I have been watching Barbara Comstock, the former hard right political operative in the picture above, become more moderate over the years as she tried to jumpstart a political career. She got to congress in 2014 but lost her seat four years later. She’s a Never Trumper today and has apparently left the GOP.
Anyway, this came to mind as I was writing the post below about QAnon’s roots in the 1990s:
Uhm:
Barbara Comstock with Representative Dan Burton, who publicized conspiracy theories claiming that a Clinton aide was murdered.
Friends of Comstock’s don’t like to talk about it, but her boss at the Reform committee, former Indiana Republican congressman Dan Burton, was a true Clinton conspirator. In his own back-yard version of the Warren Commission Report, Burton shot a watermelon (some contend it was a pumpkin) to test whether the 1993 death of Clinton aide Vince Foster was a suicide or, as feverish and repeatedly debunked stories on the far right alleged, a murder. In 2001, the Washington Post dubbed Comstock, by then a Republican National Committee dirt-digger, “a one-woman wrecking crew.”
During this time, Comstock also became close with David Bossie, the conservative activist who served on the Reform committee with her and later became head of Citizens United and Trump’s deputy campaign manager. Comstock is godmother to Bossie’s eldest daughter.
David Brock, the anti-Clinton writer who turned into a liberal Clinton champion, described how Comstock came by his home during one set of Clinton hearings “to watch the rerun of a dreadfully dull Whitewater hearing she had sat through all day. Comstock sat on the edge of her chair screaming over and over again, ‘Liars.’ ” That may be hyperbole from an admitted fabulist who has renounced much of his younger writings. [This is a bullshit, Brock renounced his younger wingnut writings a long time ago and he was a lot braver than the rest of the Never Trumper Johnny-come-latelys.]
[…]
Still, despite Comstock’s partisanship, many in the media found her reliable. “Facts were our bread and butter,” says Betsy Fischer Martin, the former executive producer of Meet the Press who became a friend, too. “She was very aboveboard and never tried to pull a fast one.”
As the Clinton wars wound down in the late 1990s, Comstock moved to the Republican National Committee, where she ran the research department, putting together voluminous volumes on Al Gore. She was in Florida in 2000 to help with the election recount that won George W. Bush the presidency, then served in his government as Department of Justice spokesperson, working under the man who may have been the administration’s most polarizing culture warrior, attorney general John Ashcroft.
Back in the private sector, Comstock worked at Blank Rome, a law firm where she was a registered lobbyist for the likes of Koch Industries, the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, and a pro-immigration group on Cape Cod, where her parents have a home. Comstock “made it clear she could get the real right-wingers, the crazies, onboard,” says one Democratic lawyer who worked with her on an issue for a well-known tech company.
She was a professional right wing character assassin who people like Tim Russert and Meet the Press turned to for the juicy gossip they craved. She knew what they wanted and gave it to them. The Democrats never successfully played that game and the imbalance in coverage was obvious for years and years.
As regular readers know, I tend to be forgiving of Never Trumpers who walked the walk and left their careers and social networks when the GOP elected an unfit, authoritarian, conspiracy theorist to the White House. I am not going to say “get out” if people do have a change of heart and for all I know, Comstock has. But when she’s in conversation about QAnon and conspiracy theories she would bring a lot more credibility to the argument if she copped to being one of the people who pushed the conspiracies back in the 90s that formed basis of the turbocharged alternate universe of the right wing today.