Hacks

by Donna Brazile

  “If you don’t want to call him the CEO, call him the transition director,” I said. “I’m sure that the title doesn’t matter to him. We’re way past that stuff. Everyone in this party knows Tom. He’s the one person in this organization that does not need to be vetted by anyone.”

  There was some shuffling on the other end of the line about how, yes, everyone loved Tom but the campaign wanted me to “try to work within the existing staff parameters.” At that moment, Dolores showed up.

  “Wait a second,” I said, with my Dolores rising. “It was OK if I was going to keep Debbie’s staff or her consultants, but I cannot get someone to help me run this party? Even someone who is willing to work for free? Someone over there is lying to me.”

  Charlie announced himself back into the call. He said he’d just vetted Tom and that Tom had passed, even though Charlie had only been gone for a few minutes. Great, but I was not done yet.

  “Folks, I want us to be ambitious. We have so many tools at our disposal,” I said. “Let’s think as big and bold as possible, knowing we might fall short, but it will not happen because we didn’t plan for a better future. We need a grassroots plan to encourage donors to reinvest in our work. Before you empty the building at the end of August, let’s pull this plan together and make it count and bring Tom on board.”

  Brandon seemed to think that this was his call, so eagerly was he parroting the statements of his bosses in Brooklyn. They didn’t have the money for me.

  “This is not a sustainable system you have me operating under here,” I said. “I can raise money for the DNC but I cannot control it. You control all the money and I have no say whatsoever in how it’s spent. We are being attacked every day by cyber forces that want to bring our party down, and I need money to ensure the integrity of our operation. You’re stripping the party to a shell. I have no ability to act to defend it.”

  I have worked with men all my life in politics and I can sense when they get to this part about not being able to deal with a woman. This was not a racial thing. This was a gender thing. Every time you mention that they are trying to shut you down because you are a woman, all these guys are like, “No, no, no.” I would not say that, and I would not act like someone who was asking for permission. I had given them all the logical reasons why I needed Tom on board. I had run out of rational arguments.

  “Y’all are thinking I am going to back down from this fight. No. I am not. We’re just trying to preserve the DNC—the DNC is a wreck. We’re just tired of just plugging up the holes of this leaky party. Tom knows the building. He was there when we won the presidency in 2008 and took back the House and the Senate, and besides, our CEO is gone.”

  Of course Brandon agreed with the men in Brooklyn. He looked at me sternly as if it was annoying him that I would try to take back control of the party as any chair would. Dolores was becoming furious.

  “You know, this does not feel like a negotiation to me,” I said. “This feels like power and control. Gentlemen, let’s just put our dicks out on the table and see who’s got the bigger one, because I know mine is bigger than all of yours.”

  The sound on the other end of the conference call was a rustle of confusion.

  “So what will it be, gentlemen? Because I am not waiting around anymore for permission. What do you say?”

  After some more deflecting and dissembling, their response was that they would have to get back to me.

  When the call was done, Brandon left the room, looking disgusted. This day was serious. This whole election was serious, and for a moment there I was concerned that I had taken it too far in the way I had confronted Brooklyn. I recovered from that quickly though. We could not lose this election to Donald Trump and I was not going to play nice or waste time. Dolores might be rude and feisty, but she usually got what she needed. Those boys in Brooklyn probably never wanted to speak to Dolores again.

  By the end of that day, I got a message that Brooklyn had agreed to allow me to bring on Tom McMahon.

  SEVEN

  Meeting at the FBI

  Back in the office on Monday of my second week on the job I had to work quickly and with focus, because I was scheduled to leave for another trip to New Orleans that night to attend the Progressive National Baptist Convention. If we were going to fight this cybermenace and help win an election, we needed more money in the bank. I had taken a look at the budget, and there were a few easy places to trim back. One was consultants. The DNC had two political consulting firms who were getting paid $25,000 a month: Hilary Rosen and Anita Dunn via SKDKnickerbocker and another firm headed by Jen O’Malley Dillon, the co-founder of Precision Strategies. Love you ladies, but the gravy train has reached the last station. I also needed to talk to the president about his $180,000-a-year pollster, too. The outgoing president no longer needed to assess his approval ratings or his policy decisions, at least not when the Democratic Party was fighting for its survival against a hostile foreign power. I knew, however, that even with all these cuts we still needed more money if the DNC was going to make an effective contribution in the final three months of the campaign.

  We also needed to find a way to talk about the hacking of the DNC that did not reflect poorly on Hillary. I understood the campaign’s focus on crafting a better, more positive message for Hillary, and highlighting the hacking was not going to help her there. Yet if we didn’t talk about the hack, didn’t explore its implications, we could not make progress in getting the rest of the country to see how serious this was.

  One of my friends, a former Democratic strategist, had moved to the private sector and was working at a company that had been hacked in a similar way to the DNC. I called him for a chat and found him eager to help me. He gave me a new way to talk about this. When the emails are released, the press and the public are titillated by the content in the emails, and that is what gets all the coverage. His company was embarrassed and playing defense on that, as the DNC was still. What gets lost, he told me, is that this is a crime and should be treated as such. When everyone is busy snickering they cannot get outraged at the violation. We needed to try to turn the public’s attention to the crime and the need for a concerted effort to increase cybersecurity.

