Hacks

by Donna Brazile

  I needed help but I did not know where I could turn.

  SIXTEEN

  State of Denial

  To get the help I needed, I ended up turning to an unlikely source: the Republicans. I’m not kidding when I say that. In the months since the convention, as I gained a greater command of the situation at the DNC and the world of hacking, I understood the importance of both parties coming out in support of free and fair elections. The hacking was not just a new technique in the high stakes world of American politics. The DNC had suffered a break-in that was putting our democracy at risk. If the GOP and the Democrats made a joint statement objecting to a foreign power meddling in our electoral process, it would be a lot stronger than if the Democrats made that statement alone.

  It seemed like a no-brainer to ask both parties to issue a joint statement underscoring the importance of honest elections. That earlier statement from the seventeen intelligence agencies who all agreed with high confidence that the Russians had hacked the DNC should be proof enough for any American. Yet the people I knew who were high up in the GOP and the campaign refused my emails and my calls when I pleaded with them to join me in condemning these acts of cyber terrorism. Apparently they saw it as good for their side, and that was all that mattered.

  Sean Spicer was a gossip buddy of mine before he was Trump’s first press secretary. I had his email and his cell number from all the Saturdays he called me before I appeared on CNN and ABC’s Sunday shows to talk about politics. At that time he was the communications director for the Republican National Committee. I’d usually be in my cab on the way to my hotel when I’d see Sean’s name on my phone, and I would know what he wanted, what he always wanted: to know what topics the producers told me we would discuss when I joined the round table that next morning with George Stephanopoulos.

  Sean is a guy with a great sense of humor—and the kind of guy who knew that if I was going to give him something, he had to give me something in return. I’d share the topics, and from him I’d get some little inside tidbit about the goings-on on his side of the street. We’re old political hands. We know the drill. I knew that when he spoke, his voice would make it sound like he was divulging a big secret, but most likely he was just trying to plant something in my ear that he hoped I might use when it was my turn to speak. Now that I was no longer a pundit, our Saturday conversations had stopped. Communicating as we had before would not be right, now that we were political opponents. The hacking of the election was something that, for me, was above the partisan divide. It was not for Sean, though.

  I texted him. I emailed him. I brought it up when we were face-to-face at the debates, but I could see his eyes dart away like this was the last thing he wanted to talk to me about. He would slap me on the shoulder like the warm acquaintances that we were, and move as quickly as he could away from me.

  Same thing with Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican Party. Reince and I were well acquainted. He had clashed with Debbie when she was chair. If he needed to cut a deal with the party about not scheduling our primary candidate debates on the same day, or if both of us wanted to take a stand on a state’s primary rules, he called me and I brought the issue to Debbie or to the party leadership to see what we could do to get it resolved. This had built mutual respect, and I was trading on that positive past when I approached him about making a joint statement about the election.

  I was not expecting a frosty reception when I walked up to Reince at the vice presidential debate, trying desperately to follow up on the text messages I’d been sending him about making a joint statement about the election. I didn’t get a really frosty reception, I got that special DC frost where the person smiles when he sees you but immediately looks past you trying to find someone in the room to come right over and interrupt the conversation. I saw his eyes searching around the room even as he was drawing me a little close for an anemic hug.

  “How ya doing, Donna?”

  “Fine, I’m doing fine. How you doing?”

  “Doing well. It’s a crazy time.”

  “So Reince, I wanted to talk to you about the texts I sent you last week. We really need to say that both parties are against the Russians’ hacking of our elections. You agree, don’t you?”

  “Hey, Donna, it’s good to see you but I’ve got to talk to that guy from Politico.”

  So thanks for nothing, zip, nada. I was desperate to get a briefing on this topic from the Department of Homeland Security, which had indicated it had information to share about the election, but the department wanted to brief representatives from both parties simultaneously. The Republicans apparently were not interested in taking this meeting. We tried to schedule it many times over the course of six weeks, but they wouldn’t commit.

  In the meantime, Donald Trump was treating the drip, drip, drip of our personal emails as his opposition research, not ill-gotten gains of a crime. He hammered away on Twitter, saying that the information from WikiLeaks proved that Hillary was a criminal and should be locked up. On October 16 he tweeted: “We all wondered how Hillary avoided prosecution for her email scheme. WikiLeaks may have found the answer. Obama!” He then tweeted on October 17: “Crooked Hillary colluded w/FBI and DOJ and media is covering up to protect her. It’s a #RiggedSystem! Our country deserves better!” He still did not let up the next day, the day before the last candidate’s debate, when he tweeted: “Hillary is the most corrupt person to ever run for the presidency of the United States. #DrainTheSwamp!” He was gleeful about the invasion of our privacy. One website tallied that he mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times in the month of October.

  My alleged leaking of the questions to Hillary before one of the Democratic candidate forums continued to be a big theme in Trump’s tweets and his rallies. “Voter fraud! Crooked Hillary Clinton even got the questions to a debate, and nobody says a word. Can you imagine if I got the questions?” he tweeted October 17. From the rally stage he always mentioned me, and always as if I were second only to “Crooked Hillary” in infamy for this thing I very well might not have done. The death threats and terrorizing phone calls escalated the more he mentioned me.

