In the eighth episode of the Culture Caucus podcast, John Heilemann and Will Leitch discuss the obligations of docudramas: Do they have to stick to the historical record?

Last Saturday, the film Confirmation, a dramatic exploration of the infamous Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 1991, debuted on HBO. The film received mostly positive reviews, and it served to conjure up all those ugly memories of 25 years ago, and force us to wonder if we’d learned anything since. The hearings were a flashpoint for issues of gender and race and the workplace—debates that we still haven’t entirely pinned down today. Plus, it was fun to watch Greg Kinnear’s Joe Biden impersonation.

In the eighth episode of the Culture Caucus podcast, we look at Confirmation and, more broadly, at the notion of docudramas. How much obligation do they have to stick to the historical record? Does it matter if they’re factual if they tell a more emotional truth? And is their most important job simply to entertain, or to educate? Or neither? We discuss the film and also John’s specific experience with the HBO adaptation of the book Game Change, which he wrote with our own Mark Halperin. What’s it like seeing your words turned into cinema?
In the second half of the podcast, we talk to Jane Mayer, whose new book, Dark Money, is about the Koch brothers’ influence in politics. She also co-wrote, with Jill Abramson, the book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, about the Thomas hearings, and she discusses her thoughts on the film, how truthful it feels, and which sections she found to be a cop out.
Mayer is amazing, and it’s worth downloading just to listen to her, even if you’re sick of us.

With a cinematic take on Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation and Anita Hill, director Rick Famuyiwa had to look back to go forward.
JOE BERKOWITZ

04.15.16 8:47 AM
Director Rick Famuyiwa’s debut, The Wood, was a semi-autobiographical film set in Inglewood, where he grew up, and filled with characters based on the family and friends who helped shape his young life. Last year’s Dope, about an ambitious teen trying to go from Inglewood to Harvard, also drew from Famuyiwa’s experience, in a less direct way. With his latest feature, though, for the first time ever, he’s recreating a piece of history he only experienced, like nearly everyone else around at the time did, by watching along on TV.
Rick Famuyiwa
Famuyiwa was at the University of Southern California in 1991, when the hearing began for Clarence Thomas’s confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice. He was a political science major at the time, having not yet transferred to his film school destiny, and so when the hearing gravitated toward Anita Hill, Famuyiwa was riveted. He recognized that he was living through a radical chapter of the kind of history he and his classmates were losing sleep studying. Now, 25 years later, he’s hoping his cinematic version of that moment, Confirmation, will have the same entrancing effect on HBO viewers.
Confirmation stars Kerry Washington as Anita Hill, the lawyer whose reluctant accusations against her former boss at the Department of Education and Equal Opportunity Commission, Clarence Thomas, brought about an increased focus on sexual harassment, and empowered women to speak up about it. (Thomas is played by HBO vet, Wendell Pierce, from The Wire and Treme.) Although Famuyiwa was familiar from his other films with investigating his past, he had to adjust his approach to directing when it came to examining—and reproducing—Americans’ shared past. In advance of Confirmation’s premiere on April 16, Co.Create talked with Famuyiwa about objectivity, old footage, and how we used to get our news.
THE WHOLE WORLD USED TO WATCH THINGS TOGETHER
“It was interesting, when I went back and realized the testimony only took place over three days total,” Famuyiwa says. “My recollection for the time was that it was going on all the time for weeks and weeks. And I think that’s because it was so concentrated, the coverage of it was so intense. It wasn’t like today where we’re we get our information and news through such disparate avenues that there’s very little besides the Super Bowl that kind of captures the public imagination at once. This particular period where Anita Hill surfaced was very compressed. I wanted to reflect that in the storytelling because I felt like that was a part of why it was such a pivotal moment in our history; it wasn’t just the salacious allegations and the nomination, but that we collectively watched and that at the time there was really just the three networks and CNN. It was fascinating how much editorial power these three places had to shape public opinion. And how they covered it really shaped our point of view in a way that, today, we’re completely distrustful of those sources but back then we completely trusted their reportage.”
DECIDING WHEN TO USE ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE AND WHY
“There were hours and hours of old TV news material to comb through—it was a deep and long process—but I think mostly what I wanted to use the footage for was to contextualize and illuminate and give that sense of how we were receiving information,” Famuyiwa says. “Because we as an audience weren’t privy to any behind the scenes information, we were just hearing the accounts being reported by various news agencies. I think in some cases, the footage informed things that I thought about before I shot. I wanted certain moments where we would have some journalistic commentary, but then other moments came after putting a cut together and feeling like we have more context here and there, so it became a sort of improvisational feel about where and how these things needed to land in the film more than anything that was scripted, because they weren’t.”
GOTTA HEAR BOTH SIDES
“Some may feel it’s a cop out, but we don’t really know the specifics of what happened—we have a record where one person said something happened, and one person went on the record under oath and said it didn’t happen, and there hasn’t necessarily been any investigation or reporting that’s said one has been definitively in one place or the other,” Famuyiwa says. “At least for me, it wasn’t interesting to dig into what that story was or what that incident was or trying to get any sort of narrative push out of that. For me, what was compelling was the mere fact that you had these two people who were very successful and accomplished in their own right testifying to these salacious allegations and that you had a panel of senators that looked nothing like them—all white male senators—and these two black people testifying.”

