Morell’s op-ed was the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm in a crowded building. And yet, somehow, most in the media—and many voters—continued to ignore the danger staring us in the face.
Snakes!
I was not shocked to see the connection between WikiLeaks and the Russian intelligence services. At least that helped further discredit its odious leader, Julian Assange. In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions. He claims to be a champion of transparency, but for many years, he’s been helpful to Putin, one of the most repressive and least transparent autocrats in the world. It’s not just that WikiLeaks avoids publishing anything Putin won’t like and instead targets Russia’s adversaries—Assange actually hosted a television show on RT, Putin’s propaganda network, and receives adoring coverage there. And if hypocrisy isn’t bad enough, Assange was charged with rape in Sweden. To avoid facing those charges, he jumped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After years of waiting, Sweden eventually said it would no longer try to extradite him, but promised that if Assange came back to the country, the investigation could be reopened.
Assange, like Putin, has held a grudge against me for a long time. The bad blood goes back to 2010, when WikiLeaks published more than 250,000 stolen State Department cables, including many sensitive observations from our diplomats in the field. As Secretary of State, I was responsible for the safety of our officers around the world, and I knew that releasing those confidential reports put not only them in danger but also their foreign contacts—including human rights activists and dissidents who could face reprisals from their own governments. We had to move fast to evacuate vulnerable people, and, thankfully, we don’t believe anyone was killed or jailed as a result. I thought Assange was reckless and wrong, and said so publicly.
The fact that these two old adversaries from my time as Secretary of State—Assange and Putin—seemed to be working together to damage my campaign was maddening. It was bad enough to have to go up against a billionaire opponent and the entire Republican Party; now I also had to take on these nefarious outside forces. The journalist Rebecca Traister observed once that there was “an Indiana Jones–style, ‘It had to be snakes’ inevitability” about me facing Trump. “Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white, and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America,” she wrote. I was up for the challenge. And I might add: Of course I had to face not just one America-bashing misogynist but three. Of course I’d have to get by Putin and Assange as well.
By midsummer 2016, the whole world knew that Trump and his team were cheering on the Russian attack on our democracy, and doing everything they could to exploit it. Trump never even tried to hide the fact that he was making common cause with Putin. But what if they were doing more than that? What if they were actually conspiring with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks? There wasn’t any evidence of that yet, but the coincidences were piling up.
Then, on August 8, Trump’s longtime consigliere Roger Stone, who cut his teeth as one of Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricksters,” bragged to a group of Florida Republicans that he was in communication with Assange and predicted that an “October surprise” was coming. This was a shocking admission, made in public, from Trump’s longest-serving political advisor. Stone made similar statements on August 12, 14, 15, and 18. On August 21, he tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary”. This was particularly notable because, as I mentioned earlier, we had determined there was a good chance that John’s email might have been hacked, but didn’t know for sure. Stone kept at it over the next few weeks, even calling Assange his “hero.”
I wasn’t the only one who noticed. At the end of August, Harry Reid, one of the congressional “gang of eight” who are briefed on the most sensitive intelligence matters, wrote a letter to FBI Director Comey that cited Stone’s claims and asked for a full and thorough investigation. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” Reid wrote. He also raised the prospect that there might be an attempt to falsify official election results. This was a reference to public reports that Russian hackers had penetrated voter registration databases in both Arizona and Illinois, prompting the FBI to warn state election officials across the country to upgrade their security. Like Morell’s op-ed, Reid’s letter was an attempt to shake the country out of its complacency and get the press, the administration, and all Americans focused on an urgent threat. It didn’t work.
Drip, Drip, Drip
As we headed into the fall, troubling reports and rumors continued to swirl. Paul Manafort resigned on August 19 amid growing questions about his financial ties to Russia. On September 5, the Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies now believed there was “a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions.” That meant it was much bigger than the DNC hack.
We heard there was a federal interagency task force digging into the Trump team’s financial ties, but no reporters could get it confirmed on the record. There was also talk that the FBI was looking into strange computer traffic between Trump Tower and a Russian bank. Reporters were chasing that one, too, and Slate’s Franklin Foer eventually broke the story on October 31. Then there were the whispers going around Washington that the Russians had compromising information on Trump, possibly a salacious videotape from a Moscow hotel. But nobody had any proof.
At my first debate with Trump, on September 26, I went after him hard on Russia, and he continued to defend Putin and contradict the conclusions of our intelligence agencies, which they had shared with him personally. “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC,” Trump insisted. “I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?” What was he talking about? A four-hundred-pound guy in his basement? Was he thinking of a character out of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? I wondered who told Trump to say that.
