Then the WikiLeaks dump released cell phone numbers and other personal information to a hostile world. While Leah Daughtry was the CEO of the convention, Patrice Taylor and Julie Greene were responsible for many aspects of completing the party business that is conducted during the convention. They were taking hundreds of calls a day, never knowing if the call would be a death threat or a threat to their families from someone who had gotten their phone numbers in the WikiLeaks dump.
They had succeeded despite that and never complained, even when this harassment and abuse ruined a beautiful moment. I only found out later that in that happy moment when Hillary accepted the nomination, Julie felt her phone vibrate and looked down to see threats and insults from a stranger. These grotesque acts were just one element of the ugliness that was to come.
Almost as soon as I became interim chair I began to notice the ways that the Hillary campaign seemed not to respect the DNC and its staff. I had to beg the campaign to hire two buses to bring the staff up to Philadelphia to celebrate the nomination. Cheapskates. They were sitting on close to a half billion dollars in contributions and thought this small investment in morale was a waste of money. It would be a terrible slight if the staff was not allowed to share this moment. Finally I found the money to do it without approval from Hillary’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn.
As soon as Hillary and Tim Kaine were nominated, they were leaving the convention hall on a bus tour of the Midwest. Before they did, I wanted a promise that Hillary or Tim would come to the DNC meeting at the end of the convention so that they could greet and thank the staff. This is a political tradition, one that Al Gore upheld, and John Kerry, too. During the Obama administration, we could always get Joe Biden to acknowledge the staff graciously. As a former chair of the party, Tim was the one we expected would do this, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible for him. I worked with some of the other officers on crafting his remarks so it wouldn’t tax his staff in any way. When Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communication’s director, saw the remarks she got angry quick. Jennifer wanted to know who approved this change in the campaign schedule because she certainly had not.
I said I had, and I reminded her that it was customary. Tim knew this tradition and he’d said that he was happy to do it.
Jennifer glowered at me, and then at Tim’s staff. Then she jumped up and walked out, slamming the door behind her.
I was thinking, If that bitch ever does anything like that to me again, I’m gonna walk.
How was I going to get Brooklyn to see the DNC as something more than a potted plant?
Once I got back to DC after the convention, I knew that party finances would be a top priority. I needed to know who we had contracts with, who the vendors and the consultants were, and what expenses were coming up in the next four months that I would be the chair. I asked the staff to give me an organizational chart, access to the bank statements and FEC reports, and a lesson in how the bills were paid and who signed the checks. I hadn’t even left Philly yet, but I knew my other priority before that first day was to wrap my head around the hacking.
While I was still in Philly, I’d reread the Washington Post story from June about the hacking, surprised by how little of it I remembered. I understood why I’d brushed it aside, though. On a first read the tone of it struck me as blasé. The hacking, it said, was routine espionage. Spy vs. Spy. The U.S. government did the same to the Russians as well. These particular Russian hackers were well known, having bedeviled governments and institutions all over the planet, including the Republican National Committee and two of the presidential campaigns. At the time the article was written, all they appeared to have stolen from the DNC was some opposition research on Donald Trump, stuff that would have come out anyway in the course of the campaign. Although they’d been inside the DNC system for quite a while, the hackers didn’t seem too interested in the emails and didn’t appear to have collected information on the donors. The DNC had the problem handled, the story seemed to suggest. In May, even before the piece ran, the party CEO, Amy Dacey, and COO, Lindsey Reynolds, had hired a top cybersecurity firm named CrowdStrike that quickly figured out what was going on. They cleaned up the system and successfully expelled all the intruders the weekend before the story was written. Crisis solved. Or so we’d thought.
In June I thought of hacking as just another kind of theft, like if someone had broken into your home in the dead of night and stolen some of your valuables. The Chinese made off with the personal data of 4 million current and former employees of the Office of Personnel Management, where I served as a member of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, in December 2014. There was even a breach inside the DNC. All candidates can use data the DNC collects on voters, but we maintain strict barriers between the campaign operations so competitors cannot spy on their opponents. In December 2015, before the 2016 primaries and caucuses began, four staffers from the Sanders campaign exploited a bug in a software update to view confidential voter data collected by the Clinton campaign. The breach caused a lot of friction between the two campaigns. So, I knew this kind of thing caused trouble, suspicion, and inconvenience, but in my experience the impact didn’t last. As I reread the Post story, however, I saw how much more serious the truth might be in this case. The story described the hackers sneaking into the DNC in the summer of 2015, almost a year before anyone figured out they were there. They burrowed in deep and didn’t make a sound. They didn’t install a big, shiny piece of malware that could be detected during a routine security scan of the system. They tucked this evil thing into a vulnerability in the Windows operating software where it quietly soaked up the DNC’s emails, voice mails, and chat traffic for almost an entire year.
The hackers were not two four-hundred-pound guys sitting alone in their bedrooms. They were sophisticated teams, codenamed Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear by CrowdStrike. The two bears, CrowdStrike said, came from competing Russian intelligence agencies that had teams working twenty-four hours a day to break into foreign computer systems. Pitting these two angry bears against the DNC was not a fair fight, Shawn Henry of CrowdStrike said in the Post article: “This is a sophisticated foreign intelligence service with a lot of time, a lot of resources, and is interested in targeting the U.S. political system. You’ve got ordinary citizens who are doing hand-to-hand combat with trained military officers, and that’s an untenable situation.”
Now this was my problem to handle. First, I wanted to talk to Marc Elias, the general counsel for the Clinton campaign. He was always well-informed, and I had grown to trust his take on things, particularly because he had helped me so much filing lawsuits for the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute to oppose state attempts to suppress the vote. I needed to know everything he knew about the DNC hacking before another reporter asked me about it.