“I thought there was narrative propulsion in that that was more dynamic than just the he said/she said of it, and so it made it easier to kind of deal with it in real time and say in 1991 nobody knew or could even suppose to know what the truth was, so we were going by the information that was coming out as it was coming out. Everyone was reacting in real time from the senators to Thomas to Anita Hill, and we didn’t have the 20/20 hindsight that we do now. I wanted to deal with it in the moment, and once I decided to do that, and not necessarily through the lens of 25 years later, it made it easier to say we’re not necessarily going to go one way or the other about who was telling the truth or who wasn’t.”
DON’T CHANGE THE CHARACTERS, FIND CHARACTER BEATS
“Most of these people are still around and still vibrant and one of them is a sitting vice president and one of them is a Supreme Court Justice,” Famuyiwa says. “At the end of the day, it is a film and we had to do what we had to do to take an event that took place over several days and weeks and compress it into an hour and 40 minute film. The main challenges just had to do with balancing your instincts to tell a story with characters a certain way vs the historical record. So often there’d be moments where obviously if I was just writing this is a fiction, I’d say, ‘Now it’s time for a scene where this happens or now a character does this or that,’ and obviously that was the challenge of this is that you can’t create those moments. So you sort of have to find the moments around the hearings and around the testimony, find character beats, but not get too far into your imagination that you’re not staying true to who these people are. But you definitely think about it and you understand that because it’s our recent history, that makes it more challenging than making a film about people who are not around to comment on it any more.

By Devon Ivie Follow @devonsaysrelax

On Saturday night, HBO will air its political-thriller film Confirmation, which chronicles the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas after Anita Hill alleged that Thomas sexually harassed her when she worked for him years prior. This spurred a media frenzy, and the highly watched televised hearings simultaneously captivated the country and reignited interest in D.C. politics. Ahead of the film’s premiere, we’ve compiled a list of the key figures behind the hearings whom you should reacquaint yourself with, and where they are now.

Anita Hill (Kerry Washington)
When Clarence Thomas was nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, law professor Anita Hill came forward alleging she was the victim of sexual harassment from Thomas when they worked together at the United States Department of Education and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. While her claims were ultimately dismissed, the hearings helped increase awareness of workplace harassment across the country.

Where is she now? Hill is currently a professor of social policy, law, and women’s and gender studies at Brandeis University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate-level classes.

Clarence Thomas (Wendell Pierce)
Before receiving the Supreme Court nomination, Clarence Thomas had an expansive law career, which included 16 months as a federal judge in the D.C. Circuit. He vehemently denied Hill’s claims, saying the hearings were a “circus” and “a national disgrace.” He ended up being confirmed by a close majority, 52-48, becoming the second African-American to serve on the Court.

Where is he now? He’s still an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and is often considered the Court’s most conservative member.