  Amen to that, but in this crazy election, how could we break through the noise?

  He suggested we have prominent Democrats write op-eds for major newspapers about the hacking and to take this message on television, too. Also, couldn’t the Democrats propose legislation to strengthen our cyberdefenses? Doing so would be a constructive way to show we were learning from the experience and trying to help others, too.

  These were very good ideas. As I was jotting down notes about what he said, and asking him to send me a memo, I had my doubts. I feared that even with such positive suggestions I would not be able to get anyone in Brooklyn to listen to me. Then I thought of Brandon. Was there a way to make him useful to the DNC? Although Brandon saw himself as a power broker, he rarely stayed in DC long enough to build a power base. The staff told me that once or twice a week, without telling anyone, he did not show up to work. The next day they would discover that he had been up in Brooklyn reporting to his handlers. Unless you’re in the room when things need to be decided, no one under you is going to seek your guidance. I could live with him reporting to Brooklyn, but I was an officer of the DNC and its chair. Robby should be taking my calls. I didn’t want Brandon’s guidance. I wanted money and he was just one of the levers I planned to pull to get it.

  I called Brandon into my office because I had decided the minimal amount of money I would need to help supplement Brooklyn’s efforts on the ground to win this election was $10 to $12 million. Immediately he said I would never get that so I revised it down to $8 million. I didn’t just come up with this figure on the spot. I had analyzed past DNC expenditures during presidential campaigns and believed we needed to spend more money on media, literature, and surrogate travel in nonbattleground states like Arizona and Georgia. I was also concerned about the U.S. Se
nate races and down-ballot contests in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. Also I thought it was a good time to try to renegotiate the terms of our relationship. Brandon and I had not started off well, but it was still early. He came into my office with a slightly bemused look on his face, as if he was coming to visit a crazy, senile old auntie and couldn’t wait to tell all his friends the nutty things she said.

  “I don’t know who you are. You are reporting to Brooklyn. I need someone who is thinking about the party. Brandon, I need $8 million from the campaign, so let’s figure out how we’re going to get that.”

  Brandon’s brows jumped higher and his eyes widened. He told me no. There was no way I was going to get that. He would not take that request to Brooklyn.

  “It’s not a request, Brandon. The DNC needs $8 million to help Hillary win this election. I thought I’d start with you, but I’m going to go around you shortly after you leave this room.”

  Brandon stiffened in his chair and his bemused look fell to seriousness. He told me that he represented the campaign and he spoke for Brooklyn whether I liked it or not. I could go around him or above him, but the answer would be the same.

  I was boiling inside at the arrogance of this young man. Did he not understand that I had long-standing friendships with most of his superiors in Brooklyn, with the exception of Robby Mook? I had the cell phone numbers of people he was still calling “sir” and “madam.” This was me being nice, but it was not going to last for very long.

  “You know, Brandon, I want to have a black-on-black conversation with you.”

  He looked so startled it was as if I had slapped him in the face.

  “What are you here for? What is your purpose in life? Why do I need you? I have never needed a liaison or a translator in my life. I am the chair of the DNC and as far as I can see, you are nothing more than a clerk. Take that message up to Brooklyn next time you sneak off up there. Tell them the chair of the DNC doesn’t make requests, and she doesn’t talk to clerks.”

  Brandon stood up, rattled by my directness. He was insulted but he had not let loose the idea that there was something just a little bit crazy about the chair of the Democratic Party. When he left, I wondered who in Brooklyn he called first to report about the madwoman of the DNC.

  When I went home, I called Ray Buckley while I was packing for New Orleans. I realized this was becoming a habit with me and that I was getting to be a bit dependent on it. A former state legislator in New Hampshire, Ray is the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party and one of the biggest political power brokers in New Hampshire. Ray is also a steady person. He never reacts too strongly, but he never underreacts, either. His memory is first-rate and he rarely forgets anything you tell him. I guessed I’d found my therapist for this election.

  The Progressive National Baptist Convention in New Orleans was great, but on August 10 I was desperate to leave. There was a once-in-every-five-hundred-years storm coming. My first flight had been canceled, and it looked like they might do the same for all the flights heading east through the storm. If I didn’t get out by 6 p.m. there was a good chance that I would not be back to DC in time for my FBI briefing on the morning of the eleventh.

  I was standing at the airport in a frenzy as I looked at the black clouds through the big windows in the waiting area. Always with the clouds! This was not just one big storm like Katrina or Sandy, but a bunch of medium-sized thunderstorms getting together to drench the earth with as much moisture as a category four or five hurricane. A truer metaphor for this election would be hard to find. People outside hurricane country don’t seem to take this kind of storm seriously because it doesn’t have a name, but I took it seriously. In order to escape this metaphor, I had to book a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth and then on to DC. The plane shook something awful as we ascended, and I was beginning to question if all of this was worth it when we finally broke through the edge of the storm. We had a smooth flight the rest of the way to Dallas, and I was back home and in my bed a little after midnight.

