There he found a very strong signal, new and powerful enough to be detected in adjacent offices. The frequency was one typically used in personal locator beacons, but it was similar to the frequency technicians had found in the U.S. embassy in Moscow half a century ago that had led them to find a microphone. This frequency had not been detected when he’d scanned the same space a few months earlier.
Still the technician’s report dismissed the possibility that we were being bugged. The Russians had used this technology way back in the 1950s. Wouldn’t they be using something more modern and sophisticated now? I shared this information with the small group of people who knew I’d had the place swept, and the looks on their faces made the information about a Russian signal hard to dismiss. I made a point after that of watering the plants during the Wings and Wine Caucuses, and saying hello and good-bye to our Russian friends as I did. “Do svidaniya, Vladimir. Until we meet again.”
I was trying to make light of it, but inside I was not feeling light. Not at all. I was still very concerned that we were not doing everything we could to ensure Hillary would win. No one wanted to conjecture about what would happen if she did not win. That was unthinkable.
These responses to my pleas almost made me doubt my ever-trusty gut. Everyone around me seemed so confident that this election was in the bag for Hillary. Maybe it was that people simply could not imagine that the country would elect Donald Trump to serve as president. All the terrible things he had done in the election were amplified by the terrible things he had done in the way he lived his life. Just in the last few months of the campaign, journalists had published stories about how he had cheated the contractors that had installed the glass and drapes and carpets in his casinos and other work in his hotels nationwide. He had two thousand lawsuits filed against him for not paying his workers. There was Trump University, another scam, where he charged desperate people thousands of dollars in tuition with the promise that his “faculty of hand-selected experts” would teach them his secrets about how to get rich. He never taught a single class, and the Trump University faculty was even less distinguished than he was. He had to settle that class action suit with the State of New York for $25 million just to make it go away.
And there was the problem with women. I mean, if Barack Obama had five children by three different wives, the press would have lost its collective mind about the dysfunction of African American family life. Not this guy, nor his pussy-grabbing tape, nor the modeling service he owned that relied on undocumented workers from Eastern Europe, while he was railing against illegal immigrants coming to America.
After the Access Hollywood tape was released, the New York Times published a story where a dozen women described different times that he grabbed them, kissed them against their will, or rubbed his body up against theirs as he pinned them to the wall. The stories were horrifying and, of course, he tweeted his clumsy denials. He tweeted: “The phony story in the failing @nytimes is a TOTAL FABRICATION. Written by same people as last discredited story on women. WATCH!” And a few days later, the same theme: “Nothing ever happened with any of these women. Totally made up nonsense to steal the election. Nobody has more respect for women than me!” The one that worried me was, “Polls close, but can you believe I lost large numbers of women voters based on made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED. Media rigging election!”
I had grown to think that if he was complaining about something, the opposite of what he said was happening. If he was slamming Hillary for being unethical, it was because he had so many ethical violations he lashed out at her to sow confusion. I certainly saw that in action at the second debate, when he brought up Bill’s wronged women as a cover for his own bad acts. When he tweeted that he was losing the women’s vote, I had a sinking feeling that his internal polls showed he was winning it.
In those closing days, I was doing all I could. With the money from Brooklyn plus our own fund-raising, I hired minority media consultants to place advertisements in black, Latino, and Asian-Pacific Islander newspapers and syndicated radio programs, and I was very proud of that considering the resistance I faced. My concern remained the same: that we were not doing enough in communities of color. I was pulling in favors from everyone. The White House was great. I asked Joe Biden, Barack, and Michelle to record robocalls for me, and they said yes to every one. I tapped celebrity connections, getting Jeffrey Wright and Magic Johnson to write letters or make robocalls. And of course I was trying to spread around what little money I had on hand.
I was worried that we were taking too much for granted in those battleground states. The polls showed Hillary leading by double digits in Pennsylvania in the beginning of October, but by the middle of the month she was down to a seven-point lead. Inside the campaign the explanation for the drop was that old cliché that the “race was tightening.” But seven points is still a huge lead. By the end of the month she was leading in Michigan by 7, Pennsylvania by 5, and Virginia and Wisconsin by 6 each, and newspapers and poll tracking firms were giving her an 80 percent chance of beating Donald Trump. Everyone was feeling fat and happy (except me) until October 28.
I was in Salt Lake City on Thursday, October 27, where I had gone to meet up with one of Brandon’s FORWARD TOGETHER buses, although Brandon was manning the one on the East Coast. Utah was on our list of expansion states, and while most polls had that state as solidly Republican, some saw that support softening. We were making a play for it. This heavily Mormon state was not the kind of place willing to give the Pussy Grabber a pass. There was a chance, and a good one, that I was wrong about the electorate and that Hillary’s overwhelming momentum would sweep Utah into the Democratic fold. If that was the case, I wanted to see it for myself. I would be happy to have my gloomy feeling proven wrong.
