Hacks

by Donna Brazile

  I did not get the feeling that I was heard, though. Instead, I got the feeling that what I was saying was further proof that I was out of step with their vision for Hillary’s victory. Perhaps they thought that because the Haitians were inclined to vote for Hillary they could assume that vote was locked in and move on to a neighborhood where the votes were more contested. This ran counter to everything I had learned in politics. You build enthusiasm among those you can depend on and make that support so powerful that it spills over into the areas surrounding the little piece of turf you can depend upon. This is how you build enthusiasm for Election Day.

  After nearly three days in Florida, my next stop was the battleground of Colorado, which Bernie had won. The state highlighted the campaign’s other big problem: the rift between the Bernie supporters and the Hillary supporters. Brooklyn needed to concentrate on winning the election. Healing the divisions between these factions was a problem I felt the party should solve for the campaign.

  I had an early flight on August 31, so I went to my hotel in Denver and took a nap. Wellington Webb, the former mayor of Denver, picked me up at the Hyatt to take me to Aurora for a campaign event. This man was bending my ear something fierce about how the senatorial candidate, Michael Bennet, was not putting enough investment in the ground game, and how Hillary had to send more surrogates to engage the electorate or she might just lose Colorado. Did she know that? She should come here, he said. This should be on her schedule for the fall.

  The next day, at an event in Denver, state party chair Rick Palacio invited all the county chairs to meet with me. Again I would be the one who would take in all their criticisms and disappointments.

  It was really nice outside, and I remember enjoying the cool air. I had this wistful feeling that if I could have been in control of my life I would have stayed in Colorado for a week, enjoying the mountain air. My feeling of not wanting to leave mixed with my sense of urgency for the campaign. That mood in Brooklyn was one of self-satisfaction and inevitability. The polls were showing Hillary holding steady, between five and eight points ahead of Trump and with a clear path to 270 electoral college votes. The mood I was gathering on the ground, however, was much more restless.

  The meeting with the state county party chairs was combative. One man in particular I remembered from the platform committee. Dennis Obdusky had come to Orlando looking for a fight. When he saw the process was designed to hear him out, he settled down and pitched in to find language we could all agree on. We went from being enemies to being buddies. I liked people like Dennis—disrupters working for good—because I had been one when I worked on Jesse Jackson’s campaign for president in 1984.

  Now, in Colorado, this man I had bonded with had been elected county chair.

  Dennis was concerned that there would not be a role for the Bernie folks in the state now that Hillary was the candidate.

  “Well,” I said. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  I advised Dennis that this would not be easy. No one gives up power without a fight, but he had a good position and the Bernie folks already had won a big battle. Ninety percent of the party platform represented what Bernie believed. Take the win, I said, and build upon it.

  As I got to the airport to fly back to DC on September 2, my mind returned to Donald Trump’s claim that the Democrats were taking the African American vote for granted.

  What I had found on the streets of Orlando seemed to support it. All the data showed that 1 percent or fewer of black folk supported Donald Trump, so that vote seemed to Brooklyn to be in the bag for Hillary. No need to spend any money to court it when the poll numbers and the data points were so overwhelmingly in Hillary’s favor. I knew that to be true, but there is a difference between telling a pollster that you favor a candidate and getting yourself out the door on Election Day and going to the polls. The campaign was telling people that electing Hillary would be a historic change, but in their daily lives they did not see how it would change anything for them. I didn’t see much evidence that the campaign had a story it wanted to tell these voters that would persuade them otherwise.

  Colorado, too, had its own air of disappointment. The Bernie supporters who were so energized in the primary season had believed that they could change the world, fight corporate corruption, and get some relief for middle-class families. They saw Hillary as not much different from any other candidate: chasing money instead of reflecting the will of the people. They were not satisfied by the strides they had made in changing the party platform victory. They saw it as a symbolic win. And they were not that far off.

  We negotiate the party platform like we’re writing the Constitution, but as soon as that battle is over, the candidate faces the new realities of the campaign and does whatever he or she sees as pragmatic. The platform could be seen as a yardstick to use to measure the candidates’ actions, but it never has been something they are beholden to accomplish.

  What I saw was a feeling of frustration and resignation rather than the energy needed to win. I’ve been in campaigns long enough to know what the odor of failure smells like.

  And when you catch a whiff of it, no matter what the numbers say, you should worry.

  TEN

  Bernie, I Found the Cancer but I Won’t Kill the Patient

  Before I called Bernie I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call. I had promised Bernie when I took the position of interim chair of the DNC that I would get to the bottom of whether or not Hillary’s team had rigged the party process in her favor so that only she would win the nomination. From the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month earlier I had my suspicions, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some emails might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof and so did Bernie.

  My long call with Gary Gensler the weekend after the convention was my road map. I followed it and began to learn what I needed to know. Debbie had not been the most active chair in fund-raising at a time when Obama had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the DNC debt and put the party on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operation. Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover in the month or so that I had served as chair.

  By September 7, the day I was making this call to Bernie, I had found my proof and what I had found broke my heart. I thought the party I had given so much of my life to was better than this. I asked God to order my steps so that I would not stumble in calling Bernie or in taking the actions at the DNC to correct what needed to be corrected in the party.

  Right around the time of the convention the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up… when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

  Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially… money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

  I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and di
d not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

  When I got back from Martha’s Vineyard I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

  The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

  I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

  When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, was signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

  The other campaigns—Martin O’Malley and Bernie—also signed victory fund agreements that kicked in should they secure the nomination, not seven months before. They also did not specify as much immediate control from the campaign as the one Hillary signed with the DNC.