  I knew I needed to get to the bottom of whether or not I had given questions to Hillary—and Hillary only—in advance of the CNN/TV One–sponsored town hall forum in March, in which she would face Bernie Sanders. (Martin O’Malley had dropped out of the race right after the Iowa caucuses.) In a way, my life depended on it. In the days after my return home, I searched my memory for a recollection of writing the email. I also searched through all the emails on my office computer for Brazile and Associates, but I could not come up with a subject line that said “sometimes I get the questions in advance.” I asked my assistant to get a technician who could go through the server to see if any fragments of that email remained, but he found nothing. I called Roland Martin, who was not very happy to hear from me. We had worked so well together during his six years as a contributor at CNN and since. That happy collaboration we had forged over the years had now dragged him into this mess, and he was upset with me about that, despite the fact that he couldn’t find the email in question in his files, either.

  Roland and I had both been unhappy with the lack of discussion on issues specific to black Americans during the primary season. He and I talked frequently and often lamented the debate moderators failing to raise these issues that were so important to one of the Democratic Party’s most crucial constituencies.

  Roland knew these issues mattered. He is the host of a national daily morning show targeting African Americans on TV One, and, in October 2015, he had questioned Hillary Clinton at one of her town halls in South Carolina, on the campus of a historically black college. He spent months, to no avail, trying to get Bernie Sanders to do a similar one.

  What Roland and I wanted for the upcoming CNN/TV One–sponsored forum was to ensure that issues important to people of color, such as the justice system and the disproportionate number of our citizens who were in jail and on death row, were included. As Ro
land later told his TV One audience, he had been discussing these issues with many others, bouncing ideas off of professors he knew at historically black and Ivy League universities, with prominent Black Lives Matter activists, and other black political figures, like me.

  I came to believe that the email contained some of the ideas that I had been tossing back and forth with Roland, similar to the way I had once shared topics I was going to talk about on the ABC Sunday shows with Sean Spicer. The reason that the networks paid me, and many party operatives like me, to comment on the news of the day was that I was plugged into a world of insiders. Forty years in politics gave me a contact list and a perspective that went below the surface, deep into the places where the media could not see. In that world, information is a form of currency, and we all trade it back and forth all the time.

  The death penalty was a topic that no one had raised in the primary debates and forums preceding the one with Roland Martin and Jake Tapper. Assuming the email was legitimate, I would have thought that I didn’t want any of our candidates blindsided by this turn of subject matter. But what I could not accept was that I would have shared information with one Democratic candidate and not the other. My rule was that when I shared something, I shared it with everyone. I know that if I shared anything for the debate with Hillary’s team, I also shared it with Bernie’s. If Martin O’Malley were still in the race, I would have shared it with his team, too.

  The Clinton people had remained silent on this matter, and that really hurt. Not one of them stood up for me on air. The people who were coming to my defense were the Bernie people. Bernie’s chief strategist, Tad Devine, said on Andrea Mitchell’s midday show that I had always treated them fairly and so did his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver. It wasn’t quite exoneration from the Bernie camp, but it made me feel a little better.

  The policy of the campaign and the party was to refuse to verify, or even discuss, the stolen materials published by WikiLeaks, DCLeaks, and Guccifer, but it was clear that a portion of it had been doctored in some way. Jake Tapper’s claim in his email that none of the emails had been revealed to be phony was just ignorance on his part, and seemed to be motivated by his fury at me. On August 2, right after the convention, New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor received an email purporting to be from our press secretary, Mark Paustenbach, pitching her what it called an “Opted” (a misspelling of op-ed, or opinion piece) for the paper’s editorial page, saying also that I would be sending the piece along shortly.

  When Yamiche responded to Mark that she would contact the editorial page editors, Mark was taken aback. He hadn’t sent an op-ed email to anyone. It was bogus. Right after that, she received an email from one of my addresses, offering Yamiche a ludicrous essay that allegedly had been written by Tim Kaine about how the vice president’s job was to make the president look good. It read, “It’s like when you go to a club, and you see those hot girls next to their boring ugly friends. I’m the boring ugly friend. I’m the one that doesn’t get drugged at the bar, because no one wants to touch me with a fifty-foot pole.” I still laugh, thinking anyone would believe those words could come from Tim.

  I was familiar with how the Russians could take over your email and start sending phony messages. On the evening of October 12, a few days after I was accused of leaking that question to Hillary, I’d gotten an email that appeared to be from John Podesta’s account. The subject was “We have a problem” and it read:

  Donna, some of our less than reliable media people are starting to privately question the Russian hack story we’ve been feeding them about these emails that Assange keeps leaking. We’re worried they may start questioning it not so privately. You know as well as I do if the media starts slamming her on this it’ll take coverage off Trump.

  HRC wants us to come up with a backup story to keep them guessing until we get to E-day in case we need to use it. Do you have any ideas? We know we can count on you, Donna.

