I was in a feisty mood, ready to knock over everything, but my hands were tied. Brooklyn had cleaned up the debt on our books and paid the bills, and the party should have been grateful for that, but they were not doing a very good job at running the party. The way they had stripped the party of functionality and purpose was shameful. I was beginning to understand why the campaign gave the party no respect.
I sent a message to the senior staff that I wanted to see them in the office at noon on that first Sunday after the convention. I go to St. Joseph Catholic Church on Capitol Hill, and I arrived there that Sunday morning with the intention of praying to God to give me strength and wisdom to handle this crisis in a way that would ensure victory for Hillary in November without setting fire to the Democratic Party. Before I left the sanctuary, I went up to the statue of Mother Mary and placed five dollars in the donation box. I took a white candle with me and poured some holy water into a plastic bottle to bring with me to the DNC.
I got to the office before noon on Sunday carrying a box of items I brought from home to make my office more personal. I had so much on my mind, I barely remember the drive there. When I turned onto South Capitol Street, I started to cry, but not about the situation the party was in. This would be the first time I entered the building since Seth Rich was murdered on the streets of DC on July 10, and seeing the building brought back grief about his death. He had been walking home from a local bar—and barely a block away from his apartment in Washington’s Bloomingdale / LeDroit Park neighborhood—when he was shot in the back in what police said was a robbery attempt. The police were there within minutes, and Seth was still alive and talking when they arrived, but he died later that morning at the hospital.
I had just left Kai for the first time in six weeks to fly to the West Coast when I got the call that Seth had been gunned down. I started to cry when I heard the news and I had a hard time holding the tears in for the next two days. I called his parents right away to express my grief. On that Sunday after the convention, when I drove into the parking lot at the DNC, I felt that loss again. This was another thing I wanted to do while I was chair: pressure the mayor’s office to find out who killed Seth Rich.
Inside the DNC building the security staff let me in, and I carried my box into the elevator and up to the main office on the third floor. I opened the door to Debbie’s office and stood for a minute looking in. When she left to go to the convention, she didn’t know she would not be coming back as chair. Her family photos were still on her desk and on the bureau behind it. Her orchids and her toiletries were still in the bathroom. I felt like an intruder.
This was where the staff would expect to meet me, I realized, so I walked in and set down my box. I didn’t take anything out of it. It didn’t feel right to stand at her desk. I sat on the sofa alongside the windows that looked at the Capitol and the Washington Monument. I breathed deep to center myself and get ready for the day. I was calmed by the beauty of the Capitol building. This was a moment for me to remember the beauty and grandeur of our country, and why we were all working hard, instead of dwelling on the pettiness and discord that was trying to tear us apart. We had a bigger enemy than each other to fight now, and we needed to put all of that aside.
I decided to call Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe for advice on getting the DNC back on its feet. I knew he’d just be getting out of church.
“Terry,” I said. “I’m sitting here in Debbie’s office about to meet the staff. What should I do?”
“Paint that damn office blue!” he said. I guess he didn’t like her Florida pink walls any more than I did. I knew I’d keep some part of the office pink out of respect for Debbie, who was a breast cancer survivor. Many women in my family had suffered from that disease as well. Terry promised to help me solve the DNC’s financial difficulties. He said that he would encourage other governors to help with fund-raising, and he offered his chief of staff to help me strategize my transition into my new role as chair.
When I called the Sunday afternoon interviews with the senior staff, I advised everyone that I wanted to learn about their duties and responsibilities. Brooklyn told me who they wanted me to fire, and some people had volunteered to leave on their own. One of the people Brooklyn wanted me to keep was Brandon Davis, the liaison between Hillary’s campaign and the party.
I remembered Brandon from the convention and at first I didn’t have much of a problem with him. He was a nice young man who had worked in union organizing. Patrick Gaspard, who had served as Obama’s political director, had worked with Brandon in the Service Employees International Union, and had asked me to watch out for him. I’m always inclined to help a young black man on his way up the political ladder.
His title at the DNC was chief of staff, but really his role was acting as Brooklyn’s eyes and ears in DC so that he could ensure that the party did not do anything that the campaign did not want it to do. No one was to breathe or to move unless Brooklyn told them it was okay. I think Debbie understood the rules of the game. She would not cause anyone any trouble. Now that I was replacing Debbie, it appeared Brandon’s job had expanded to include making sure that I played that game, too.
Brandon was the first one in the door on Sunday, and he took a seat on the brown leather sofa across from me. Here was a young man without a boundary facing a woman who has walls built up and barbed wire around them, too. He was the kind of guy who would argue with you about the color of a wall. I said that this pink was too bright for my tastes, and he corrected me saying this was not a bright pink, it was a tropical pink. Things were not starting off well.
While we waited for the other staff members to arrive, Brandon started to tell me about all the perks that came with the office I had assumed. Did I know that Debbie had a car and a driver? That big Tahoe SUV in the garage? That was mine now.