  I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement. The victory fund agreement seemed to confirm my suspicions about Brandon’s role. He was there to watch the money and make sure that it was spent exactly as Brooklyn wanted. He really was the clerk.

  Other than that, what I found was the normal order of political business. The party did nothing different than previous presidential cycles. During the primary season they were constantly in touch with Bernie’s director of delegate operations and anything they sent to Hillary they also sent to the other candidates. A defeated candidate might argue whether or not the rules were written fairly, but they were negotiated in the open with lots of input from the members of the party long before most candidates declared their interest in running. The party did that on purpose so that there could be no influence exerted by those trying to win the nomination. Bernie’s supporters did not participate in these negotiations for a simple reason: he was not a Democrat at that time.

  The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

  The sadness I felt didn’t just come from the fact that I could not change what had happened. I had been careful not to interject myself into this part of the election. I worried that if I did, I might end up running the party. But seeing what had happened made me acknowledge that I could have prevented this if I had been more involved. Why were the party officers not consulted about signing this agreement? Had I been chair when it was proposed, I would have gotten the officers to weigh in on this momentous decision.

  The morning before I called Bernie, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt that I had not wanted to get my hands dirty with all of this mess, and now I was up to my neck in it. And although I wanted to get all of this out into the open to prevent it from happening again, I felt terrible that I couldn’t tell anyone about this except Bernie, because of the conversation I had had with the Spook.

  This was the man my friend Elaine connected me to when I was visiting her on Cape Cod, a man whom she felt would be capable of explaining some of the cyber mess to me. I met him at a hotel bar the week after I returned home to Washington—just like in the movies. He had significant experience in Russia from his time working for international organizations in the days when the old Soviet Union crumbled after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sometimes the word “spook” is considered a racial slur but I did not see it this way with my spooky friend. As the weeks of this strange election unfolded he was like a ghost who appeared early in the morning, calling me on my home landline often as early as 4 am, to tell me what to be aware of, and often knowing what would happen in the campaign days before it occurred. This quality was spooky to me, as if he operated in a mysterious world that only a few could see. In my head, the nickname stuck.

  The Spook described Russian president Vladimir Putin as a man who yearned for the old order, when the Soviet Union was as big as the United States and the two countries were well-matched adversaries. Although Russia now was smaller and weaker, it was wily and well-informed about the intricacies of American politics. Russia still could have an impact in sowing dissension inside the United States. The term the Russians had for this was “active measures.”

  Active measures are designed to destabilize the politics of whatever country the Russians attack. They manipulate the media, spreading propaganda and disinformation along with forgeries of official documents. These active measures create discord within communities, making people doubt their leaders and believe false narratives about what is transpiring right before their eyes. As examples, the Spook pointed to people doubting that the intelligence agencies are giving the public correct information, seeding the idea that they have an agenda of their own. These active measures also create doubt about the integrity of the elections, and get people to doubt the motives of a free press.

  “They call it political warfare,” the Spook said. “The tool kit is called ‘active measures,’ and a lot of it is not clandestine.”

  When he described these techniques, it was as if he was describing WikiLeaks. None of what WikiLeaks did was clandestine; it was right out in the open. The impact of its actions was to split the Democratic Party into warring factions that sought to discredit each other. Inside the five days of the Democratic convention, the threats and harassment created by the leaked emails slowed the staff work considerably. The fact that we had pulled off a harmonious convention defeated these active measures that time, but it was clear that the Russians were not done yet.

  As Trump was campaigning, he spoke with admiration about Putin and cast doubt on the idea that these leaked emails came from the Russians. Trump, unwittingly or on purpose, was part of these active measures. If I told the world what I had found out about Hillary’s surreptitious control of the Democratic Party, I could be seen as part of the active measures, too.

  My Spook didn’t know me at all, but he could see my despair for the future of the country and my uncertainty about what role I should play to protect our democracy. I didn’t know if there was anything I could do, or should do, to help keep the country safe. I knew I needed to make sure that we found out everything about what the Russians were doing inside the party, because the Spook said they were certain to keep trying and to escalate as the election neared.

  “Nothing they are doing is a surprise,” the Spook said. “TTP: tactics, techniques, and procedures that they have used in other countries and in other elections. They are doing it in the U.S., and they are not shy about it. There is an aspect about this work that breeds som
e arrogance and bravado. They have targeted other countries before, but they are now aiming these tools at a great power, and they have succeeded in dividing the country even before the election. This time I think they are focused on the psychology of the voter, but I would not be surprised if the next time they will try to tamper with the vote: the voter registrations, access to voting on Election Day, and perhaps the vote itself.”

  I left that hotel bar with a knot in my stomach. The only thing I could hope for and pray for was that Hillary would get elected. Even if I disagreed with what her campaign had done to secure control of the party, I knew when she was in power she would stand up to the Russians. She was strong and knew the international political landscape. Putin despised her, and I bet this was one of the reasons he was working so hard to make sure she did not sit herself in the Oval Office. She was our best hope, and I wanted more than I ever had before for her to win, even if in my heart I had my doubts that she could.

  In the meantime I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.

  “Hello, Senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”

  I discussed the fund-raising agreement that each of the candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I described how Hillary’s campaign had taken it another step.