Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign
The Los Angeles Times has described Brock as "integral to Hillary's run" for the presidency in 2016. Clinton adviser Paul Bagela commented: "What kind of a movement would we be if we rejected converts? He saw the permanent intellectual and ideological infrastructure they have on the right and brought it to the left." 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.
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. 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."
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. 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."