  The morning of August 11 I drove down Ninth Street to FBI headquarters. I’d been a resident of DC for more than thirty-four years and never had I been to the FBI. My assistant Ro’chelle Williams, from my consulting firm Brazile and Associates, met me around the corner from the Bureau and took my car to my downtown office. The last thing I wanted was a parking ticket outside the FBI.

  In the lobby I met up with Ray and Henry Muñoz from the DNC and Tom McMahon, whom I had just been able to bring on board. When Michael Sussmann arrived, he took out his security clearance badge, likely left over from his time at the Department of Justice. I was impressed. And Shawn Henry from CrowdStrike, our cybersecurity contractor, came right behind and took out something from his backpack that got him through the first screening.

  Proudly I took out my top security badge from the State Department and flashed it at the window. The man there told me that it was not a sufficiently high clearance for the briefing we were about to attend. I wanted to be with the crowd that just had to flash their badges, but Ray, Henry, Tom, and I had to fill out extremely detailed forms just to be let in the building.

  To get to the briefing room we had to go through a security screening just like the airport TSA’s, only we had to turn over our phones and all our other devices. After we handed over our electronics, we went through another screening before we crossed the atrium and entered a different part of the building. At that entrance, there was yet another screening before they ushered us all into a windowless room and handed us forms to fill out.

  While we were filling out the forms, a staff person told us that we were being videotaped. Then she read aloud the warning at the top of the form that said if we revealed to anyone what we discussed with the FBI, we would be committing treason. They had taped us listening to her read this so that there could be no ambiguity about what we had pledged to do.

  Assistant FBI Director Trainor greeted Michael Sussmann warmly and introduced the other people he’d brought with him. All I can recall is everyone had a long title with the word cyber or counterintelligence attached to it. I wanted to make small talk, crack a joke or something to bring a little humor to the room of humorless people, but Trainor placed himself directly opposite me at the table. This was not the moment for joking. As the agents described the Russians’ methods and the extent of the cyberattacks in the United States, not just in the political sphere, I was so scared I wanted to walk out the door and flee the country.

  All my life, I have binge-watched crime dramas and love movies with cops being the heroes, but this wasn’t a movie. This was real life and it was happening in real time. At the conclusion of the two-hour meeting, I wanted to tell the taxi driver not to take us back to the DNC but right to the Pentagon. This was a war, clearly, but waged on a different kind of battlefield. During that twelve-block ride up Capitol Hill, we didn’t say a thing. Henry looked left, Ray looked right, Tom was checking his phone, and I was in suspended disbelief looking straight up at the dome of the U.S. Capitol.

  As soon as we got back into the building, we sat numb and silent on the couches in Debbie’s office. I am not one to tremble, because I am my daddy’s girl and I do not scare easily. After that meeting I was just looking at the sky wondering what it was that we should do. Patrice kept walking in and out of the office, but no one wanted to talk or take our order for lunch. Patrice told me later that we looked as if all the life had been drained out of us. I finally asked her to leave so I could talk to Tom, Ray, and Henry. My first words were, “What the fuck!”

  Ray said he half-expected that Jason Bourne was going to come flying through the wall when we were being briefed. We all started to laugh, which was good.

  “Donna, if God forbid I was ever appointed to the Senate and told that I was going to be on the Intelligence Committee, I would resign,” he said. “There is something to living in a world where you just don’t know.”

  We had a conference call with the other officers, and I struggled to hint at the t
hings we could not describe. It was heartbreaking to see how so much of what we had been told could happen or might happen would now actually play out. Now I appreciated why I had chosen Ray as my confidant. He and I had shared this experience, and no matter what would come in the months ahead he was someone I knew I could rely on. I would talk to the cyber task force at our next phone call about how this information from the FBI might help us focus our plan on what to do next, but no matter what that plan was, I would always be able to depend on Ray for emotional support.

  This day was serious. This whole election was serious. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. When I went to my office by the railroad tracks I pulled out my bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured myself a nice stiff drink.

  EIGHT

  The Duck and the Spook

  By the third week of August Washington clears out. Members of Congress are home for summer break, and all the Washington players and their staffs plan vacations then, when the DC weather gets thick and swampy. Traditionally that’s when Democrats set out their beach towels on the sand at Martha’s Vineyard. In the summer of 2016 President Obama and the Clintons were among the vacationers there. Reluctantly, so was I.

  I never did understand why almost every big muckety-muck in politics ended up on this little island off the coast of Massachusetts where upscale black professionals have come every summer since the turn of the last century. I never felt I fit in there, among the black elite. I like a dock on a lake, a boat to go fishing, and a loud band in a dive bar at night.

  What brought me to the Vineyard was a panel I was scheduled to appear on called “Race and the Race to the White House.” It was sponsored by the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard and would feature Henry Louis Gates and Charlayne Hunter-Gault as moderators and New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow among others on the panel with me. Glenn and Debbie Hutchins invited me to stay in their house in Edgartown.