Hacks

by Donna Brazile

  Before I left for Las Vegas we had our long-delayed meeting with the Department of Homeland Security. The GOP still declined to join us, so just a few people from the DNC and HFA went. The meeting reflected what Pratt Wiley, the director of the DNC Voting Rights Institute, was hearing about attempts to break into the electronic voting system in Arizona and Georgia, and perhaps other states that had not realized it yet. The DHS also was picking up on Russian attempts to infiltrate the electronic voting systems in several states. The DHS was working with any secretary of state who would cooperate to determine if the Russians had been successful, but it was getting rebuffed by many of them who suspected federal interference in the election process. I worried that our system—and whatever way it might be connected to those voting systems—might be a route in.

  When the people who were giving us the briefing warned about more dire attacks, like a Russian attempt to take down the power grid on Election Day, I felt as though I had reached my saturation point. With the attacks on my home, and me, the DNC, the mole in our office, the terror in the faces of the people I held dear, and now this plot to hack the vote itself, it was all too much. As we drove back to the DNC, I joked that I wanted to put crime scene tape around that building. There were so many crimes being committed against us in that building, and perhaps there were even more that we had yet to uncover.

  As I was preparing to fly to Las Vegas for the last debate, Julie, Patrice, and Anne took me aside. They were worried about me traveling alone. The attacks on me had become so frequent and so vicious that they preferred that I have someone along who would watch out for me. What they did not know was how I had been cautioning my family that they should be extra careful now. Our name, Brazile, was distinctive, and it would have been easy for my many sisters and brothers and their children to become the target of some crazed person out to harm me. Several of my siblings said they wanted to come stay with me just until Election Night to make sure I was safe, but I told them no. All I could think about was Seth Rich. Had he been killed by someone who had it out for the Democrats? Likely not, but we still didn’t know. If they came after me like that, I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. This became a very heated conversation. I wanted to maintain my autonomy and not to cause anyone harm, but my colleagues were genuinely concerned for my well-being. Anne mentioned several people who had agreed to escort me, but I instructed her to thank those people and reaffirm that I would travel alone.

  The debate was in a basketball stadium, the Thomas & Mack Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on October 19. Before the start of the broadcast, I went around and said hello to everybody, but especially I wanted to talk to Reince. The day after the DHS meeting I sent him a formal letter on DNC stationary offering that we be briefed together on the hacking of the DNC so that he would know what had happened to us. I didn’t expect him to believe me, but he might believe the Department of Homeland Security. I still wanted him to work with me on a joint statement about assuring the integrity of the elections. When I went over to him before the debate, he managed to wiggle out of the conversation once again.

  When we all entered the arena and I saw where I was seated, I burst out laughing. I was no longer among those seated in the front row or among the family. I was not even visible. They had seated me in bleachers behind the scrim that served as the backdrop to the debate stage so that no one in the audience or the cameras could see. That was where they put me and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others whom they had to invite but wanted to tuck away. I would have seen more of this debate if I’d stayed home. The only thing I could see was the back of the monitors.

  I was tired. It had gotten to the point that the only time I could sleep was when I was in an airplane. When I was up in the air, I knew they couldn’t get to me. I was cut off from the threats, the insults, and the daily drama. As soon as I smelled the jet fuel fumes, I started to nod off and rapidly fell asleep. This was part of the reason I didn’t want anyone to travel with me. I needed those few hours of rest. When I recognized this slight, I decided to make the best of it. When you are in the front row, you have to be careful how you behave because the camera could be on you at any minute, especially if you rolled your eyes. Here in the back with the outliers, I could eat mints and chew bubble gum and even nod off if it got boring.

  It was not boring. Hillary was great, wearing suffragette white, confident and glowing. Trump was full of rage and condescension, as if he didn’t want to go through this again because she had beaten him so badly the other two times. The contempt they had for each other was obvious. They didn’t even shake hands before they stood behind the podiums. Chris Wallace, who was the moderator, made sure to announce in advance that he and he alone had written the questions and decided what they would be. I was too tired to see that as an insult to me, even if it was, and also a portent of what was to come.

  She took him on with grace and was never intimidated by his smirking bluster. The highlight for me was when Hillary stood him down on the hacking of the election. Chris Wallace asked her a question about one of the speeches she allegedly had made that was published by our old enemy WikiLeaks. In it she talked about open borders for trade and advocated for a global electrical grid. On the debate stage she acknowledged she supported that, but quickly pivoted to ask him to doubt it because of the questionable source of the information:

  You are very clearly quoting from WikiLeaks, and what is really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans. They have hacked American websites and American accounts of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the Internet. This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly from Putin himself, in an effort, as seventeen of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election. So I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is finally: Will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this, and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election, that he rejects Russian espionage against Americans, which he actually encouraged in the past?

  Trump mocked her for the pivot from open borders to Putin, and the crowd laughed. Chris Wallace had to admonish the audience not to react audibly.

