If we played this right, this campaign against Trump could increase our numbers nationwide, and Tom was someone who knew how to do that. Tom was a person with great common sense, but he also knew how to manage a crisis. I can be impatient and wanted someone who was cool when things got hot. I’ve found it is smart for me to hire people who are the opposite of me. Best of all for the party, Tom and Donnie both said that they were willing to work for free. I had decided that I would not take a salary, either, as a contribution to the party that had given so much to me. I cleared away most of my speaking engagements and took a hiatus from my role as a commentator at CNN and at ABC. The only thing I refused to give up was my teaching. I learned as much from my students in the Georgetown Women’s Studies department as I hoped they did from me. Teaching was a boon to my spirit. I told Julie and Patrice when they were booking events for me that the one appointment I always would make was my Wednesday afternoon class at Georgetown.
I called Brooklyn to tell them that I wanted to bring Tom on board as my executive director and that he didn’t need to be paid for this.
“We care about the Democratic Party as if it is our own,” I said. “He knows everybody in all fifty states, and that’s what we need. He knows everybody and everybody loves Tom.”
They told me no. They wanted me to rely on Brandon.
Rely on Brandon for what? He wasn’t someone with superior wisdom and guidance. I enjoy learning things from those who know more than me, but Brandon had never run a presidential campaign and did not have essential contacts in the state parties. As far as I could see, he was just a clerk, the messenger who absorbed what was going on and took all that information back up to Brooklyn. Then Brandon told me that Brooklyn was sending me down a chief financial officer named Charles Olivier. Oh no, I thought, now I’m going to have two Brandons. This job was getting worse by the minute.
Monday night when I dragged myself home, I realized I had a duty to tell the other officers of the DNC what I had found in the last few days. The officers have a fiduciary responsibility to the party, and they are personally liable if it is mismanaged. What I found in the first day was alarming and I thought they should know.
I had the staff set up the call for 9 p.m. when I would be home packing for a trip to Las Vegas and New Orleans that I had committed to before I became chair and could not cancel. For the call, I was sitting on my couch, maybe a little bit anxious because I was in a state of shock. Just in that one day I had discovered so much more than my fellow officers knew, and I had to tell them everything. I told them how our big donors had been compromised and that the extent of the hacking was much more severe than the party wanted to admit. In many ways, the cyberattack on the DNC was a twenty-first-century version of the famous 1972 Watergate break-in. This time, cyberthieves broke into the party’s computer server and stole confidential information. I described the party’s dire financial situation and how it was being bled dry and was staggering around without an ability to lead itself out of this darkness.
In making the call it was essential for me to understand that my fellow DNC officers supported me. They told me to keep digging and let them know as I found things out.
“The sooner we get on top of it, the better we will be,” said Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
“The sooner we get on top of it, the sooner we’ll know how many millions this is going to cost us,” I said. We had already spent $300,000 on remediating the hacking, but I estimated $3 million or more would be the final figure.
The call lasted almost two hours. I didn’t want to just deliver the bad news, I wanted each member of the leadership to have a chance to comment, to offer me advice. We needed time to express our anger that all of this had been going on and Debbie had not consulted with us. As party officials, we were stewards of the party, charged with making sure that issues were addressed promptly so that the party could survive and prosper. Although some of the officers knew a little bit about one issue or the other, none of them had understood the whole picture that I was laying out as I went down my list of issues one by one.
It was a sobering phone call, but in another way it was uplifting. Instead of making them feel like marginalized figures who were not that important to the party, I had empowered my colleagues. I promised I would keep them informed, and they promised that they would help me make these tough decisions as we continued on toward the election.
After just one day in the office, I had to hit the road. Normally I like being out in the world, but this time I had to drag myself through a trip that took me to Las Vegas and New Orleans. The whole time I was traveling, every spare minute was taken up with working on setting up the cyber task force, getting recommendations of people who might be good and willing, and calling them to see if they were available. I also arranged to be briefed at the FBI on August 11 to learn everything they knew about the hacking, as soon as Assistant Director James Trainor, head of cybersecurity, returned from vacation. I asked if any of the officers of the DNC wanted to come with me and Ray Buckley, and Henry Muñoz agreed to come along.
I got home from this trip just in time for President Obama’s fifty-fifth birthday party at the White House. I’d been invited to this party every year despite the fact that my nickname among the Obama staff was Trouble. Sometimes I was good Trouble, and sometimes I was bad Trouble, but it was always something. I was sorry that this would be the last Obama birthday party I would attend, because they were always great ones. I’ll never forget the time that Prince played for the president. This year it was Beyoncé who was scheduled to perform, as well as John Legend, Usher, Jennifer Hudson, and Stevie Wonder. Not bad.
The whole East Wing was packed with guests and the dance floor was full. Now I like to get out there and throw it down, pick it up, and throw it down again, but people kept pulling me aside for hushed conversations. I was outside the Blue Room when National Security Advisor Susan Rice, whom I’d known since she was a young woman in flip-flops and cutoffs working on the Dukakis campaign, took my hand. Despite the swinging party, Susan had a tight grip on me and she was staring at me sternly as she pulled me into an alcove. I remember Angela Bassett coming our way with a big smile but, when she saw the looks on our faces, she went in a different direction.