I spotted Marc at the Logan Hotel on Sunday and I walked right over to him. Marc told me to sit close so that we could talk quietly. As we sat face-to-face on couches, he started talking a mile a minute about the Justice Department and the FBI and the proof they had that this hacking had been the work of Russian agents. Marc was dropping words like cyberwarfare, breach notifications, ransomware, and other terms that had never crossed my lexicon.
By the time we finished talking, I must have looked like a ghost. I was terrified and confused. One thing I understood was that the hacking had not ended.
Marc also agreed that I needed to get a handle on the party finances and would likely have to begin to clean house. For that I had to talk to Charlie Baker and Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. Why would I need to talk to people from Hillary’s campaign about the party’s finances?
Trust me, Marc said, adding that Gary would clarify the situation for me so I would not be blindsided when I walked in the door on my first day in DC. Marc offered to let Gary know I would be calling. When I left Marc, I felt a little dizzy. I was starting to understand that this job I took on would be about a lot more than simply ai
ding Hillary in her all-but-certain path to victory.
On Friday after the convention, I took my time as I prepared to make my way home. It was a beautiful day in Philadelphia, and I was enjoying saying good-bye to the many old friends I had seen at the convention. I liked that feeling of the city emptying out, the hustle subsiding.
As I pulled into DC a few hours later, Minyon Moore was blowing up my phone with a little crisis. Minyon and I had become friends working on Michael Dukakis’s presidential run in 1988, plus she was on the Executive Committee of the DNC. That evening she was packing up to move to Brooklyn to serve for the next three months as chief political strategist of Hillary’s campaign. The problem was she’d locked herself out of her house. I had a key. I dropped my bags and convention swag at my house, grabbed her spare key, and was on my way to her place.
After I let her into her house, Minyon and I caught up on her front porch. How many other evenings had we spent doing just this with a glass of Prosecco? Too many to count. That night we were both on the cusp of something great. Minyon would be key to helping Hillary get elected, and so would I! Sisters in battle once again. I wanted her to tell me anything she could that was useful about the job I was about to take. I knew many of the people she would be working with in Brooklyn, but I didn’t know who made the decisions. How could I be of the best use to Hillary?
Minyon said first I needed to talk to Gary Gensler.
Again with the Gary Gensler. Who was Gary Gensler?
Minyon assured me that I knew him. I’d worked with him on the platform committee.
“Was he that bald guy with the big glasses who acts like he knows everything?”
Minyon said the reason he acted like that was because he did know everything. Gary had been an undersecretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Obama. He had worked at Goldman Sachs before he got into politics.
Not Goldman Sachs again!
I did remember working with him on the big brawl that was the platform committee. He was good forging consensus on platform planks. Gary brought me the three different gay rights platform amendments. I’d get those three different committee members together, and Gary and I would help them agree on language that was adequate for everyone, and then move on to the next dispute. I did like Gary and I knew he would tell me the truth.
Minyon, always elegant in her manners, had another delicate piece of advice for me about dealing with the smart young people in Brooklyn.
“Donna, you cannot cuss these kids out because it will shut them down,” Minyon said.
“What the fuck?” I said. Damn! They picked the wrong woman for this job.
After I got home I saw that Minyon had left a case of Prosecco in the backseat of my car. I brought it inside and put a bottle in the refrigerator and called my older sister, Cheryl, in New Orleans. She was so happy to hear from me, relaying how everyone she knew in our hometown of Kenner, Louisiana, was proud of me and how much they liked the New Orleans sashay I made on my way off the stage. Oh, and how they loved my dress! She wanted yard signs, ten at least, so she and all our neighbors could show how much they supported me and Hillary. I always hesitated to tell my family that Louisiana does not matter to the Democrats in the presidential cycle. We never win that state. I didn’t even know if Hillary was going to open an office in New Orleans.
There was a sweetness to the evening I relished. I had this delicious Prosecco from my good friend and a great call with my sister. I sat out in the garden chatting on the phone and batting back the bugs, sipping that Prosecco. I texted Gary and he got back to me immediately. We agreed to speak at 10 a.m.
I had a feeling that this might be the last peaceful moment before the frenzy.
FOUR
Picking the Apples
That next morning I called Gary Gensler on the dot of ten. He wasted no words. He told me that the party was broke and $2 million in debt.
“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”
That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the DNC on an allowance.
If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Post article about it was published online. Back in March I had emailed a friend, complaining that I hated being a vice chair in what seemed like name only and that holding a paper title was the worst decision I had made in my political career. Now I was beginning to understand how much about what had been going on at the DNC the officers did not know anything about.
On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.
“No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”
I knew that was so. During the 2014 midterm Obama wanted to draw on the party’s $10 million line of credit with the bank to help down-ballot races, basically putting us on the hook for $10 million of those campaigns’ expenses. All the other officers said yes but I said no. Obama has no problem raising money, so he should just go out and find it himself, I said. It took them months to convince me and they did only when I got in writing a pledge that the president would help pay it all back.
“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked.
“I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said.
Gary was not familiar with the way the DNC was governed, but he described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.
Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to HFA could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.
“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”
Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.
“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” Gary said. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”
“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”
The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.
I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had hap
pened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.
Gary told me they were paying for CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity services out of the building fund, not paying it out of regular receipts, thereby depleting the rainy day fund. This surely was a rainy day, but I thought we should be able to fund-raise for cyberprotection.
“Gary, I need to let this sink in,” I said. “Promise me you will come sit with me and go over the books so I can see what is working and what is not.”
We agreed to meet next week, but when we hung up I was livid. Not at him, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fund-raising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best that I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.
Hacks Page 4