Geoff Embler Interview With American Bridge’s Pat Dennis
I talked to American Bridge’s Pat Dennis by email for a new feature — the That’s Interesting Interview. Pat is a seasoned researcher and is the research director for American Bridge’s Trump War Room. American Bridge 21st Century serves as an opposition research hub for the Democratic Party. You can get more information like this by subscribing to my That’s Interesting newsletter here.
Geoff Embler : How did your team tackle Trump research in the 2016 cycle, especially when you had many other candidates to look at as well before the field thinned out? He had an extensive record of media interviews, in addition to an enormous and complex financial disclosure.
Pat Dennis : Looking back on the 2015–16 Republican primary, it’s easy to forget just how many serious candidates participated, and just how strongly the conventional wisdom wrote off Trump’s chances. I began working on the 2016 election with a decent sized team in early 2014, so we had a decent amount of time to do work on the conventional choices. But it was still such an incredible amount of work that by the time we were finishing it up, it was becoming apparent that this Trump guy might have a real chance. We entered the project with an extremely experienced team, but essentially no baseline of research on Trump the way we did with a Rubio or a Cruz.
Starting from essentially scratch on Trump, it became clear to me that building out the backbone of the research report on him using news clips — as you might for a typical politician — would be too time consuming. Even limited Nexis searches were on the order of many tens of thousands of clips. We were in a race with reporters at this point, and I wanted us to have a really solid understanding of all the storylines in his life before we were scooped and missed the opportunity to put our own spin on stories that we knew reporters would eventually uncover on their own anyway.
I didn’t know at the time that the number of pitchable stories on the guy was, in practice, essentially unlimited.
With Trump, we had the luxury several high quality full length books written by talented journalists about various parts of his life. I started by picking out five or six of those (including buying a then rare copy of Wayne Barrett’s The Deals And The Downfall for $200, slicing off the spine, and running it through a sheet feed scanner so we could copy/paste the text). The timelines and storylines from those books, along with a targeted Nexis dive of New York City papers and tabloids, formed the initial skeleton and timeline of his career.
No Trump research book will ever be completed, but the skeleton allowed us to get organized, and to sort our digging into a context, and gave us the ability to structure and prioritize ongoing projects.
And there were a lot of them.
Of particular importance, we were vacuuming up names of businesses entities and ventures that Trump participated in. These came from news reports, his financial disclosure, trade publications, and more. Each and every one of them (there were hundreds) essentially became a project of its own, requiring a story to be told and a checklist of business records searches, litigation searches, and other things. Some of them forced us to get pretty creative — such as buying Trump University and Trump Institute course materials off of eBay. But having this organized project allowed us to put Trump’s financial disclosure, when it came out, into context, giving us numbers on deals we generally already knew about and understood. This was vital to allowing the thing to be digestible at all.
Geoff Embler : How have you seen research change since American Bridge began?
Pat Dennis: Under Trump, the media environment has gotten faster, more saturated, and — surprisingly — in a few ways less silly, perhaps because there are more life and death issues to fill column inches right now. But in other ways, it’s gone off the rails.
Our research operation is inextricably tied to the media landscape, but the actual nuts and bolts of what we do day to day hasn’t changed much. What’s changed is how quickly and how effectively we have to do it if we’re going to make any kind of impact at all.
In my work, the projects I’m most proud of aren’t huge research books or devastating news stories pitched, it’s the infrastructure and knowledge base we’ve built up to allow us to get better results, more consistently. It’s a unique benefit of being at a persistent super PAC, rather than jumping from campaign to campaign.
Examples here include an internal Wiki of investigative techniques and procedures — everything from how to check if your target has paid their property taxes, through to how to find an opponent’s deleted blog or old tweets. We’ve built out a video training series on some of the more difficult technical tasks, and built out digital tools to make time consuming tasks easier, such as automating the comparison of a list of campaign donors against a list of government contract recipients. American Bridge’s video database is second to none.
Basically, the end result here has been that we’re able to find similar stuff to what we could find in 2011, but we’re able to do it a lot faster, and find a lot more of it. As the media environment has sped up and changed, this has allowed us to speed up and change with it, without having to reinvent the wheel every two years.
Originally published at https://www.geoffembler.com on September 16, 2020.