“What do you know about the hacking?” she asked.
“I don’t know much of anything about the hacking,” I told her. I had been spending the last few days trying to educate myself. The lawyers had talked to me, and I was reaching out to experts.
She told me I had to take this very seriously.
“I do,” I said.
“It took a long time for the FBI to get any response from the party,” she said. “I wanted you to know that you need to stay on top of this.”
I said that I knew I had to stay on top of it. I couldn’t understand why no one had taken it seriously before. I heard from Evan Perez, a CNN reporter, that the FBI had been calling and calling the DNC in the fall of 2015 to tell them that the Russians were in our system, but they never got anyone to respond. That made no sense to me. Debbie was a member of Congress. Why didn’t the FBI go straight to her?
Susan said she wasn’t concerned about the past. “You must promise me you will get a briefing at the FBI as soon as possible.”
“I will. I have it all set up for August 11.”
“Also make sure that the DNC cooperates fully with the investigators, promise me that,” she said.
I was the chair now, and I could promise full cooperation as long as I held that office.
That was the assurance that Susan wanted to hear. She released me from her grip. I got the message.
I didn’t know if I was going to be able to dance after that, but I wanted to give it a try. Also I wanted to be on the dance floor when Beyoncé took the stage, so I headed there. Who stopped me on my way to the dance floor but Eric Holder, the former attorney general. He grabbed me by the shoulder and led me to a less crowded spot where we could hear each other better.
; “I want to ask you if you’ve had a chance to get up to speed on the hacking of the DNC,” Eric said.
Not again! And here I was thinking that he was asking me to dance.
Yes, I said, I was moving as fast as I could to get there, but I had a lot to learn.
Good, he said. The DNC was not very responsive to the FBI. I’m glad you are taking this seriously.
I wanted to say, How could I not take it seriously when the national security advisor and the former attorney general are ordering me to do so? I didn’t say that, though. I said I took it very seriously and was meeting with the FBI the following week. Those were the magic letters: F, B, I. Once I said those letters to Eric and to Susan, they knew I was in capable hands.
I got home from the party and called Ray Buckley. I felt sworn to secrecy after these direct and intense conversations with powerful figures from the administration, but I also needed someone to speak with about this. Ray is someone I trust without reservations. He, like me, is one of nine children and he came to politics early in life, just as I had; he made signs to support a gubernatorial candidate when he was just eight years old. More than that, we had worked alongside each other on the Gore campaign and still bore the scars of that defeat.
As I described to Ray the serious demeanor of Susan and Eric at Obama’s party, I felt this weight settling on my shoulders. I think Ray did, too. We did not know what we were going to hear when we went to the FBI that next Thursday, but I believe we both felt that when we left that office we would not see the world in the same way that we did now.
SIX
Gentlemen, Let’s Put Our Dicks on the Table
That first week at the DNC I was busy, but I was lonely. I had a notebook I was filling up with the things I needed to do or get a handle on in order to run this party. I had a page dedicated to the hacking, and at the top of it I wrote, “I need people to help me with cyber stuff.” This was an area where I knew I needed outside advisors. I had a page on finances, too, and a page on party politics. I had a big staff around me, but I didn’t have my crew. There were very few people with experience in the party who would understand all of these three areas. The one person who I kept aching to have on my team was Tom McMahon, but Brooklyn was still resisting the idea that I needed him.
This did not make any sense to me. How was I supposed to function as a chair and how were we supposed to function as a party if I did not have a second-in-command? There was no way that I could handle all of the responsibilities of the chair, help win the election, travel as a surrogate for Hillary, and handle the cyber attack unless I had someone at my side. I wondered if Brooklyn was worried that I was trying to build my own power base in the DNC, but doing so was the farthest thing from my mind. The situation at the DNC was more complex than anyone in Brooklyn understood. The DNC really was like a neglected child and my job was to restore it to health. I had to help elect Hillary, preserve Obama’s legacy, and rebuild the DNC. The only way I could do that was to hire Tom.
Try as I might to explain it to Brooklyn, all of my urgent pleas felt like they were words falling down a well. Take Hillary’s campaign manager, Robby Mook. He had this habit of nodding when you are talking, leaving you with the impression that he has listened to you, but then never seeming to follow up on what you thought you had agreed on. At least that seemed to be the case with his interactions with me. When we would see each other, as we did many times at the convention, he was warm to me and treated me with respect, but I seemed not to be able to get a straight answer when I needed something, especially something as badly as I needed to bring Tom on board.
