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June 16, 2018 - July 5, 2019
As the rough day wore on, we could not get any guidance from Debbie.
should come from her, but she was defiant. “I’m not doing that,” she said. If I knew Debbie, she was probably hunkered down in her hotel room trying to cut a deal with Hillary for her exit,
[The Russians] have been involved. They were in our system at the DNC for well over a year…
Hilary Rosen, my longtime friend, CNN colleague, and DNC consultant to the chair’s office,
No matter the problems many of us had with Debbie’s style, she had done her very best preparing the party for this big moment. Everyone who spoke had pain in their voices. It was heart-wrenching.
I wished my dad, Lionel, were alive. I remembered the day I called to tell him to turn on the television because Al Gore was going to make a big announcement about me. When he balked at that, I told him that Al Gore was going to announce that I was his campaign manager, the first black woman to run a presidential campaign. My father was unimpressed. He said, “It’s just a job.” I felt sad that I didn’t have him to call now.
he pointed me back to Debbie. I walked over to her and gave her a hug as a hush settled on the room.
“I will step down on my terms and I will put out a statement.” “Okay, Debbie, you do what you need to do,” I said. “I will always be your friend.” She still wasn’t ready to resign.
I could get her into all the good parties. Right then, however, I needed something from her. If I was going to be the party chair and in front of the cameras all the time, I needed a better wardrobe.
When you’re a pundit, you only have to look good from the waist up. I brought many nice blue tops, but down below I wore jeans and sneakers, the perfect shoes for running around a big convention hall.
We had dresses and jewelry and shoes for every outfit laid out on the chairs and sofas in the room, moving the pieces around until we thought we had the right mix.
Debbie was brave, a lot braver than those congresspeople who run from the protestors at their town halls, and I was proud of her.
knew they would want to do this before the convention opened, so a bigger version of that caucus scene would not unfold on the convention floor and be broadcast around the world.
“Oh, my God, Lucy,” I said. “How can I just slow this down? This is happening too fast.”
Suddenly I had an entourage. I had a press aide to block the media from bothering me, but dozens of other people suddenly wanted me to make decisions about one thing or another.
preferred the Sheraton because it was where people I knew were staying: the party’s rank and file. The community organizers and union people, the teachers and the firefighters, were all there. The Hillary people wanted me to operate out of the Logan, which had a bar called the Commons, but there were very few common people who wanted to drink there. It was filled with party powerbrokers, lobbyists and big donors, the candidate, the Secret Service, the candidate’s family. Cocktails were $16 each, and a glass of wine set you back $12. Also, they didn’t even serve chicken wings. Who wants to go
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We had a lot to be proud of as a party, and we could be particularly proud of Hillary and the way Bernie Sanders capped off the night with his own riveting speech.
I felt my desire to help protect Obama’s legacy and accomplishments more strongly than ever after Michelle’s speech. There was so much on the ballot, including Obama’s protection of voting rights, criminal justice reform, expansion of Medicaid through Obamacare, and efforts to combat climate change, all of which needed to be preserved. I could not do that dressed for a funeral. For my big speech the next day Lucy and I chose a happy dress: simple black with a beautiful cream lace outer shell.
This was the first time in my four decades in politics I had been asked to be a featured speaker.
I had rehearsed my speech so many times, but I still didn’t feel as though I had nailed it.
I have never, ever, in all of my years seen a leader so committed to delivering that better future to America’s children as Hillary Clinton.
I wanted them to know who Hillary was when no one was watching, at her core, rooting her to this earth: her hope for children and her commitment to helping them live up to their God-given potential.
from the first day I met Hillary Clinton I’ve known that she is someone who cares just as much and would fight just as hard for children everywhere. Poor kids, you’ve got a champion. Kids who live in poverty, you’ve got a champion. Kids who need help, you’ve got a champion. As long as she’s in charge, we’re never going back. And that’s why I am with her! Let me say this as your incoming chair of the Democratic National Committee, I promise you, my friends, I commit to all Americans that we will have a party we all can be proud of. We will elect Democrats up and down the ballot, and we will
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When I finished my speech, I danced off the stage, first in little steps, a bit hesitant, like I did not have my feet under me yet.
Donnie, who I worked with on former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt’s presidential campaign in 1988, had campaign people from Bernie and Hillary with him in the boiler room.
Wherever Bernie supporters would hold up signs attacking Hillary, he’d send people to stand in front of them with bigger signs to block those people out. If someone from the Bernie faction left his seat, Donnie would send a Hillary person as a replacement to dilute the negative energy.
To seasoned convention watchers, what we saw on the floor was atrocious, but most of the folks at home saw a flawless convention, where one strong speech b...
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In the crucial weeks before the convention, right before the party announced the hacking, the DNC confiscated the staff’s computers for the weekend without any warning or explanation.
When they got to work on Monday they found out that the cybersecurity firm the party hired had wiped their computers clean, eliminating all their files, including their files about the convention.
If the hackers saw everyone downloading files, they’d take evasive action.
They were taking hundreds of calls a day, never knowing if the call would be a death threat or a threat to their families from someone who had gotten their phone numbers in the WikiLeaks dump.
Almost as soon as I became interim chair I began to notice the ways that the Hillary campaign seemed not to respect the DNC and its staff. I had to beg the campaign to hire two buses to bring the staff up to Philadelphia to celebrate the nomination. Cheapskates. They were sitting on close to a half billion dollars in contributions and thought this small investment in morale was a waste of money. It would be a terrible slight if the staff was not allowed to share this moment.
When Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communication’s director, saw the remarks she got angry quick. Jennifer wanted to know who approved this change in the campaign schedule because she certainly had not. I said I had, and I reminded her that it was customary. Tim knew this tradition and he’d said that he was happy to do it. Jennifer glowered at me, and then at Tim’s staff. Then she jumped up and walked out, slamming the door behind her. I was thinking, If that bitch ever does anything like that to me again, I’m gonna walk.
Although they’d been inside the DNC system for quite a while, the hackers didn’t seem too interested in the emails and didn’t appear to have collected information on the donors.
CrowdStrike
In December 2015, before the 2016 primaries and caucuses began, four staffers from the Sanders campaign exploited a bug in a software update to view confidential voter data collected by the Clinton campaign.
They tucked this evil thing into a vulnerability in the Windows operating software where it quietly soaked up the DNC’s emails, voice mails, and chat traffic for almost an entire year.
They were sophisticated teams, codenamed Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear by CrowdStrike. The two bears, CrowdStrike said, came from competing Russian intelligence agencies that had teams working twenty-four hours a day to break into foreign computer systems.
You’ve got ordinary citizens who are doing hand-to-hand combat with trained military officers, and that’s an untenable situation.”
As we sat face-to-face on couches, he started talking a mile a minute about the Justice Department and the FBI and the proof they had that this hacking had been the work of Russian agents. Marc was dropping words like cyberwarfare, breach notifications, ransomware, and other terms that had never crossed my lexicon.
Gary Gensler.
He had worked at Goldman Sachs before he got into politics.
“Donna, you cannot cuss these kids out because it will shut them down,” Minyon said.
I always hesitated to tell my family that Louisiana does not matter to the Democrats in the presidential cycle. We never win that state. I didn’t even know if Hillary was going to open an office in New Orleans.
That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the DNC on an allowance.
If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Post article about it was published online.
On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged. “No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”
Gary was not familiar with the way the DNC was governed, but he described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp.
The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house.
But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.