I don’t remember much from that Utah trip. What I remember vividly is being in the airplane on the way back to DC that Friday—just ten days from the election—and watching Wolf Blitzer describe the letter that FBI Director James Comey had sent to the Republican chairs of the various intelligence committees in the House and the Senate stating that FBI investigators now were looking into new Hillary emails that they had just found while investigating another matter.
When I saw that, I felt like the world had just dropped out of the sky. I started emailing everyone I could think of to figure out what the hell was going on, but most people were in shock themselves. By the time I landed, the story had moved forward to not just anyone having these emails, but Anthony Weiner! Huma Abedin, Hillary’s top aide, was married to that foul man. He remained under investigation for the lewd selfies he had sent, sometimes to underage girls; in one selfie, his little boy was visible in the background. The FBI had been looking through his laptop and saw a number of Hillary’s State Department emails on it. Huma sometimes had used the family laptop to print out emails for Secretary Clinton, who preferred to read hard copies.
O Lord, please save us from technology, I thought. Almost every problem that came Hillary’s way this election was the result of emails. They might seem as though they were making everyone’s lives easier, but the way we handled them, and the way they could be falsified and manipulated, took up a tremendous amount of time and caused so much pain for her and for all of those who supported her.
I went straight from the airport to the DNC, and it was like entering a four-car funeral. When the press called, we didn’t know what to say. Soon Brooklyn let us know that we should say nothing. We didn’t know anything about Huma and the content of her emails, so there was nothing to discuss.
My message to the staff was that we had one more week to go, and that was plenty of time to recover from this. When you are in charge you never express remorse, doubt, or confusion. You keep the staff focused on the task and hold out hope, even if you do not feel much yourself at that moment.
I kept it together at the office but when I got home, Jeremy Peters from the New York Times reached me on my landline. In my emotional state, I was unguarded. He quoted me in hi
s piece saying, “This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time. We don’t want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, ‘Keep your focus; keep your eyes on the prize.’”
My statement was not much appreciated in Brooklyn, where the message they had crafted was one of confidence. Comey could look all he wanted, but he was not going to find anything. I believed that to be true. I knew Hillary was an honest person, and if she had made a slip in her emails, it was not from a desire to hide anything. We had to be bold and confident. There was no other way to win this election.
In the final week before the election, I reached out to my Spook. I wanted to know his insight into what Comey was thinking by releasing this statement. My Spook was confused, too. It’s a very easy thing, cyber-wise, to run a program that compares emails in one folder with another and identify the ones that are not duplicates. This was something his staff could have done in a matter of minutes to resolve the matter without announcing it to the world. Yet he chose to cast doubt on Hillary. My Spook did not see Comey as having acted malevolently, however. He reminded me that Comey had the reputation of being a Boy Scout, the kind of guy who always strived to do the right thing. The Spook did not believe that someone like Comey would deliberately tamper with the election to favor one side.
You could see the delight in the faces of Trump’s campaign staff. They believed that they had the election won, and not because they had been so clever at campaigning or had such a great candidate. Comey was winning it for them. Trump was campaigning hard in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, and Michigan. His tweets were about those visits, but also about “crooked Hillary.” “#CrookedHillary is unfit to serve.” And: “@PaulaReidCBS: @CBSNews confirms FBI found emails on #AnthonyWeiner computer, related to Hillary Clinton server, that are ‘new.’”
I had to believe the attitude I portrayed to the staff. We had one more week to go. I took out my apology list and started making calls. We need you. We need your money to help Hillary get over this. I made call after call. I asked them not to give up or give in. These were her stalwart supporters, the ones that stuck by her even though their lives had been torn apart by the hacking.
I was able to raise some money from these calls but the online fund-raising softened dramatically. As the week became the weekend, I knew there was a lot of early voting taking place, and I wanted to keep my foot on the pedal. By the weekend there was so much gossip in the media and many people were turning against Comey, but the people I worried about most were women.
In the work I was doing to get out the vote and build enthusiasm, the one thing I did not worry about was women. I figured that was Hillary’s responsibility. Once Comey started to question her emails again, I feared that we were losing those college-educated white women who had been Hillary’s strong supporters in the election of 2008. Were they feeling shaky about her? Had Trump’s relentless campaign to discredit her made them harbor a little kernel of doubt about her ethics? If they did, something like this might turn them in Trump’s direction.
By Saturday night, I felt a little bit of a backlash building. Comey had announced that he saw no problem with these newly revealed emails after the Bureau had reviewed them. Suddenly people were pissed at Comey for setting the campaign on fire. Perhaps this was going to excite the base even more. If she was down and out, she showed no sign of it in public. And her daily distributed talking points that had seemed like dry toast now had a little bit of Tabasco on them.
I had declined offers to go on the Sunday shows to talk about this, because I could not be an actress at this point in the campaign. I was just too damned scared.