  Later, of the hacks, Trump repeated his claim—despite the unanimous agreement of seventeen nonpartisan government agencies—that we had “no idea” if the perpetrator was “Russia, China or anybody else.”

  Hillary shot back that Trump “would rather believe Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence professionals who are sworn to protect us.”

  For me, this was the best answer she could have given, and I admired how she baited him into that trap. It was not clear that the crowd was with her on this, but I hoped and prayed that some people in the television audience were.

  When it was over, I made my way with Adam Hodge, the DNC communications director, to the spin room. There was a pen where the featured guests of the two parties were supposed to gather to take questions from the press, who were straining at the barriers with their cameras and recording devices. In the pen were Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, Jennifer Palmieri, and that snake James O’Keefe, who had made all those fraudulent videos to spread bad information about the DNC. Why was that guy in the pen, protected by Pence’s secret service? I was too tired to get angry. I wanted to do my duty to talk about how great Hillary was and get back to the hotel. One of my last prebooked interviews was with Megyn Kelly for Fox. It was less of an interview than an ambush. She was so eager to get to me that when she saw me approaching, her producers yanked Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway out of the chair almost midsentence so I could sit down right away. Megyn was gunning for me.

  I expected to talk about the fact that Trump would not commit in advance to whether or not he would accept the result of the election, but Megyn was having none of that. She wanted to talk about paid protestors and James O’Ke
efe, and she wanted to talk about me leaking questions to Hillary.

  On half the screen was footage of the violence that broke out at a Trump rally in Chicago in March. This spooled out while Megyn asked me about Bob Creamer’s contract with the DNC. All I could say was that the contract existed before I took over as chair, and now it had been terminated and all others involved had been fired. This was not enough for Megyn, who wanted me to own this, admit to it, apologize for it, and make more footage for Fox to display. I was not fast on my feet that day. I didn’t have my usual wry smile and quick capacity to turn the subject around. I tried to praise Hillary for her great debate performance, but Megyn was impatient with me because she wanted to attack me about the debate question. I felt my shoulders slump as she laid into me with such fury.

  “As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted because your information is totally false,” I said. “What you’re telling the American people—”

  “I’m getting this from Podesta’s emails.”

  “But Podesta’s emails were stolen,” I said.

  “So you deny it? CNN’s Jake Tapper said that this was unethical. Someone was unethically helping the Clinton campaign.”

  I tried to explain that I had my records, that this was falsified, that I never in my life had gotten a debate question in advance from CNN, but her impatience with me only grew. The minute I tried to defend myself, she looked as bored as bored could be, and rushed me off camera. She had gotten what she wanted from those ten minutes attacking me. I was too numb, too tired, from the whole thing to cry, and when I looked around the spin room for a familiar shoulder to collapse upon, there was no one there. Not a single Democrat or Democratic pundit left in the space. I wanted so bad for this whole thing to be over, but there were still three weeks to go.

  That night, Donald Trump took the time to tweet, linking to a clip of Kelly’s interview with me:

  “Totally dishonest Donna Brazile chokes on the truth. Highly illegal!”

  SEVENTEEN

  Firefighters

  The week the Hacker House team started to arrive, in the beginning of October, we established a routine of twice-a-day phone calls to keep us up-to-date on what they found as they dropped into the compromised maze of the DNC computer system.

  The calls included Heather Adkins, who seemed to be an angel of cyberspace, floating around the globe as she managed a global team of security engineers for her employer. No matter what time zone she was in, Heather always was available to help. Nicole Wong was on the calls, too, even though her expertise was policy. She could not do the work that the Hacker House team did but she, unlike me, understood everything they said. And although I didn’t know the jargon, what I got from participating in these calls was a jolt of the bright energy of Hacker House. I could feel it without understanding all the technical ins and outs.

  The Hacker House crew were outsiders to the toxic culture of Washington, DC, patriots who brought their big brains to this problem because they wanted to make sure that the election was a fair fight. Rob Witoff told me as much. “There is nothing political about this for me,” he said. “This is not about who wins. If a foreign power is interfering with our election, I want to prevent that.” They operated in the world inside those hundreds of servers and laptops connected to our scattered network and spoke the language of the thousands of lines of code that they needed to review in order to solve the mystery of what was happening in the ongoing hacking of the DNC.

  The contrast between them and the general mood at the DNC was dramatic. After everything that had taken place in that building in the last four months, the office was a beaten-down place. People were dragging through the day, wary of what was happening on the devices they used, what might be exposed by their daily communications, and anxious about what would be in the next WikiLeaks drop. Would it be something that would embarrass them? Cause them to lose their jobs? Expose them to danger from another vengeful group of lunatics? I had managed to boost some of the employees with my Wings and Wine Caucus, but the majority were still subdued. From the moment that Ryan and Rob arrived, it was as though there was a separate energy center in the building.

  On that first day in the DNC they stayed until ten at night investigating the breach that had been announced the moment they arrived. Part of their job is to keep meticulous records of everything they find and how they respond to it. As Rob said, in the fog of war, information gets lost or misheard, and there can be a lot of false positives. They created a shared document to capture information in one place and an incident timeline to help them reconstruct what (if anything) happened. Every new piece of information went on that document.