I told Brandon I intended to sell the SUV. I could drive myself around town, as I always had.
Besides her assistant, Brandon said, Debbie had a chief of staff and a body woman. She also had media consultants and a fund-raising consultant. I was free to hire my own consultants, two or three if I liked, and bring in a new communications team. All of that would go on the DNC payroll.
I told Brandon I didn’t need any consultants, and the party’s communications staff was enough for me. And God knows I didn’t need a body woman.
This was one way of getting the burn rate down, I thought. I wondered how many other hangers-on and sycophants were draining the lifeblood out of this party. This was the way to keep the chair fat and happy: Give her a huge staff and lots of perks and don’t ask her to do anything.
The other members of the senior staff started to trickle in. I thanked them for coming in on a Sunday and asked them to wait in their offices, because I wanted to speak with them one on one. As they scattered, I saw that Brandon had remained on the sofa, as if he was going to interview them with me. Now that I was replacing Debbie, it appeared Brandon believed his job had expanded to include being my boss. This was not starting off well.
“Brandon, you have got to get out of this office so I can meet with these individuals,” I said.
Brandon didn’t like that very much, but he left the room.
When members of the staff came in, at first I was bristly. I had to figure out whom I could trust. My questions at first were very basic. I was filling out my own organizational chart. What do you do? What does your department do? How many staff? Whom do you report to? Any consultants working with your department?
Some of the staff gave me attitude, too. I had to be very specific in the way I asked my questions. Unless I asked the right question, I couldn’t get an answer. I came to realize that I could not fire some of the people who were cagey in their responses. No matter how sneaky they seemed, they held inside them crucial institutional knowledge. It would take a while to pry that out of them. If I fired them, I would never get to the bottom of what was going wrong inside these walls.
After I had interviewed two-thir
ds of the senior staff—everyone except those on vacation—it was 10 p.m. I was alone in the building searching for an office I could call my own. I would never feel right taking Debbie’s big office even if I painted it green, purple, and gold for New Orleans.
I found an empty office near Debbie’s that had a window that looked right over the train tracks. I grew up next to the tracks, and the sound of a train passing is always a comfort to me. I brought in my box from home and took out a few pictures of Kai, one of my dog, Chip, and a sage smudge stick. I sprinkled a little holy water on the chairs and the desk and said a prayer for healing and for strength. The last thing I took out of the box was my bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.
Political veterans always remember a campaign by the vice they had adopted before Election Day. Decades ago in one campaign, my vice was Johnnie Walker. Before I left home that morning, when I was looking around for things that would comfort me in this troubling assignment, I saw that bottle in my liquor cabinet. Seeing it felt like finding an old friend in a strange town. I took one of the glasses from Debbie’s bar to my new office by the railroad tracks, but I decided it was not yet time for me and Johnnie to get reacquainted.
I had learned a great deal about the dysfunction inside the party in the last ten hours. As I saw it, we had three Democratic parties: the party of Barack Obama, the party of Hillary Clinton, and this weak little vestige of a party led by Debbie that was doing a very poor job getting people who were not president elected. As I saw it, these three titanic egos—Barack, Hillary, and Debbie—had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes. Barack never had seen himself as connected to the party. He had not come up through it the way Joe Biden and Hillary had, but had sprung up almost on his own and never had any trouble raising money for his campaigns. He used the party to provide for political expenses like gifts to donors, and political travel, but he also cared deeply about his image. Late into his second term, the party was still paying for his pollster and focus groups. This was not working to strengthen the party. He had left it in debt. Hillary bailed it out so that she could control it, and Debbie went along with all of this because she liked the power and perks of being a chair but not the responsibilities. I know these three did not do this with malice. I knew if you woke any of them up in the middle of the night to ask them how they felt about the Democratic Party they would answer with sincerity that they loved this party and all it had done for the country and for them. Yet they had leeched it of its vitality and were continuing to do so. In my three months I was going to do what I could to bring that life back.
The other thing I came to see, by listening with my heart and not just my mind, was that the perception of these staffers was wrong. With the release of the twenty thousand emails, the whole world had turned against these people. Inside and outside the party, these staffers were painted as villains. After these hours I spent talking with them, I heard the pain in their voices when they described the harassment they had endured from Trump supporters and Bernie supporters when their private email addresses and cell phone numbers were broadcast for the whole world to use. Death threats, rape threats, and vows to harm their children. Many of them had not slept well in the weeks since they became aware of the magnitude of the hacking, and that just got worse after WikiLeaks.
After speaking with them I no longer looked at them just as the million or more I needed to cut from the monthly budget. When I went home I wrote myself a big note, in big letters: “Take all the bad apples out, but remember how many good people there are here.” I went to sleep after midnight, bone tired, with the knowledge that the next day, my first official day at work, would be even harder.
Remember, my dad, Lionel, had said, it’s just a job.
