Hacks

by Donna Brazile

  On October 7, after a busy morning and lunch, Ray and I drove to Nashua. My phone started rattling in my bag and I grabbed it to see what the ruckus was. I was thinking it might be something about Hurricane Matthew, the fifth named storm the nation had suffered that year. Matthew was a category five and starting to build in strength, but that was not the thing that was blowing up my phone.

  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had released a statement about our hacking, the first sentence of which nearly brought tears of relief to my eyes: “The US Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”

  I read that sentence out loud to Ray, and he hooted. And the second sentence in the statement was even stronger:

  “The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

  Hallelujah! That’s right, my fellow Americans. Putin is screwing with the election, and the only candidate benefitting from this is Donald Trump. Now what we had said about the hacking was backed by all the United States intelligence agencies except the FBI. Even though the FBI was not willing to sign this statement, Ray and I already knew what they had on Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear. People don’t understand how hard it is for those agencies to say that they are “confident” about anything, because they are so cautious in everything they say publicly. The FBI definitely had scared that caution into us when we went to that briefing in August. We still had to be careful what we said, but the constraints that had been tying us down since July didn’t seem so heavy now. Ray and I felt so freed by this statement. It was like we had been yelling in the forest and up to this point no one had heard us. Maybe someone would believe us now.

  After the rally, I checked Twitter, and my heart sank. It didn’t seem like the DHS statement about the Russian responsibility for the hacking was causing much of a stir yet. I wanted the country to be as outraged as I was about this, but I supposed it might take a while for people to understand the magnitude of what it meant. The party needed to make a statement to reinforce this revelation, I thought, but I’d have to focus on that after I had some time with Bernie.

  Bernie and I took a walk away from the venue. He put his hand on my back as we walked, a gesture that drew me closer to him. I was thinking that he would ask me about the hacking and that statement by DHS, but he surprised me when he started talking about Seth Rich. A few weeks earlier, a Dutch television interviewer asked Julian Assange about Seth’s death. On the tape I saw of the interview, Assange fueled a conspiracy theory. He dropped his smirk and said, “Our sources take risks.” Assange was implying that Seth was a source for WikiLeaks! When the interviewer pressed him on his relationship with Seth, Assange left it vague, responding, “We do not comment on our sources. We have to understand how high the stakes are in this case.”

  I had been saddened by the crazy conspiracy theories that ignited on Twitter and Reddit. They wounded Seth’s family. I knew this accusation was not true. As Bernie and I walked, with his steady hand on my back, he asked me about Seth’s family, about his work at the DNC, and about his murder. I told him that after the second debate I was going to Nebraska to visit Seth’s family and help them plan the memorial and scholarship fund. This talk with Bernie was important to me. Bernie is no-nonsense. He asks good questions, and he’s always very grateful to people who tell him the truth. Sometimes when you are explaining something to a good listener you understand it better yourself. I told him my visit with Seth’s family was in three days. He asked me to send them his regards, and I promised I would.

  The communications staff and I were putting the final touches on our statement about the DHS announcement when I got news that the Washington Post had posted the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump and Billy Bush on its website.

  I remember looking at it on my phone in disbelief. How much more can the public take in on a single day? I also knew that this revelation meant the DHS announcement would get next to no airtime.

  I couldn’t help but be distracted by the tape myself. As you surely recall, in the Access Hollywood tape, a bus pulls into a parking lot—a normal enough shot, it seems—and then things get disturbing as Donald Trump’s commentary begins. He brags about making sexual moves on a married woman at a time when he had been married to Melania for less than a year. He leers at a woman who is standing at the entrance to the studio to greet him and talks about her legs and congratulates himself for his good luck. More than that, the way he laughs about being such a powerful man that he always gets away with whatever he does. “When you’re a star you can do anything,” he says.

  I was disgusted by what this old man was saying, although it wouldn’t have been better coming from a young one. What father talks that way? I thought of Ivanka, whom I’d gotten to know when her family was bidding on the lease for the old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, now a Trump hotel. She was elegant and well-mannered. And here was her father, a man with two daughters, saying things that any father should object to. This was sexual assault, not locker room talk. My father was a basketball player. I know many guys who play sports. I don’t know anyone who talks that way.

  I was certain that the GOP was finally going to unload this guy. He had turned so many tables upside down and rewritten the whole rule book, embarrassing the party many times a week, but they never left him. Finally, I thought, this was it. Trump wasn’t doing very well with women in the polls, but this video would destroy even the GOP women. Every mother would think about what she would have to tell her daughter if some disgusting old man talked to her like that, and they would not stand for a party that tolerated it in the presidential candidate.

  This was a game changer, if not game over. What else did we need?

