But what if we lost? What if we lost to Donald Trump? I would never be able to live with that.
As the evening wore on, I unplugged my home phone. It was ringing so much. Reporters were calling incessantly, and so were my political friends all around the country. Everyone wanted the inside story of what was going on with Hillary. I didn’t have it, and even if I did I could not share it.
The next morning, Monday, September 12, I snuck into the office through a back door. Reporters were camped out on the steps of the DNC. Journalist David Shuster had reported that a meeting on the future of Hillary’s candidacy was imminent, although I had not called one. When I got to my desk I found I was the most popular person in the Democratic Party.
First I heard from Joe Biden’s chief of staff, asking if I had time to speak with the vice president a little later that day. Gee, I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about? I got an email from Martin O’Malley, whose campaign never really did get off the ground. Once you run, though, you get that bug. I was guessing he just wanted to let me know that he was still breathing and in very good health. I got a call from Jeff Weaver, Bernie’s campaign manager, asking if I had a moment to chat with Bernie. Of course I did. I always had time for a chat with Bernie. At eleven Charlie Baker, the CEO of Hillary’s campaign, arrived in my office and sat down without offering an explanation. None was necessary. With all of the rumors in the press about the party considering replacing Hillary, he had been sent down on an early train to make sure that Donna didn’t do anything crazy.
“Hey Charlie,” I said. “Did you come down to pick up this tea I have for Hillary? I know it would help her with her cough.”
I was keeping my own counsel on this, not sharing my thoughts with Charlie because I knew what his opinion was. A few hours into the day we got our talking points from the campaign about Hillary and they were awfully weak, trying to turn her neglect of her health into a demonstration of her strength of character. She had kept a breakneck pace as secretary of state and she did the same as a candidate, trying to push through her pneumonia. Instead of owning up to the shameful way that her campaign tried to disguise her condition, the talking points praised her for being so transparent about her health, tying it to her release of her tax returns when Donald Trump had not.
This seemed like the same old same old campaign rhetoric when the country was crying out in pain.
Alone in my office after Charlie left to return to New York, I started to think of what would be the ideal ticket if I could arrange to choose one. Under the process outlined in the party charter, if the nominee died, resigned, or became disabled, the party chair would confer with Democratic leaders in Congress and the states and report to a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, which is authorized to fill the vacancy.
I spun out a dozen combinations for the ticket depending on my various considerations. I would want to keep a woman on the ticket, because it would be terrible to lose this chance to have a woman president. But then it would be even worse to lose to Donald Trump. Would I want to keep Tim Kaine on the ticket? If that was the case, then I had only one choice to make. Again and again I thought about Joe Biden. He was the strongest person to appeal to the working-class voters who seemed to embrace Trump. The ticket I liked most was Joe Biden and New Jersey senator Cory Booker. I felt certain that that combination would win the general election.
Then I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them. And I could not do this to my friend. Even if Hillary was ill and the campaign had its weaknesses, the effort to replace her would be divisive. This campaign was already torn apart by the lies and insults of Trump, the hacking and the steady drip of stolen emails released almost every week by WikiLeaks. To replace her, I’d have to work on getting party support to force her to resign her candidacy. The Bernie faction would be delighted by that, particularly if they thought Bernie would be a replacement. The section of the party—the majority—that supported Hillary would oppose that strongly, and it might further deepen divisions, allowing Trump to capture votes in the confusion.
No matter my doubts and my fears about the election and Hillary as a candidate, I could not make good on that threat to replace her. This election was no joke, and we were all in it together going forward. I would not entertain any more thoughts of replacing Hillary.
Instead, I doubled down on my commitment to do everything I could to help Hillary win.
TWELVE
I Am Not Patsey the Slave
We knew there was more coming, we just did not know when. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had warned that batches of documents about the Democrats would be released all the way up to Election Day. Late in August, Roger Stone, that sleazy, leering, white-haired Nixon operative who was a big supporter of Donald Trump, tweeted that soon it would be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.” The whole Democratic party was in an anxious crouch fearing how much chaos that might add to a crazy campaign. In those weeks after Hillary’s 9/11 collapse, when she rested in Chappaqua and began to prepare for the first debate on September 26, we didn’t know when the hammer would fall, but we were as ready as we could be.
Working with the cyber task force, the staff and I had developed a step-by-step contingency plan for the next email dump. As soon as the documents dropped, I would release a statement acknowledging the attack. The statement would remind the world that the DNC was the victim of a crime perpetrated by the Russians to influence the election. Trump was mocking the idea that Russians were involved, even while he urged them to release more emails. The statement would also emphasize the steps we had taken to protect the DNC since the first time the Russians broke into our system months earlier. Someone who was not really paying attention might believe that the Democrats were so incompetent that they just kept getting hacked.
The second step in our response to a new document dump was for our research department to search the documents for anything that might cause trouble, and our lawyers would review them against a database to ensure that they were not forgeries. I’d then assemble our war room of experts—including the cyber task force—on a quick conference call to determine what else we needed to do.