Meanwhile, Roger Stone continued to tweet warnings that WikiLeaks was preparing to drop another bomb on us, one that would destroy my campaign and land me in prison. He was such a bizarre character it was hard to know how seriously to take anything he said. But given what had happened already, who knew what other dirty tricks were coming our way.
Then came October 7, one of the most significant days of the entire campaign. I was in a prep session for the upcoming second debate, trying hard to stay focused on the task at hand.
The first thing that happened was that Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, and Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, issued a brief statement that for the first time formally accused “Russia’s senior-most officials” of ordering the hacking of the DNC. We already knew this, but the formal statement gave it the full weight of the U.S. government. Strikingly, the FBI did not join in the statement, and we later learned that Comey refused to do so, claiming it was inappropriate so close to the election. (Hmm.)
Then, at 4:00 P.M., the Washington Post broke the news of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. It was a catastrophe for Trump’s campaign. Less than one hour later, WikiLeaks announced it had obtained fifty thousand of John Podesta’s emails and published a first batch of about two thousand. It looked like an orchestrated attempt to change the subject and distract voters—and provided further reason to believe that WikiLeaks and its Russian patrons were very much in sync with the Trump campaign.
It turns out, Russian hackers had gained access to John’s personal email account back in March, thanks to a successful phishing attack. WikiLeaks continued to release stolen emails almost every single day for the rest of the campaign. For a while,
it seemed like the WikiLeaks gambit was failing. The Access Hollywood story dominated the headlines, put Trump on the defensive, and sent his Republican backers scurrying for cover. The press eagerly covered every stolen email that emerged—even reprinting John’s favorite risotto recipe—but none of the stories monopolized the news cycle like the Trump tape.
I commiserated with John about the outrageous invasion of privacy—I was one of the few who knew what it felt like—but he took it in stride. He felt bad about some of the language he used. He felt even worse for the friends and colleagues who had sent him private messages and now had to see their words printed for all to see. And WikiLeaks hadn’t bothered to redact personal information such as phone numbers and Social Security numbers, which victimized good people who deserved better.
In the end, though, most of John’s emails were . . . boring. They revealed the nuts and bolts of a campaign at work, with staffers debating policies, editing speeches, and kibitzing about the daily ups and downs of the election. In fact, Tom Friedman of the New York Times wrote a column about how well the behind-the-scenes correspondence reflected on me and my team. “When I read WikiHillary, I hear a smart, pragmatic, center-left politician,” he wrote, and “I am more convinced than ever she can be the President America needs today.”
What was harder to see at the time was that the steady stream of stories guaranteed that “Clinton” and “emails” remained in the headlines up until Election Day. None of this had anything at all to do with my use of personal email at the State Department—nothing at all—but for many voters, it would all blend together. And that was before Jim Comey sent his misguided letter to Congress, which made it all much worse. As a result, we faced a perfect storm. And Trump did his best to amplify our problems, citing WikiLeaks more than 160 times in the final month of the campaign. He could barely contain his excitement whenever a new batch of stolen emails appeared.
Comparing the effects of WikiLeaks and Access Hollywood may prove the old Washington cliché about how the “drip, drip” of scandal can be even more damaging over time than a single really bad story. Trump’s tape was like a bomb going off, and the damage was immediate and severe. But no other tapes emerged, so there was nowhere else for the story to go. Eventually the press and the public moved on. It’s amazing how quickly the media metabolism works these days. By contrast, the WikiLeaks email dumps kept coming and coming. It was like Chinese water torture. No single day was that bad, but it added up, and we could never get past it. WikiLeaks played into people’s fascination with “pulling back the curtain.” Anything said behind closed doors is automatically considered more interesting, important, and honest than things said in public. It’s even better if you have to do a little legwork and google around for the information. We sometimes joked that if we wanted the press to pay attention to our jobs plan, which I talked about endlessly to little avail, we should leak a private email about it. Only then would it be news worth covering.
WikiLeaks also helped accelerate the phenomenon that eventually came to be known as fake news. False story lines started appearing on Facebook, Reddit, Breitbart, Drudge Report, and other sites often claiming to be based on stolen emails. For example, WikiLeaks tweeted on November 6 that the Clinton Foundation paid for Chelsea’s wedding, a totally false accusation, as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler later verified in his Fact Checker column. Kessler, who’s never been shy about criticizing me, heard from readers who said this lie helped convince them to vote for Trump. After the election, he investigated and found it to be “a claim lacking any evidence,” and he urged readers “to be more careful consumers of the news.” The lack of evidence didn’t stop the New York Post and Fox News from repeating the lie and giving it mass circulation. That really got under my skin. Bill and I were proud to pay for Chelsea and Marc’s wedding and we treasure every memory of it. Lies about me and Bill are one thing, but I can’t stand to see lies about Chelsea. She doesn’t deserve that.