This was part of the removed way that he and his team encountered the world, the very quality that Minyon had warned me about that she suspected might lead to friction developing between him and me. If I was strong and made my demands in a forceful way, he was likely to flee from me immediately and avoid me in the future. The young men that surrounded Robby Mook—and they were all men in his inner circle—had mastered a cool and removed style of politics. They knew how to size up voters not by meeting them and finding out what they cared about, what moved their hearts and stirred their souls, but by analyzing their habits. They could take all the things you bought while shopping online in the last six years, analyze them, and say they were confident that they knew pretty much all there was to know about you.
If you bought a certain brand of beer and subscribed to Golf Digest that could predict who you were likely to vote for. Women who drove a mini van and bought romance novels and country-and-western music were also likely to vote for a particular candidate. I appreciate the importance of this data in understanding where to concentrate the campaign’s resources, but what made me uncomfortable was that this microtargeting of voters brought with it the idea of small victories. They only had to persuade six people to change their votes in one precinct and twelve over here and Hillary was going to win the election.
That small focus missed the big picture, and it undervalued the emotion that drives people to the polls. You might be able to persuade a handful of Real Simple magazine readers who drink gin and tonics to change their vote to Hillary, but you had not necessarily made them enthusiastic enough to want to get up off the couch and go to the polls. When I interacted with Brooklyn I could not feel positive emotion behind the campaign. And I also thought my strong feelings and how I followed my gut instincts made them uncomfortable.
I was certain that Robby and his crew had the ability to identify every voter who was inclined to vote for Hillary, but in the confusion created by Donald Trump, would voters feel that their vote mattered? I was not so sure that they would. Many people in this election seemed to be voting out of spite, or out of anger, not out of enthusiasm, as if voting was a tool they were using to settle a grudge. For Donald Trump the grudge was against communities of color. If we didn’t find a way to make them see that this was their election too, no amount of clever manipulation of data would bring them out to the polls.
I didn’t want to criticize their method, as I knew it had power, but what I brought to the campaign was powerful, too. It was the inclusive, galvanizing feeling of sweeping up toward victory, of attaching yourself to the cause. I wanted to add that energy in the communities of color that I knew so well, in the state operations where I had so many friends. Tom agreed with me that data was a tool, but it did not solve the problem of building enthusiasm and getting people motivated. To me Tom was perfect to be my second-in-command because he had come up through the party just like I had. He had a deep love of its traditions and history. He knew we were not just a building, we were an institution. Despite the attempts by Robby and the rest to strip the party of its functionality and independence, Tom knew what a huge contribution the party could make when it was strong and healthy. And he knew dozens of important people in every state, often the same people I did, and a few more. I could say to him, “Get Fred in Arizona to do that.” He’d know precisely who I was talking about without needing a last name and was likely to have Fred’s number in his phone already. With him at my side my burden would be lighter and everything at the DNC would go more smoothly.
Brooklyn didn’t want people who could second-guess them, people with more experience. To me, this seemed foolish because you need people who have those kind of connections to get things done and also to inspire the base. Everybody worshiped the data and the analytics. And I worship the people, the people who made politics what politics is. It’s like if you had a bunch of great chefs in the kitchen and you’re all trying to make the perfect gumbo. And Robby was like, “Let’s just get it online. We’ll order it from the best gumbo place in Louisiana.” He was arguing with me as to whether or not you need a roux. You know what? You need a roux.
I had asked nicely about hiring Tom but that nice try had been ignored. I had gone around Robby to get allies in pleading my case that hiring Tom was not just important to me, it was vital to Hillary’s victory. A week into my job I was beyond frustrated, and my thoughts return
ed again and again to the idea that if I was going to get action, I needed to be so direct that no one would ever forget what I was asking.
There’s a part of my personality that I don’t like anyone to see, a part of me that is my Daddy’s girl. I call her Dolores and she does not like it when she thinks people are not being straight with her. I don’t want anyone to see Dolores but I could feel her rising up inside me as Brooklyn continued to waffle about Tom. One night when I went home I called Charlie Baker to warn him that I was struggling to keep Dolores contained. “Charlie, I’m about to kill Robby,” I told him. “And it ain’t going to be pretty.” Charlie told me just to get Robby on the phone and he’d help us reach a compromise that would get Tom on my team.
The next day I brought Patrice, Julie, and Brandon with me into the chair’s office and placed the phone at the center of the table to dial into a conference call to Brooklyn. On the other end of the line were Robby, Charlie Baker, Marc Elias, and Marlon Marshall, who was Robby’s lieutenant and the director of state campaigns and political engagement. Marlon had also worked on the 2012 Obama campaign as deputy national field director. I announced that I wanted them to explain to me what the problem was with hiring Tom McMahon as my chief executive officer.
Robby said I needed to wait for the campaign to decide if it wanted to spend money on hiring a temporary CEO.
“What?” I said. “You don’t have to spend money on him. He said he’d work for free. That can’t be your reason. Tell me straight.”
There was an awkward few seconds of silence before Robby said that Tom had to be properly vetted.
“Oh come on!” I said. “What’s the problem with Tom? Tom has a great reputation. People love him. The press loves him.”
Charlie excused himself and said he had to go off the call for a minute, but I pressed on.
Hacks Page 6