In the six weeks since I took over as the interim chair, I was getting a daily crash course in the world of hacking, and still I thought I needed to know more. I found out at last why it had taken so long for the FBI to let us know we had been hacked. The cause was incompetence on both sides. After first becoming aware of a possible hacking when they detected computers in the DNC communicating with known Russian hacking command centers, the FBI called the DNC in September 2015 and asked for the IT department. The FBI agent was transferred to the DNC’s help desk—you know, the people who answer your calls if you’re having trouble logging onto the network or your mouse stopped working right. The help desk employee was a contractor hired by The MIS Department, the Chicago-based technology company who had worked with the Obama campaign in 2008. When Obama took office, he’d brought this company on to help with the party’s network.
The technician thought the FBI call—made by Special Agent Adrian Hawkins—might be a prank call, not an unusual occurrence at the DNC. Agent Hawkins said he was trying to alert the party to the presence of Russian hackers in our computer network. Think about that for a minute. If the FBI—or even someone who claimed to be the FBI—called you, wouldn’t you panic, just a little? Everyone I know would have an elevated blood pressure, if not a mild heart attack, when they heard a voice from the bureau on the phone. And if they were black they’d immediately take the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” stance.
Instead of alerting his superior, the IT contractor decided to look for a compromised computer in the system. The technician’s scan of the system didn’t turn up anything, so he let it go.
Special Agent Hawkins called again in November but the IT tech again could find no signs that the system had been breached. This went on for some weeks before th
e FBI offered some more specific information. In December Agent Hawkins gave the technician a URL for the machine that was sending out the signal to Russia hoping having that address would help the tech office find it inside the system.
At this point, the contractor alerted our CTO Andrew Brown and they searched but again did not find anything. Nonetheless, the idea that something significant could be wrong in our system began to sink in. They met with Agent Hawkins in January in an FBI office in Virginia. Agent Hawkins showed them logs of Internet traffic between the DNC and the Russian entity known in hacking circles as Cozy Bear. Cozy Bear was well-known to the FBI, having hacked the State Department and the White House. Still our IT department could not find the evidence the FBI was pointing to. This went on until April, when the DNC tech department observed intruders logging onto our servers. The hacker, the DNC would later come to discover, was a different hacker popularly known as Fancy Bear. That was when Andrew brought the problem to Amy Dacey, the DNC Chief Executive Officer, who alerted Debbie. Debbie called Michael Sussmann, who recommended that the party hire Crowdstrike to help us with this problem. Seven months!
The IT guy made a mistake, and a big one. What about the FBI? Aren’t these guys the world’s most sophisticated investigative force? They know how to read people, right? The FBI agent had to know that he had not reached the decision maker when he got this young man on the phone. The DNC offices were only a few blocks away from FBI headquarters. The agent could have walked over and asked at the front desk to speak with the boss. I believe Miss Barbara Hurd and Miss Natalie Chung would have promptly called the party CEO, Amy Dacey. Or they could have brought our chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, into a secure room in Congress where they hold high-security briefings, but that seemed not to have crossed their minds. By the time Debbie finally found out about the hack, the Russians had been in the system for almost a year without anyone noticing.
How had they done it? Those in the hacking world call the method social engineering. That’s when a hacker distracts a target with things that are hard for most humans to resist, like adorable videos of dogs skateboarding or pandas wrestling that most people love to click on. While you’re laughing, the hackers are dropping malware into your system. They can also use voice mail if the phone system is integrated with the computer network. In the case of Cozy Bear, a voice purporting to be a female journalist left messages on DNC staffers’ phones asking for information on a story. While the listener was playing the message, she was unknowingly accepting malware.
I knew about phishing—a method in which a hacker sends an email that appears to be from someone the recipient trusts with a tantalizing subject header like You Need To Read This Cybersecurity Report. With Hillary’s campaign chair, John Podesta, it was an email that looked as though it was sent by Google demanding that he change his password. When he did change it through the link the hacker provided, they got into the system on his credentials. They also robbed identities by setting up a website that looked just like one for our IT firm but had one letter transposed in the URL, something most people would not notice. Instead of being mismarket.com, it was mismarkte.com, but otherwise the page appeared identical to the one the staff used every day. When the staff logged in, the fake site harvested their IT credentials and, from that point on, maneuvered through our system under someone else’s identity undetected.
In other words, we were being attacked on multiple fronts at once.
You know that feeling when there are rats in the basement? You take measures to get rid of them, but knowing they are there, or have been there, means you never feel truly at peace. As I went about my daily duties at the DNC, often my mind would drift to the image of rats. In the cyberworld the initials RAT stand for “remote access tool,” nodes where the Russian rats accessed all the information the DNC held in trust in whatever way they chose.
They weren’t rats, though. They were bears. They had built dens in the walls and hibernated there for months. They hibernated well, inside big computer operating systems like Windows or popular software like Adobe Creative Suite so that a routine security sweep would not detect them. Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear were rival intelligence agencies. Putin had pitted his cyberforces against each other. Some might see this as a waste of resources, but it had made them fierce competitors who were motivated to be aggressive and take chances. They sought to undercut each other at every move, stole sources from each other, and grabbed all the goodies for themselves. Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear often went after the same target just to see who would win. One report called their cybertools ingenious in their simplicity and power.