Angela Wright (Jennifer Hudson)
Like Hill, Angela Wright publicly alleged that Thomas made several unwanted sexual advances when she worked as his press secretary at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Thomas later fired Wright from her position, and she took a job as a journalist in North Carolina.) She never officially testified during the hearings for reasons that are still unknown.

Where is she now? After nearly ten years at the Charlotte Observer, Wright went on to on a career in communications.

Joe Biden (Greg Kinnear)
As the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (and United States senator for Delaware), Joe Biden presided over the hearings. Even though he ended up voting against confirming Thomas for the position, he was strongly criticized by women’s groups and liberal legal groups for mishandling the case, one of the main complaints being he didn’t push for Angela Wright to testify.

Where is he now? He’s serving a second term as vice-president of the United States under President Barack Obama.

John Danforth (Bill Irwin)
The relationship between John Danforth and Thomas went back years — a young Thomas served on his staff as an assistant attorney general in Missouri. As a United States senator for Missouri during the time of the hearings, Danforth was one of Thomas’s biggest advocates for the Supreme Court role, and is regarded as being one of the main reasons he was ultimately confirmed.

Where is he now? After a brief tenure as the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Danforth retired from politics in 2005.

Charles Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright)
Charles Ogletree served as Hill’s lead attorney during the hearings.

Where is he now? He’s currently Harvard Law School’s Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, as well as the founder and executive director of Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

Ted Kennedy (Treat Williams)
As the chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee as well as a United States senator for Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy was part of the committee that helped oversee the hearings. He was widely criticized for remaining silent for nearly its entirety.

Where is he now? In 2009, Kennedy died of brain cancer, at the age of 77.

Kenneth Duberstein (Eric Stonestreet)
A prominent D.C. lobbyist after he ended his tenure as President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, President George H.W. Bush enlisted Kenneth Duberstein to “coach” Thomas and help ensure he would be appointed to the Supreme Court.

Where is he now? Duberstein is still an active and in-demand lobbyist.

Ricki Seidman (Grace Gummer)
Ricki Seidman served as Ted Kennedy’s chief investigator on the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. She was the first Senate staffer Hill confided in about Thomas’s sexual harassment.

Where is she now? Seidman is a senior principal at TSD Communications, a small firm based in D.C.

Orrin Hatch (Dylan Baker)
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch took a leading role in the hearings and questioned Hill in a manner that was perceived by the public to be combative and misogynistic.

Where is he now? Hatch currently holds many governmental positions — he’s a United States senator for Utah (a role he’s held since 1977) and the president pro tempore of the United States Senate. He also made a cameo on Parks and Recreation.

Harriet Grant (Zoe Lister-Jones)
One of Joe Biden’s chief aides during the hearings, Harriet Grant was a young lawyer who assisted in reviewing Hill’s allegations.

Where is she now? She continued to serve as a D.C. lawyer for many years after the hearings ended. She has since retired.

Alan K. Simpson (Peter McRobbie)
Alan Simpson, then a United States senator for Wyoming, was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who was present for Hill’s testimony. He was noted for being antagonistic in his questioning.

Where is he now? Since retiring from politics, Simpson was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and had a brief stint as the co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. He later said he was “a monster” in his behavior toward Hill.

Shirley Wiegand (Erika Christensen)

Best friend and a colleague of Hill’s at the Oklahoma University School of Law, Shirley Wiegand supported Hill throughout the duration of the hearings. She said of the experience: “Anita and I viewed ourselves and our mission in overly simplistic terms, as two farm girls who were taking the truth to Washington. When we got there, it became apparent that the truth was not relevant, so Anita packed the truth up and took it home.”

Where is she now? Wiegand is an emerita professor of law at the Marquette University, where she has taught since 1997.

Mark Paoletta (Daniel Sauli)

Mark Paoletta worked as the assistant counsel to President George H.W. Bush, and his job was to ensure Thomas’s court appointment went as smoothly as possible despite the media madness that encompassed the hearings.

Where is he now? He has continued to serve as an attorney specializing in congressional investigations, and is also a partner at DLA Piper’s Federal Law and Policy group. He isn’t thrilled with Confirmation being aired.