Russia’s propaganda networks, RT and Sputnik, were eager purveyors of fake news. For example, U.S. intelligence agencies later pointed to an August 2016 video produced by RT titled “How 100% of the Clintons’ ‘Charity’ Went to . . . Themselves.” It was another lie. Since Bill and I have released our tax returns going back decades, it’s public record that since 2001 we’ve donated more than $23 million to charities such as the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, educational institutions, hospitals, churches, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Clinton Foundation. And none of us—not Bill, not Chelsea, not me—has ever taken any money from the foundation.
At the time, I was barely aware that such silly Russian smears were circulating on American social media. And yet, according to a U.S. Intelligence assessment, that one RT video alone was viewed more than nine million times, mostly on Facebook.
Even if I had known that, it would have been hard to believe that many voters would take any of it seriously. Still, reporting from BuzzFeed and others was finding that the reach of fake news on Facebook and other outlets was far wider than anyone expected, and that much of it was being generated in faraway countries such as Macedonia. The whole thing was bizarre. And Trump did all he could to help fake news spread and take root, repeating fake headlines from Russian propaganda outlets like Sputnik at his rallies and retweeting extremist memes.
The day before the election, President Obama was campaigning for me in Michigan (yes, we campaigned in Michigan!), and expressed the frustration we all felt: “As long as it’s on Facebook and people can see it, as long as it’s on social media, people start believing it,” he said, “and it creates this dust cloud of nonsense.” Nonsense was right.
On October 30, Harry Reid wrote another letter to Jim Comey, trying one last time to focus the nation’s attention back on the unprecedented foreign intervention in our election. The former boxer from Searchlight, Nevada, knew we were in the fight of our lives, and he couldn’t believe no one was paying attention. Harry had been briefed by intelligence officials and was frustrated they weren’t informing the American people about what was really going on. “It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government,” he wrote to Comey. “The public has a right to know this information.” And yet Comey—who was only too eager to speak publicly about the investigation into my emails—continued to refuse to say a word about Trump and Russia.
I was worried that we’d see even more direct tampering on Election Day. But what more could we do? My campaign and I had spent months shouting into the wind. All that was left was to make our strongest case to voters and hope for the best.
Dragnet
After the election, I tried to unplug, avoid the news, and not think too much about all this. But the universe didn’t cooperate.
Just four days after the election, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister bragged in an interview that his government had “contacts” with Trump’s “immediate entourage” during the campaign. Both the Kremlin and Trump’s people tried to walk back this remarkable admission, but the bell couldn’t be unrung. A few days after that, President Obama ordered the Intelligence Community—the collection of the government’s seventeen different intelligence agencies—to conduct a full review into Russian interference into the election.
Then, in early December, a twenty-eight-year-old man from North Carolina drove to Washington, D.C., with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-caliber Colt revolver, and a knife. He had read on the internet that a popular local Washington pizzeria was secretly hosting a child sex abuse ring run by John Podesta and me. This particularly disgusting fake news got its start with an innocuous email released by WikiLeaks about John going out for pizza. It was quickly refracted through the dark corners of the internet and emerged as a blood-curdling conspiracy theory. Alex Jones, the right-wing talk show host effusively praised by Trump who claims that 9/11 was an inside job and the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, recorded a YouT
ube video about “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.” Soon that young man from North Carolina was in his car on his way to Washington. When he got to the pizzeria, he searched everywhere for the children supposedly being held captive. There weren’t any. He fired off one shot before being apprehended by police and eventually sentenced to four years in prison. Thankfully, no one was harmed. I was horrified. I immediately contacted a friend of mine who runs a bookstore on the same street. She told me that her employees also had been harassed and threatened by conspiracy nuts.
In early January, the Intelligence Community reported back to President Obama and published an unclassified version of its findings for the public. The headline was that Putin himself had ordered a covert operation with the goal of denigrating and defeating me, electing Trump, and undermining the American people’s faith in the democratic process. That was no surprise to me or anyone else who had been paying attention, although it was notable that it was now the official view of the U.S. government. The real news, however, was that the Russian intervention had gone far beyond hacking email accounts and releasing files. Moscow had waged sophisticated information warfare on a massive scale, manipulating social media and flooding it with propaganda and fake news.
What Happened Page 34