FIVE
Trouble Comes to the White House
The more I learned about the hacking, the more it kept me up that night. I was frightened by all the things I didn’t know and worried about how I would get up to speed quickly, now that it was my responsibility to handle this. I was not just worried about myself, though. I was worried about all the other innocent people outside the DNC who were victims of the hacking, some of whom were already feeling it, and some who would feel it soon.
I had saved dozens of emails I had received from big donors since the WikiLeaks dump that described how difficult their lives had become now that their personal contact information was available online. One donor wrote that he had not slept in days. He’d received so many threatening calls on his cell phone that he’d changed his voice mail message to a plea that people leave him and his family alone. People called to threaten him, harass him, scream obscenities, and to ask him why he was so evil. He had called the FBI, which had opened forty separate cases to investigate these calls. He, like others, contacted me to ask what the party was prepared to do.
Just that weekend, I’d gotten a notice from Home Depot that if I’d used my credit or debit card at a self-checkout stand between April and September 2014, it was likely that my identity had been compromised. The DNC had not issued a similar statement to our donors and others who had left their information on our website. Home Depot offered to repay the losses of those who had been hacked and encouraged people to sign up for a service that would monitor their online identity for fraud. If Home Depot was doing that, why wasn’t the DNC?
When I got to the office the next morning, I made arrangements to interview the people I hadn’t met on Sunday. Then I settled in to read the memo Michael Sussmann, one of the DNC attorneys who is a partner at Perkins Coie, sent me about the party’s obligation to disclose to people that we had been hacked. So many innocent people had their personal information exposed in the hacking. The DNC site is not just for donors and party business. If someone wants to tour the White House and cannot get a ticket through their member of Congress, the DNC has a few to give out. The party also arranges for the guests at the Easter Egg Roll, and all the email information the guests furnish for those requests is entered on the DNC site. Sussmann’s memo detailed how the DNC had to determine whom we had to notify.
Should we contact everyone or just those whose information we knew had been distributed? Every state had different laws governing under what circumstances and how its citizens needed to be notified, and whether or not the state attorney general should be alerted, too. The part of it that I found most alarming was that most of the states required citizens be notified within thirty days or less.
Thirty days! We’d known about this since late April, and we had not done anything to alert the hundreds of thousands of people who had placed their trust in us. Everybody was acting as if this had not happened and encouraging us not to talk about it. Hillary was enjoying a solid postconvention bounce in her poll numbers and the first positive coverage since the beginning of the campaign. No one in Brooklyn wanted to distract from the good mood with a slew of stories about the DNC hacking. Talking about these emails might confuse voters who knew that Hillary had been investigated by Congress and the FBI for the email server she kept in her home. People might conflate this disaster with Hillary’s mistake. Also, Donald Trump was doing his best to conflate the WikiLeaks dump with Hillary’s email server problem, and we did not want to get into a shouting match with him over it.
On July 27, the day before Hillary accepted the nomination, Trump addressed a press conference in Miami where he suggested that the hackers also had emails Hillary had deleted from her private server. “By the way, if they hacked, they probably have her thirty-three thousand emails. I hope they do,” he said. “They probably have her thirty-three thousand emails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there… Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing. I think you will be rewarded mightily by our press.” He was encouraging a hostile foreign power to commit a crime against his opponent.
While he continued to point a big red arrow at Hillary, the party had to go about the business of fixing this mess. Just thinking about t
he enormity of this task crushed my spirit, while at the same time I was very aware of how much I didn’t know.
I needed help. While I was still in Philly I decided to set up a cyber task force of experts who could advise how to respond to all aspects of the hacking and also show me how to make sure that this did not happen again. With the help of Michael Sussmann, who had been a cybercrimes prosecutor at the Department of Justice, I was pulling together names of people from all around the country for a conference call, where it was very likely I would not be the smartest person on the line. I hoped these experts were kind and generous people, because I was certainly going to look like a fool asking the most basic questions when we all spoke. I needed more help than just in cyber, though.
We still had an election to win, and I wanted to do my part from the powerful position I now held at the DNC. With all the new vacancies at the DNC I wanted to bring in my own team, a team that would help me help Hillary win. If we were doing hand-to-hand combat with the Russians on behalf of the party, I needed people I could rely on in a fight. There were things that the party could do better than Brooklyn could. The DNC had to take a lead on mobilizing voters in down-ballot races and in nonbattleground states. I wanted to bring on Tom McMahon and Donnie Fowler Jr.
When Howard Dean was chair, Tom McMahon had been his executive, the man who best understood Dean’s fifty-state strategy—his goal to make the party viable in the red as well as in the blue states. I wanted to copy that in the time we had left before November 8. Tom and Donnie knew people in every state because of all their time in the field. I sensed we could add great value to the campaign. There is a big difference between someone from the Clinton campaign showing up who has never visited that state before, and Tom or Donnie or me calling someone they’d known in elections stretching back two decades. That kind of personal touch is the glue that holds campaigns together.
Hacks Page 5