  As we got closer to Boston I watched the Republicans abandoning Trump. Senator after senator, congressman after congressman cited their daughters as a justification. Rep. Jason Chaffetz said if he continued to support Donald he’d never be able to look his teenage daughters in the eye again. Senator Mike Lee was so worked up he did a cell phone video denouncing Trump, thereby ruining Lee’s chances for any appointment in his administration if Trump won. He must be betting, like I was, that Trump was a goner. Even Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, tried to put distance between them by saying, “I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them. We pray for his family.” The whole party, it seemed, was running in the other direction. All over Twitter and on the airwaves there was conjecture about whether or not he would be removed from the ticket.

  I put out another statement: “Donald Trump’s offensive, degrading, and disgusting comments about women revealed today are beyond the pale and don’t bear repeating,” the statement read. “The only remaining question is whether Republicans will continue to stand by him and call him a role model for our children?”

  Any normal candidate would drop out of sight after a bombshell like that and spend some time with his team to figure out how to respond. Donald Trump was not going to do that. That Friday night he taped a rushed apology, but it sounded forced. He seemed angry that he had to apologize. He said he never told the world he was a perfect person, but that the tape did not reflect the man he was, and that he had changed. Those three statements don’t contradict each other, but taken together they reveal a lie. Also he claimed the high road from way down in the gutter, “We are living in the real world and this is nothing more than a distraction from the real issues.” And then he
went after Hillary for Bill’s sexual aggressions. Not the statement of a repentant man.

  When I arrived at my friend Julie Goodridge’s house in Jamaica Plain, she told me there was even more news that day. How had I missed it? WikiLeaks dumped 50,000 of John Podesta’s emails. The Russians were doing Donald Trump another favor, releasing damaging emails to distract from the degrading things he’d said on the Access Hollywood tape. The emails included alleged transcripts from Hillary’s speeches to Goldman Sachs. Her high speaking fees from Goldman were something Trump had been beating her up about on the campaign trail. He kept taunting her to release the speeches. And when she wouldn’t, he said she had something to hide. She was telling her supporters one thing and something different to her banker pals.

  In the email dump there was one paragraph where she described how we live in a global world and should lower trade barriers. WikiLeaks was intervening to save Trump’s reputation once again by dumping this damaging material only a few hours after he was humiliated by the Access Hollywood tape. If Trump survived this disaster, I knew he would feature that statement in his stump speeches from that day forward.

  I went to bed thinking he would not. His party was abandoning him, and the calls for him to resign as a candidate were coming from all corners of the country as well as the media. The combination of the DHS press release about the Russians hacking our election, along with the Access Hollywood tape, had guaranteed Hillary’s victory. Or so I thought.

  The next morning Trump rose from the swamp ready to fight us all. Paul Ryan canceled a joint fundraiser with him in Wisconsin because he didn’t want to be seen on the stage next to him, but Trump didn’t care. His tweets were belligerent. First he was jaunty, tweeting, “It certainly has been an interesting 24 hours!” Then defiant: “The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly—I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA.”

  The next move was to go after Hillary by re-tweeting remarks from Juanita Broaddrick, who has alleged that Bill had assaulted her decades before, though the case has never gone to trial. “@atensnut: How many times must it be said? Actions speak louder than words. DT said bad things! HRC threatened me after BC raped me.” And, “@atensnut: Hillary calls Trump’s remarks “horrific” while she lives with and protects a “Rapist”. Her actions are horrific.”

  There was a moment there when I had to pick my head up and focus on the world outside the window. This is where we were in this election, I thought, an election that was going to decide the future of our country at a difficult time. The election that would mark for history the way we responded to electing our first black president, and this was what we were talking about. One month to go, and I didn’t have any feeling that it was going to get better. I now felt that the Republicans were never going to abandon Trump no matter what he did.

  From Boston I made my way to New York, where I would appear on This Week with George Stephanopoulos to speak about the hacking. That night would mark the second debate. George wanted to talk about the Access Hollywood tape and the leak of Hillary’s speeches. He asked me, did I think Bernie would have won if Hillary’s speech fragment had been public when she and Bernie were competing for the nomination? How could any of us know? I tried to steer the topic back to Russia.

  “George, when you see something postmarked from Russia, you should be afraid to open up the document. I refuse to open these documents. I refuse to allow a foreign government… to interfere and meddle and manipulate information. So I don’t know if it’s true or not true,” I said, hoping that somewhere in the living rooms of America, someone heard me.

  That night, October 9, at the second presidential debate in St. Louis, the hall at Washington University was filled with tension. Had there ever been an election where both parties seriously considered replacing their candidates? I didn’t remember one. Donald’s plan to drown out the reverberations of the Access Hollywood tape was to invite three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexually assaulting them, and one whose rapist Hillary had defended early in her legal career. He held a press conference, which the cable networks covered live, during which each of the women disparaged Hillary because of Bill and endorsed Donald Trump. Trump sat smugly with hands folded at the center of a table, two women on each side. After the women finished speaking, they stood up to leave the room without taking questions, while the reporters barked questions at Trump. I saw Steve Bannon grinning like a fool in the back, hidden among the reporters. I bet this whole stupid stunt was his idea, and the media was going for it.

