USA TODAY International Edition
Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare
The man behind the movie draws big money, power in GOP’s ranks
David Bossie isn’t a household name, but he probably should be.
The 50- year- old political operative, as much as any single person, is responsible for the nearly unrestricted flood of money pouring into the 2016 presidential campaign. He runs the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, and his attempt to distribute his 2007 anti- Hillary Clinton movie gave rise to the Supreme Court’s 2010 blockbuster Citizens United decision, which upended decades of campaign- finance rules and allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts to influence federal, state and local elections.
Nine years after Hillary: The Movie, the barrel- chested activist now is turning one of the biggest weapons of the post- Citizens United era on Clinton. He’s the newly installed leader of the Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC, a super PAC funded largely by hedgefund billionaire Robert Mercer that plans to merge cutting- edge technology and old- fashioned opposition research in a push to sink the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee.
At the same time, Bossie, a longtime outside agitator against the Clintons, is moving closer to the inner circle of a Republican Party now dominated by the biggest outsider of them all: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Bossie is a first- time convention delegate at this week’s Republican National Convention, but he’s chairing Maryland’s 76member contingent of delegates and alternates to the Cleveland gathering. The state’s Republicans recently elected him as GOP national committeeman, tossing out a veteran who held the seat for more than a decade. On Thursday, convention- goers can screen the latest movie he’s produced, Torchbearer, in which Duck Dynasty reality TV star Phil Robertson ties the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Nazism and terrorist attacks by the Islamic State to godlessness.
Next week, Bossie will be at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia as one of the Republican National Committee’s anti- Clinton surrogates.
“I’m now a member of the RNC,” Bossie boasted during an interview this week, tugging at the official party credential that dangled from his neck. His ascension, he said, is a sign that the “establishment is really moving much more towards the conservative movement, which is an exciting thing for the grass roots.”
Bossie emerged on the political landscape in the 1990s as the top investigator for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He helped lead GOP probes of the Clinton administration, including the Whitewater controversy and allegations that China tried to illegally funnel political donations to the Democratic Party. ( Bossie resigned in 1998 amid sharp criticism of his role in releasing edited tapes of prison conversations with Webster Hubbell, a Clinton confidant and former Justice Department official who was jailed for overbilling clients while in private practice.)
His 2007, 90- minute documentary about Clinton was scathingly critical of the former first lady. Bossie and his allies cast it as an issue- oriented film. The Federal Election Commission and a lower court said it amounted to a political commercial which could not be distributed during the primary season because it was funded by corporate money.
In the end, the Supreme Court’s 5- 4 ruling swept aside those limits and said restrictions on independent corporate spending in elections amounted to “censorship.”
“There are very few people who have played such a singular role as a conservative activist in these campaign- finance issues,” Sheila Krumholz, who runs the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, said of Bossie.
“It’s back to the future for him with Hillary Clinton,” she added. “He can keep opening and reopening the same old wounds because he’s been an activist as an investigator and instigator for so long.”
In an interview this week, Bossie called himself a “repository of all things Clinton since 1992.”
The father of four said young voters don’t know enough about Clinton and the controversies that dogged her husband’s administration. Part of his job, he said, is to dredge up that history, tie it to the latest controversies about Clinton Foundation funding and Clinton’s private email server and use the newest technology and money from deeppocketed donors to spread the message to voters.
“That makes us dangerous,” he said.
Mercer, the co- founder of Renaissance Technologies, recently poured $ 2 million into the anti-Clinton super PAC as seed money, Bossie said.
“He can keep opening and reopening the same old wounds because he’s been an activist as an investigator and instigator for so long.” Sheila Krumholz, of the Center for Responsive Politics