesses against Hunter Biden.”
Facts First USA later circulated a memo among major Democratic donors, members of Congress, and others in late October, saying: “The White House cannot be the sole nucleus for publicly responding to the onslaught of congressional investigations,” according to a copy of the document obtained by the New York Times.
The memo proposes allocating $5 million a year to a “SWAT team to counter Republican congressional investigations,” including topics that “may be too personal or delicate for the White House to be responding or to even be seen as directing a response.”
Brock said his group “intends to work with the White House where appropriate but will make our own judgments,” per the Times report.
Senator Ron Johnson said last week that it comes as “no surprise that Joe Biden and his allies are worried about GOP investigations into the corruption involving his family’s overseas business dealings.”
“I expect more to be revealed as a result of these investigations,” Johnson said. “Senator Grassley and I exposed the truth about Hunter Biden, the corruption in the Biden family, and how Joe Biden lied to the American public,” he continued, referring to his investigation before the 2020 election that found Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings were “problematic.”
“The corrupt news media completely dismissed and covered up our investigation and the Hunter Biden laptop with the help of federal law enforcement officials,” he said. “It is important to uncover the truth and deliver it to the American people.”
Headline Fail of the Week
If you have ever asked someone to watch your laptop when you stepped away for a moment at a café, you may have committed an ableist sin, according to a recent NBC News opinion essay, “Dear fellow cafe goers, please don’t ask me to watch your laptop.”
Brian Kateman, co-founder and president of the Reducetarian Foundation and professor of environmental science and sustainability, argues that the simple request is “irrational and disruptive” at best, but an insult to disabled people at worst:
Perhaps you expect more from the stranger who assented to watch your belongings. It’s hard to believe you wouldn’t, because asking someone to watch something of yours turns them from passive to active bystander. So perhaps you expect them to say something to the thief — or even physically intervene — to prevent an act of grand larceny. But think about it. You know nothing of the person you’ve just asked to watch your belongings. What if they have an invisible illness or disability that prevents them from stepping in? Or maybe they’re a parent of young children or a caregiver of some kind, and they think they don’t want to put themselves in a potentially dangerous situation that could leave the people who depend on them alone. Or what if they are on parole and they’re afraid of violating any conditions? Intervention could be a lot to ask of someone.
Media Misses
• Another week, another misstep by the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz:
Taylor Lorenz grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, went to a $90K Swiss boarding school, once published the home address of @libsoftiktok, and works for a newspaper owned by the second richest man in the world. pic.twitter.com/UB1j1OIOpx
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 14, 2022
• Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake descended further into absurdity this week, saying, “I identify as a proud election denying deplorable. And my pronouns are I/Won.”
She also said her husband is the second-most amazing man in her life, behind former president Trump.
• ABC News’ Martha Raddatz went to bat for President Biden during an interview with Texas governor Greg Abbott on Sunday:
ABC’s Martha Raddatz: “You talk about open borders, I don’t think I’ve ever heard President Biden say, we have an open border come on over, but people I have heard people say it are you, former President Trump, Ron DeSantis, that message reverberates in Mexico and beyond…” pic.twitter.com/kORhsTMSko
— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) December 18, 2022
Meanwhile, during a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, Biden said that migrants “deserve to be heard. That’s who we are. We’re a nation that says, ‘You want to flee, and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come.'”