  Are you kidding me? This ploy was so absurd. As if Russia was a phony story! I knew how Podesta sounds, and I knew this was not him. I forwarded the fake email to the security team to check against our email database, and I also alerted some people at Hillary for America, who were certain that it was fake. To me, it was evidence that some of the DNC emails were fakes. Someone was trying to make people doubt that the election was fair, and Donald Trump was seizing on it. As Trump campaigned in October, his major theme was that the system was rigged, and my email controversy fed into the narrative he was running with.

  As I frantically searched for proof that would restore my reputation, it dawned on me that I was in a no-win position. It appeared that I had violated some cardinal sin of journalism in appearing to favor one side over the other. Whatever the facts, it was the appearance that mattered. I knew there was no way that any of the people who questioned me on television would be interested in a long and nuanced explanation. That world is quick. The questions would be: Did you do it or not? And are you sorry? If I didn’t have a snappy comeback, I’d get cut off and expose myself to further ridicule. The best, if regrettable, course of action was to take the hits now and reconcile with my accusers after the election.

  And the hits were coming from all sides. They were digging up emails I’d written about Obama in 2009 saying that people were still hurting under his economy. They published this as if it had been written in 2016. Where was this coming from? And why did the emails they dropped seem to support perfectly the talking points Trump had for that day’s campaign?

  The attacks were unrelenting and coming on several fronts at once. On October 17, that sleazy Republican operative James O’Keefe released a doctored video that showed Scott Foval, who worked for one of the campaign contractors, boasting about paying protestors to incite violence at Trump rallies.

  The violence at Trump rallies was becoming a big issue. Trump would stand on the stage and rile up the worst in people with his incitements to throw Muslims out of the country, and his long narratives about Hillary and how the system was rigged against him and his supporters. He told the crowds it was time to take the country back. If they stuck with him, he would restore them and their families to power. Protestors who were brave enough to get into Trump rallies were sometimes beaten by his supporters, punched in the face, and always humiliated. The media, penned in as they were and also subjects of Trump’s ire, talked about how dangerous this was, and they saw it as a reflection of the dark mood in the country. When James O’Keefe produced this footage, Trump gloated that he and his supporters were not to blame. It was all coming from Crooked Hillary.

  I watched O’Keefe’s video with a sinking heart, knowing this was something we could not fight back against, not really. Every political campaign has an operation that sends out people to their opponents’ campaign events to make sure that the media and the participants also get a dose of the opposition point of view. The people who take on this work might be union members with signs for their candidate or people with flyers to hand out to those waiting to enter the venue, and might even be that Damn Duck. In the budget the term we use for it is bracketing. We hire a contractor, like Bob Creamer, to do this work of organizing the opposition force, and also to organize rallies for our candidates. The Republicans do it, too. In 2016, this program conducted hundreds of press events. None of them involved any violence whatsoever.

  Regardless, the footage of Foval boasting about picking fights with crazy people in the line to a campaign rally looked terrible. Foval was taped saying, “It doesn’t matter what the fricking legal and ethics people say. We need to win this mother fucker… In the lines at Trump rallies, we’re starting anarchy.” Creamer confidently said that Hillary was definitely aware of what he was doing with the duck. “The campaign is fully in it,” Creamer said. “Hillary knows through the chain of command.” Foval described in detail how money could flow through different contractors and PACs so that it could not be traced directly to the campaign.

  I knew how much fuel this would add to the
raging fire of this campaign. What he had captured in this doctored video did not look doctored, and it also captured everything that the voters suspect about the corruption of politics. Voters would see this as proof that they were being manipulated by powerful forces who saw them as pawns in a high-level scam.

  How did they get it? That was something everyone in the party and the campaign wanted to know. I was part of a long email chain between the campaign, the party, and many contractors on the day that the video was released about how the young woman who took the surreptitious footage got in.

  She called herself “Angela Brandt,” and she had passed herself off as the niece of a friend of Bob Creamer who wanted to volunteer at Mike Lux’s office to work on the bracketing operation. Later we discovered her real name was Allison Maass, a woman who had infiltrated Hillary’s campaign in Iowa and was caught by Russ Feingold’s senate campaign in Wisconsin before she caused any trouble there. At Mike Lux’s office she moved in undetected. Quickly she had a key card and access to the email system there. Mike said she’d only used the key card twice, which meant every other time she was at the office she was surrounded by others. That also meant that two times she was there alone, able to do whatever she pleased. She even came to the DNC, as part of that team from Mike’s office. The day that someone from the Sinclair Broadcast Group confronted Bob Creamer about the footage, she folded up her laptop, gathered her personal items, and walked out the door without saying a word to anyone.

  Here we were in the middle of an election where our security was daily under threat, and this kind of foolishness, this lack of concern for vetting volunteers, took place. I wanted someone else to deal with it, but I knew I would take the hit to deflect from a focus on the campaign. That’s what principals do. Whether it was true or not, it was something else that would be hung around my neck as the chair of the DNC when both sides gathered for the final debate in Las Vegas in two days.