Judy Smith (Kristen Ariza)

The deputy press secretary and special assistant to President George H.W. Bush, Judy Smith was tasked with privately handling the media controversy surrounding Thomas during the hearings.

Where is she now? Interestingly, Smith’s legendary prowess in crisis management was the inspiration behind the popular television show Scandal — the protagonist, Olivia Pope, was modeled after her. She continues to works as an author, television producer, and crisis manager today.

Arlen Specter (Malcolm Gets)

Arlen Specter, then a United States senator from Pennsylvania, served on the Senate Judiciary Committee and assisted in the hearings. Like Hatch and Simpson, he was notoriously aggressive about challenging the validity of Hill’s claims, going so far as to accuse her of “flat-out perjury.”

Where is he now? In 2012, Specter died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, at the age of 82.

Sonia Jarvis (Kimberly Elise)

Sonia Jarvis was a roommate of Hill’s when she lived in D.C. She gave an affidavit that Thomas had visited their house on one occasion.

Where is she now? Jarvis is a distinguished lecturer at Baruch College, specializing in race, politics, and the media.

The ‘Scandal’ star talks with THR about the behind-the-scenes drama of HBO’s political telefilm, her talks with Anita Hill and what she hopes viewers will take away from the project.
Kerry Washington as Anita Hill in HBO’s ‘Confirmation.’ Courtesy of HBO

The ‘Scandal’ star talks with THR about the behind-the-scenes drama of HBO’s political telefilm, her talks with Anita Hill and what she hopes viewers will take away from the project.
Kerry Washington has high hopes for HBO’s Confirmation.

Premiering Saturday, Confirmation stars Washington as Anita Hill opposite Wendell Pierce as Clarence Thomas and details the explosive 1991 Supreme Court nomination hearings (at which Anita Hill testified) that brought the country to a standstill and forever changed the way people think about sexual harassment, victims’ rights and modern-day race relations.

Academy Award-nominated writer Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) penned the script and executive produced the movie alongside Washington. The movie features an all-star cast that also includes Greg Kinnear as Joe Biden, Eric Stonestreet as lobbyist Ken Duberstein and Jeffrey Wright as Hill’s legal counsel.

Airing weeks after FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story captivated viewers with its exploration of race relations amid the trial, Confirmation has faced early drama from some of the players depicted in the movie who claim that it’s anti-Republican. The Hollywood Reporter talks with Washington about those criticisms, her meetings with Hill and more.
Let’s go back to the beginning of Confirmation. What drew you to Anita Hill’s story?

I was 14 at the time [of the hearings], so a lot of my memories are through my parents’ eyes. I remember being really struck by it because generally we were all on the same page when it came to issues that we talked about. My parents would always talk about political and social issues, and everybody was usually on the same page — whether it was about affirmative action or the right to choose, and this was one of the first moments where I could really see my parents struggling with each other because they were not on the same page. My dad felt one way about watching this African-American man have his career and reputation stripped and maligned publicly by this panel of older white men. And my mother felt equally pulled in the direction of Anita Hill and listening to this professional African-American woman talk about the challenges she faced. I was really struck by my own sense of intersectionality and the awareness of belonging to more than one community and those instances where they may at times be at odds with each other.

As an exec producer on Confirmation, what kind of involvement did Anita Hill have? How much did you talk with her? Did she read the scripts?

In the beginning, we talked to her when we were talking with a lot of people because we talked to people on both sides of the aisle. We talked to people from all different kinds of experiences: journalists, other lawyers, senators, to her. We really tried to do our due diligence and research. [Screenwriter] Susannah Grant did most of the heavy lifting in that area. But as producers, we were all involved in a lot of the interviews. At that point, I was trying to soak up as much information as I could, but I was also holding that information at arm’s length. I was reading her memoirs, but I was also reading Clarence Thomas’ memoir and a lot of books about the period. Part of why we were approaching it in that way was because one of our goals — and our intentions in the very beginning — was to tell as balanced a story as we could. We wanted to take these people who had become ideological, iconic symbols — like Joe Biden, Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill — and uncover the humanity for people so that they weren’t just symbols. But they were complicated, three-dimensional human beings. That had to happen in the writing, in the casting and in the execution of the film. At some point in that process, I turned to my fellow producers and director and said, “Now I have to step away from this, and I have to devote myself to her 150 percent and trust you guys to hold the rest of it.” At that point, I started to engage with her in a more one-on-one way in terms of helping me to develop the character.