  They named this incident MIS:80, after The MIS Department, the contractor who had been running our computer system since Obama had taken office and 80, the network port that identified where the breach occurred. Of the two incidents that first day, one was a false alarm. An engineer on the staff had connected to the system via a suspicious login that set off a security alarm. Rob and Ryan tracked down the engineer to verify it was in fact he who had logged in, not an outsider to the system. Just as they were signing off on that incident, another alarm sounded in a different part of the system. They didn’t know if the CrowdStrike software was identifying a new breach or an old one that they were rediscovering. Although Hacker House didn’t identify the actor, this second breach was serious, and what it revealed about the vulnerability of the DNC system was even more concerning.

  The MIS Department did a lot of business with the Democrats nationwide. These state organizations and campaigns connected through the same system used by the DNC. A political party wants to include as many people as it can in registering voters and signing on volunteers. We didn’t know who could be coming in through those other campaigns and state organizations, because the network centered in Chicago was a hub for all the The MIS Department clients. Someone getting in through Nebraska or New Mexico might be able to maneuver through the system to the computers of the DNC.

  As Rob and Ryan discovered the vast number of ways that outsiders could get into the DNC system, they knew the first thing they had to do was quarantine it from the rest of the The MIS Department network. The most efficient way to be sure potential intruders were completely out of the environment and hadn’t planted backdoors through which they could still get into our network was to take the scorched-earth approach: to fully rebuild the MIS:80 servers at the DNC and restart everything from scratch. They directed the contractors who worked at MIS:80 to use laptops dedicated for use only in the DNC network and different ones when they worked on the larger The MIS Department system.

  When I heard about the intensity of this first day, I was surprised by how upbeat Ryan and Rob were on the next morning’s call. What they were describing was a hot mess and an embarrassment, and to me it was frustrating. By the time they arrived we had spent nearly $2 million remediating the hack, and there were still significant problems. Heather was not nearly as alarmed as I was. She said on one of the calls that what Rob and Ryan encountered was something they had all seen before. CrowdStrike had done a good job and the DNC has responded well, but working under intense pressure something always would be overlooked. Both our volunteer hackers were undaunted; in fact, they were excited. Ryan told me not to feel discouraged.

  “We are firefighters,” he said. “Your team here performs certain functions, but they are not an in-house security team. They manage the smoke detectors but they can’t tell the kids to stop playing with matches. We face big fires.”

  Ryan, at 6'3" with a big red beard, almost looked like the classic Irish firefighter but Rob was slight of frame, with blue eyes, fair skin, and a runner’s leanness. They both wore a uniform, though: the jeans, t-shirt and hoodie outfit of Silicon Valley.

  After that rocky introduction to the DNC computer system, Rob and Ryan went with Andrew Brown to have a late dinner at Ted’s Bulletin, an old-time DC joint that has great milkshakes
and house-made Pop-Tarts. While they ate, they made a few big decisions about what was up ahead for Hacker House. This, they told Andrew, was not the assignment that they had been led to believe it was. They would not be mere advisors assisting the existing crew in how to improve an upgraded system. If the first day was any indication, they would be responding to live intrusions on a regular basis. The hours would be long but the work would be exciting. When you are really good at your cybersecurity job, you build such strong defenses that you rarely face a live intrusion. In this hodgepodge of a network, they would be facing them several times a week. Plus, they believed this work was vital to the election, much more important than what they had imagined when they signed up.

  The team also needed more people. Rob and Ryan roughed out a list of people they were going to approach about coming to DC for a few weeks. They needed a great infrastructure person to help them gather the information necessary to make sense of the activity in more than thirty cloud accounts, several data centers and hundreds of desktops and laptops across the DNC. Each piece of the network produces data for every action taken and those actions are recorded in logs. To make this environment easier to analyze they wanted Tom Cook, an infrastructure expert who has worked at the biggest Internet service companies in Silicon Valley, to set up the telemetry.

  Rob and Ryan also needed hunters: engineers who are gifted at poring through the information generated by the network logs, server monitors, applications and cloud event logs to find patterns that identify where the bad stuff is hiding. They called Chris Long and another hunter I’ll call Ron because he doesn’t want his name used.

  Then Ryan ordered $200 worth of Soylent, a meal-replacement fluid designed in Silicon Valley that supposedly fulfills all your body’s nutritional needs. Ryan believed the schedule would be that they’d get up around eight, grab some Soylent, and Uber over to the DNC for a day that would last until nine or ten at night, sometimes longer. Ryan decided he needed to buy the Soylent bars, too, as they didn’t know if they’d be able to leave the computer room when an incident was underway. And Rob called his girlfriend to cancel the trip to Paris they had planned for later that month. “We can go to Paris, or we can save the election,” he told her. Lucky for him, she reluctantly agreed they could go another time.