On November 1, I was at the DNC when I got a call from Michael Sussmann. Earlier that day Patrice had been trying to find me and couldn’t, so she’d called Sussmann to ask if I was there with him. This made him think we needed an emergency plan if something happened to me. He asked if I had a designee. I’d never thought of this before, but I instantly chose Tom McMahon, the man who knew everything that I knew about what was going on.
Later that day Rand Beers, a member of our cybersecurity task force, asked if we had an alternative place for the DNC to set up shop if something happened to the building on Election Day. Suddenly I was being asked questions I’d never even considered before—questions no American presidential campaign had been forced to consider going into the weekend before Election Day. Although I had a sinking feeling in my gut, in truth and despite the polls, I did not know what would happen.
All I knew was that I would be on a train to New York at noon Monday and see what fate awaited the nation.
NINETEEN
Election Night
On the Thursday before the election I got a call from Charlie Baker as I was arriving at a political breakfast with corporate executives featuring GOP conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt and me. Brooklyn had decided to give me $1.5 million to run my Get Out the Vote (GOTV) operations in communities of color. I felt like jumping for joy! I was not going to have to spend the next ninety-eight hours worrying about raising money for yard signs, or vans to bring volunteers to barbershops where they would persuade people to get to the polls. At this stage of the campaign I knew exactly how to spend that money to be the most effective for Hillary and some down-ballot races. I knew places where there was a good candidate for sheriff who needed a bit of a boost, and some state legislators we wanted to support because they had especially promising futures. Before the breakfast, I got on the phone to spread the joy, calling organizers and officials in battleground states all around the country promising that the money was coming within the day, and we would strategize later about how to spend it.
I was worried about Virginia, even with the former governor and U.S. Senator as our vice presidential nominee. I had been in Northern Virginia, a territory easily won by the Democrats in the last few elections. There didn’t seem to be much going on there. With a little extra juice, Hillary’s chances would be stronger. I also wanted to spread a little love to Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, because I had a gut feeling that his state could swing either way, despite what the polls and the campaign were saying. G.K. Butterfield, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, and a representative from Durham, also had called worried about turnout in North Carolina after Hurricane Matthew. The people I was calling were those I knew from four decades of running campaigns, the ones who understood the ground game that wins an election. I was feeling less nervous about Tuesday after I made those calls.
When I got out of the event, I had a message from Brooklyn. My $1.5 milllion was now $750,000. It had been only ninety minutes from the initial call to the follow-up, and my money was cut in half.
You know I went straight to Brandon. I wanted to burn his ass at the stake for undercutting me so many times. He told me Brooklyn had decided to hold some of the money back because they were going to buy time on cable shows over the weekend. I said, “Brandon, you know colored people are not sitting at home on a Saturday night, not the ones that get out to vote. They’re at a party or they’re at the club. I’m only asking you to give me back the money raised by the DNC. How can you give it to me and then take it away?”
I never did get that money back. He won that one. I was angry at everyone all over again. I had already promised these states the resources. Donnie had promised Michigan $350,000 and Ed Rendell $150,000 from several unions and a big donor who wanted to help with voter protection. I wanted to target Detroit, because I feared that there was no enthusiasm there. These old black voters like literature, particularly cards that feature Obama. There is never enough love for Obama in the African American community. When you go into a convenience store or a barbershop or a beauty salon, the images on the wall are of Jesus, JFK, Dr. King, and Barack and Michelle. I had made up cards of a photo I took of Obama hugging Hillary when she got nominated. Having Obama embrace Hi
llary was a message people in these places needed to see.
We needed to get those cards out, and I was still trying to get more money for North Carolina. I left the CEO event knowing that I had to go back to the DNC and start hustling up some money.
When I got back to the DNC, I went to the office and opened my blinds and looked out over the railroad tracks at the stand of trees across the way. Hey, Vladimir! Yoo-hoo! You want a piece of me? Take your best shot. I’m done.Do svidaniya, motherfucker. Then I threw my tired black ass into my chair, shaking my head at what a mess I had become. I had stopped cussing and screaming a decade ago, but no sooner had I gotten back in the DNC building when everything I gave up for Lent I started doing again: drinking scotch and cussing, calling people out. I could not wait for this thing to be over.
We worked the weekend, late into the night, and I managed to raise $150,000. I also arranged for some people to donate directly to state parties so they did not have to go through the DNC. We worked hard and finished well that last Sunday night at the office, the last Wings and Wine Caucus before we went to New York.
On Monday we took the noon train from Union Station. Julie, Patrice, and Julie Goodridge, who was down from Massachusetts for Election Night, grabbed seats in a back row, and I gave Tom and Charles some money to bring us back wine and beer. We were joking and drinking. For the first time in months, we felt free. What we had endured in the last two months at the DNC was going to be over soon, right after Hillary won. I knew Donnie and Tom would go back to their other jobs, and I would go back to whatever was left of my life.
Hacks Page 20