How much did you discuss the events that weren’t televised with her — how she felt in certain circumstances, whom she trusted and so on?

All of that was part of our conversation — particularly when I was working on portraying her later in the process. We talked a lot about her feelings as it was all unfolding.

Was there something from those discussions that really surprised you that helped inform your performance in Confirmation?

It’s hard to say. I’m always reluctant to talk about this conversation too much because she’s so guarded and with good reason. But spending time with her helps me to access her and understand her rhythm. But so did studying the hearings themselves. We were so lucky that the story unfolded in a time when people were — almost for the first time — engaged in a 24-hour news cycle. There’s so much footage from the hearings and the press conferences, and I studied and was really inspired by [playwright-actress and Stanford University professor] Anna Deavere Smith [who contributed an essay to Hill and Emma Coleman Jordan’s Race, Gender, and Power in America collection of essays], whom I admire a great deal, and the way that she worked from real video. I used a little of her approach in terms of studying Anita from the footage that we had, again and again.
Looking back on the whole process, is there one scene that really stands out that was challenging for you?

To play somebody at the absolute most stressful, life-changing moment in their life? All of it was. It was funny, when we were talking about it, Anita Hill said, for her, it was a really intense period of days and weeks. I had to live in that space for such an extended period of time. It was really intense.

How did you approach playing her — as someone who had been wronged or as someone who was standing up for what she believed in?

After I read both [Thomas’ and Hill’s] memoirs and a lot of the books about the process and the culture at the time, I went back and read hers again when I started preparing the character. I really admire and respect Anna Deavere Smith, and she has a very specific way of working from raw material. She works almost like an anthropologist or sociologist in terms of interviewing people and recording them and embodying the rhythm of how people speak — so paying attention not only to what people say but how they say it. I tried to use a lot of the video that we had from the hearings and from press conferences and work from Smith’s approach to get inside the rhythm of Anita.

In a larger sense, were you able to tap into anything from Scandal for Confirmation?

One of the reasons why I was really drawn to the character is because she’s so different from Olivia Pope. After five seasons of playing somebody who has so much access and power — who for the most part is always the most powerful person in the room aside from Papa Pope [Joe Morton] — I was drawn to the idea of playing somebody who was in that same environment but at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of access and power.
A few of the politicians depicted in the film have claimed that it’s anti-Republican. What do you say to them?

A lot of that feedback is coming from people who haven’t seen the film, so it’s a typical conversation to have. When you see the film, it’s very clear how much we were respecting and prioritizing the humanity of so many of the players involved and knowing that my own complicated understanding of intersectionality, in terms of gender and race, is part of why I wanted to make the movie. It’s not a propaganda movie. It’s a movie about complicated people in a really complex situation doing the best they could with the tools they had at the time.

We did our due diligence. Susannah was waist-deep in the research and double-checked [it]. It’s one of the reasons I was happy that HBO wanted to make the film, because not only are they invested in protecting it, but they’re invested in protecting the truth and making sure that people aren’t having their lives inappropriately dealt with. I feel confident about the film and about our intentions in making it, but quite honestly, I understand it. When the hearings were going on, people were unhappy and frustrated, and that was then. The reasons why it hasn’t become a public part of our canon of historical national conversation in the way it maybe should be is because it was a difficult thing for people to deal with, and Americans wanted to sweep it under the rug when it was over. The fact that we’re going back and telling this story reignites and honors the importance of these conversations. Of course it’s going to be upsetting to some people — that makes sense. It was upsetting at the time, so it would be upsetting again now.

There have been reports that Joe Biden reached out to HBO, and some adjustments were made — not based directly on his calls but as a whole. What were some of those changes?

I would feel more comfortable having that conversation with Susannah, because she would be able to have that conversation more accurately.