My primary teacher in my hacking crash course was Shawn Henry, the man from CrowdStrike who was quoted in the Washington Post article I’d read in what seemed like a lifetime ago. Through him, I saw all of this more clearly. Even after the convention, we did not know for certain that the Bears were out of our system. In politics things have a tendency to get ratcheted up, but talking to Shawn and the cyber task force had the opposite effect. We became sober and deliberate. Shawn has that sterling military demeanor I respected in my dad, but in a bald-headed white man. He has piercing blue eyes that size up a room quickly, and you know that with that laser gaze he’s very hard to fool. Yet because he is a good man, a patriot and cyberwarrior for our side, being around a man with that character has the effect of putting you at ease. With those watchful eyes on our side, you can feel safer, and that was his goal with his advice on how we should change our computer protocols.
Once I became chair we installed new security measures. Everyone on the staff was required to log off any time they stepped away from the computer, no exceptions. Logging in required two-step verification: the system would send a code to your cell phone that allowed you to log back in, so you could not do it only via your password. We no longer used the DNC email system for important communications. Any sensitive phone calls took place via FaceTime audio, and we were advised not to talk freely while standing in front of a window.
I remember the day I jotted down that advice in the sage green notebook I used for my cyberbriefings. At the top I put a gold-and-purple logo sticker from LSU, my alma mater, and at the left corner below, a midnight blue circle with white letters that said VOTE FOR SETH RICH. When I shut that cover after the conference call, I stood up from my desk to look out over the railroad tracks that first drew me to this room. Maybe I shouldn’t have my desk in front of this window, I thought. The space from here across the tracks was open. What if there was a sniper hiding in those trees across the way? For the first time since I moved in, I closed the blinds. That was what this election was doing to us: making us doubt the things that steadied us.
I could feel another kind of hush in the office, the hush of fear, reticence, and suspicion. In September and October of an election year, the DNC is jumping, and few people usually go home before 8 or 9 p.m. This election season, I could see people watching the clock. Some of them were even leaving early. This was a different cyberhush than the one from Robby’s team in Brooklyn, where the young men were focused and bonded and could work late into the night with fingers fast across the keyboards. At the DNC we looked at our computers warily, not knowing if they could be trusted.
When I looked around the office at night, the only person I saw was often Adam Parkhomenko, the DNC field director. I eventually asked him to move his office to the empty one near mine so that I could feel safer staying late. Adam was also a reserve police officer, and I was grateful to have him there, but I wanted more energy in these rooms. The lack of enthusiasm I saw as I traveled the country was something I couldn’t stop on my own, but I was not going to let it linger at the DNC if there was something I could do about it.
To help boost morale, I decided I’d hold impromptu parties in Debbie’s office. I called it my Wings and Wine Caucus. I have always loved wings and I believe they pair well with wine, but I’d offer beer, too. Debbie left behind some pretty good wine, and by the time we got through that, people we
re starting to stay later and work better together.
At first Wings and Wine was a big confessional. I heard how the hacking was affecting the staff in their lives outside the office. Tom McMahon said he kept finding himself in places where the people around him were speaking Russian. He did not recall that had ever happened before. My assistant, Anne Friedman, was very conscious of her phone. She had been sitting out with friends on the deck enjoying a summer evening when she started to wonder if the Russians had turned on the microphone in it. Both Tom and Anne tried to talk themselves out of this paranoia. That was ridiculous, they agreed, and called it lunacy. But was it? As I looked around the table, I wondered how many others had had moments, like I’d had at my office window, when they second-guessed their safety. This is what the Russians were doing to us, too.
These meetings were helpful in other ways. We bonded with each other, even bonded through those fears. Everyone was invited, but you know how that goes. After a few times you are down to a core group with a few surprise guests every once in a while. I already knew Tom and Anne, the daughter of a close friend, but I got to know Julie Greene, Patrice Taylor, and Adam Parkhomenko better. Also, I learned to trust Charles Olivier, the CFO sent down by Brooklyn, and he grew to trust and later to respect me.
I was suspicious of Charles from the beginning, because he was good friends with Brandon. Now that he was a regular part of Wings and Wine, the barriers between us were starting to fall, and he was open to my questions about how I was perceived in Brooklyn. It was still chapping my hide that they did not include me on the national election strategy conference calls, as if my decades of experience in the black community were not needed for a victory in November.
Over many evenings of Wings and Wine, I got Charles to describe the point of view Brooklyn had of my old, ragged ass. To Robby’s boys, my moment of glory had been the Gore campaign, which we lost. To them my campaign knowledge was from a bygone era. The common wisdom was that my inability to accept that things were different now was what was making me so feisty (meaning “unpleasant to work with”), but the truth was that no matter how much noise I made, my thoughts were irrelevant to them. I saw myself as making a sacrifice to help the party. They saw me as desperate for significance and trying to claw my way back into the national conversation.
Hacks Page 12