  The setup for the audience in St. Louis was much different from the formality of the university auditorium at Hofstra where they had held the first debate. The candidates were taking questions from the audience, who were perched on bleachers. I was on the Democratic side with Nancy Pelosi and Claire McCaskill, across from the women from the press conference who were seated near the Trump family on their side of the room.

  When Hillary came out onto the stage she refused to shake Trump’s hand. Maybe she was trying to insult him, or maybe she just couldn’t stand the idea of touching that pussy-grabbing thing. Whatever her intent, it seemed to please him. He got feisty and he was moving around the stage with confidence, almost stalking her. As she stood at the front of the stage, he paced behind her, his large body full of fury as she addressed the crowd. I don’t know how she stood her ground without flinching as he menaced her for all the world to see. He deftly threw many of the questions from the moderators and the audience back onto Hillary. When people asked him about his taxes, he bragged about not paying much, and blamed Hillary for writing the tax laws to favor her and her rich friends. Never mind that Hillary has not served in Congress, the branch of government that writes the tax laws. The zinger was clever and, for those who don’t understand how government works, I bet it seemed like he won that point. But Hillary was on her game, too. She said she had faced many strong opponents, but never had she questioned anyone’s fitness to serve. “Donald Trump is different,” she said. No shit.

  Later Hillary scored a point.

  “It’s good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the laws of this country,” she said.

  But Trump didn’t miss a beat.

  “Because you’d be in jail,” he said. The crowd, which was told not to express reactions at these things, roared with laughter.

  At the end of the debate she did shake Trump’s hand, but I believe that was because she was confident that she had won. He was so far down after that sleazy tape, he needed to trounce her on the debate stage. In my opinion, he damn sure did not do that.

  As I stood up to walk to the spin room I saw that it was different for this debate. We were surrounded by gossip columnists. I was interviewed by a reporter from Inside Edition. The campaign had become a reality television show.

  I turned my phone back on. I reared back at what I saw on the screen. For the first time in this election, Donald Trump’s crew had their sights trained on me. Throughout this whole campaign I had never been a target of the trolls, and I had been grateful to fly just below their radar. Since I had said those things about Donald Trump on Sunday, the insults and racial slurs had started to increase, but after my appearance on This Week, I had a big target on me. I watched the horrifying language and terrifying threats scroll across the phone. One said, “How dare you present yourself as some kind of new, cleaner leadership? You have no moral standing to lead any of us. Step down now.”

  And another was more direct in threatening my life.

  “We’ve got your number, all of you,” it read. “You’re going down somehow or another. If not by revolution, then by radiation sickness after your Queen starts nuclear war… May you lose sleep every night the way we do.”

  I felt the fear rising in my body until I had to turn the face of the phone away from me. Now it was my turn in the barrel.

  FIFTEEN

  The Terror Comes Home

  After the sec
ond debate in St. Louis, I flew to Newark and then on to Atlanta to attend a fund-raiser for the Georgia Democrats. In Atlanta I checked into the Omni Hotel, a place I had stayed at many times because it was connected to the CNN headquarters building. I was looking forward to getting some rest when I arrived, and to get my laundry done at the hotel. I had been on the road for six days and was scheduled for a few more.

  At half past noon on October 11, I had been dozing when my phone rang. Rebecca Kutler, a producer from CNN, said she needed my help on a story. Just as I was answering the phone I saw an email from Politico and a similar one from BuzzFeed reporter Mary Ann Georgantopoulos, both writing about an email from the latest WikiLeaks dump. Mary Ann’s read: “An email you sent Ms. Palmieri suggests you tipped off the Clinton campaign about a question a day before CNN’s town hall debate in March. Did this happen? Why did you send the question? Was this allowed?”

  “Do you recall CNN giving you any debate questions that you turned over to the Clinton campaign?” Rebecca asked.

  I shook my head, trying to rock my brain awake so I could respond to this moment. I was stunned. Leaking questions didn’t sound like something I would do. Whatever I know, I share with everybody, and besides, CNN never gave us questions in advance of one of their political events. I was searching my memory, but in this post-nap state I didn’t come up with anything. I needed a clue, a time marker.

  “What debate?”

  She said March 12, 2016, was the date on the leaked email.

  In the spring of 2016, near the beginning of the primary campaign, Bernie was gaining traction. His message of fighting for working people and the middle class resonated with both Democrats and Independents. He wanted more debates, and the DNC leadership and I agreed that there was nothing wrong with adding more.