What do you hope viewers walk away with after watching Confirmation?

One of the most important things that comes forward in the film is the importance of our voices in this country. Anita Hill was a very reluctant hero, based on these things that I wasn’t so clear about before doing research on her and how much she did not want to come forward and was put in that position because the information was leaked. But when I think about how it inspired other people to have their voices — that’s moving. I love those moments in the film where Joe Biden, Clarence Thomas or Anita Hill are talking, and all of a sudden you hear the phone start to ring in the congressional offices because that is the moment of the unscripted character. That’s the American people calling in for congressmen to say, “I’m not happy” or “I have an opinion about this, and I need to be heard.” We’re lucky to live in a representational democracy where our government’s job is to represent us. We put them in office, and they’re supposed to represent us. And that’s one of the important reminders in the film: that they can’t do their jobs unless we are showing up with our voices. Unless we are voting, making phone calls and participating in the process, our representational bodies won’t know how to represent us and won’t do their jobs well. We have to be part of the process.
Considering what you now know, do you think Clarence Thomas should have been confirmed to the Supreme Court?

I’m reluctant to answer those questions. There is this idea that I’m making the film for a political agenda. When I saw the Anita documentary a few years ago, I wanted to pull back the onion and know more. I wanted to know about what was happening in those rooms where the cameras weren’t rolling and what was going on for Anita Hill, Joe Biden and Clarence Thomas. My passion was about uncovering the process because that’s where the story was. I’m reluctant to answer those questions because this film is not about my personal politics. It’s about a vital moment in our shared history as a country.

Switching gears to Scandal for a moment — Olivia has killed Andrew Nichols. Does this make her a monster? How much do you know about how this season ends? Will there be a new president?

I know nothing about where the season ends. … I don’t want to say if Olivia is a monster or not because I think that word has a particular context in the Scandal world that is still being revealed to us. I always feel like my job with Olivia is to hold the face of nonjudgment, because I have to be her. I try not to judge her and have ethical judgment calls on what she does. My job is to get inside it and justify it wholeheartedly. So I’m probably the wrong person to ask.

Confirmation airs Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO. Scandal airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on ABC.

Republicans have faced the vast majority of campaign finance allegations from CREW in recent months.

Bill Allison

April 11, 2016 — 2:00 AM PDT

For more than a decade, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, has scrutinized and assailed federal agencies and politicians from both parties to root out unethical behavior in government. Over the past two years, however, some of the group’s most influential work has been quietly dropped.

Annual rankings of the “most corrupt” members of Congress and a bi-annual list of the “worst” governors have stopped. A pipeline of in-depth reports on issues ranging from financial markets to timber-industry lobbying has gone dry. The group walked away from a spat over Hillary Clinton’s treatment of e-mails as secretary of state, even after an Inspector General found that CREW’s public records request had been improperly denied.

Many of those projects, according to CREW, were set aside to reorient its focus toward campaign finance violations by political candidates and the outside groups that support them. The shift also coincided with a leadership change in 2014, when CREW, looking to bring on a new board chair with a strong fundraising base, hired David Brock, a Democratic operative with deep ties to liberal donors. That network of contributors has been the force behind a collection of groups that Brock has created to oppose Republicans and conservatives, as well as one devoted to defending Clinton.

Now, CREW shares office space, a board member and fundraising executive with the groups under Brock’s purview, and as a result is intertwined with the kinds of organizations it investigates. Some former staffers say that Brock, who has moved into the vice chairman role, has pulled the watchdog into a partisan agenda and, in doing so, weakened its impact.

CREW says that isn’t the case. “The board membership may change, but we have always maintained the highest level of integrity and absolute independence in the work we do—and that remains the case,” said Jordan Libowitz, the watchdog’s communications director.

Brock, who declined to comment for this story, is the founder of American Bridge 21st Century, a super-PAC that does opposition research on Republicans; an associated foundation; and Media Matters for America, a charitable organization that aims to expose right-wing bias in media. Brock also started Correct the Record, a media rapid-response team that defends Clinton, and has served on the board of Priorities USA, the main super-PAC supporting the former first lady’s 2016 campaign for president.
Founded in 2003 as a federal ethics watchdog, CREW gained a much wider portfolio, unmasking corporate front groups and calling out stock manipulators. The group has gone after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over his aides’ alleged use of private e-mail accounts to conduct official business, as well as groups founded by billionaire brothers Charles Koch and David Koch over political spending. In one of its biggest victories, CREW won an argument against the administration of George W. Bush to account for and preserve millions of documents that otherwise would have been lost.

By 2013, CREW was filing an average of eight federal lawsuits each year, with a peak of 15 in 2007, public records show. In the nearly two years since Brock arrived in August 2014, the group has filed a total of four. Meanwhile, CREW also mothballed a number of projects related to government transparency, congressional corruption, and so-called Astroturf lobbying campaigns that purport to represent grassroots movements but are primarily the product of a few wealthy donors, a Bloomberg analysis of CREW’s work showed.

“They’re on the back burner,” Libowitz said of the projects. “Our biggest focus is fighting the influence of money on politics, specifically trying to find places where people have violated the law, and file complaints against them.”

So far in this election cycle, CREW has filed about 14 complaints with the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission over alleged tax or campaign finance violations. Just one of those has been against a Democrat. Groups supporting Republican presidential candidates have drawn particular scrutiny. CREW accused Right to Rise USA, the super-PAC that supported Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s failed run, and Conservative Solutions PAC, the super-PAC that backed Senator Marco Rubio, of taking so-called straw man donations from recently formed limited liability corporations that shield donors’ identities.

Louis Mayberg, a co-founder and former board chair of CREW, criticized the group for what he says is uneven targeting of Republicans. Mayberg, who resigned from the CREW’s board in March 2015, said that trend contributed to his decision to step down. “I have no desire to serve on a board of an organization devoted to partisanship,” Mayberg said.

According to Libowitz, CREW’s results shouldn’t be surprising: “The vast majority of dark money spending has come from conservative groups, so it holds to reason that the majority of rule breakers would as well,” the CREW spokesman said, adding that Brock doesn’t tell staffers whom to investigate.
Mayberg said another key factor that encouraged him to depart was the decision in 2015 to back away from the controversy involving Clinton over her use of a private e-mail server while at the State Department, an issue that has dogged her campaign for the White House. When the New York Times reported in March 2015 that Clinton had potentially violated federal laws on preserving government records by using a personal account for work, Anne Weismann, CREW’s former chief counsel who had already been seeking Clinton’s e-mails through public records requests, said she was told to stand down.
“It was made quite clear to me that CREW and I would not be commenting publicly on the issue of Secretary Clinton using a personal e-mail account to conduct agency business,” said Weismann, who also left the group last year. “The fact that we said nothing on that subject says volumes.”
In January, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General concluded in a report that CREW’s petition for Clinton’s e-mails had been improperly denied. CREW has decided not to pursue the matter, said Libowitz, who declined to comment directly on Weismann’s claim. Meanwhile, Brock’s Correct the Record super-PAC has actively rebutted critical reports on Clinton’s use of her private e-mail server.
Formed in 2013 as a subsidiary to American Bridge, Correct the Record’s website says that it is a “strategic research and rapid response team designed to protect Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks.” Its employees work out of the same office that houses Brock’s other groups, including CREW. Correct the Record registered as a super-PAC in June 2015. Its biggest donor so far is Priorities USA, the super-PAC supporting Clinton, which gave it $1 million. Clinton’s campaign kicked in about $276,000.
Correct the Record has been criticized by law experts, including Lawrence Noble of the Campaign Legal Center, for working directly with the Clinton campaign, even though super-PACs are prohibited from coordinating with candidates. Brock’s group has said it can do this because the law only forbids the coordination of expenditures on broadcast and cable advertisements. Correct the Record only publishes political messages on the Internet, an activity the group says is exempt. Correct the Record declined to comment.

“While they certainly push the envelope, they haven’t gone over that line,” Libowitz said of Correct the Record. “Their critics say they’re pushing into a gray area, but we tend to focus more on clear violations” of campaign finance law.