Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

by Donna Brazile

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to HFA could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC.

The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to...

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controll...

The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.

The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that.

She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.

Gary told me they were paying for CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity services out of the building fund, not paying it out of regular receipts,...

Brooklyn had cleaned up the debt on our books and paid the bills, and the party should have been grateful for that, but they were not doing a very good job at running the party. The way they had stripped the party of functionality and purpose was shameful. I was beginning to understand why the campaign gave the party no respect.

I go to St. Joseph Catholic Church on Capitol Hill, and I arrived there that Sunday morning with the intention of praying to God to give me strength and wisdom to handle this crisis in a way that would ensure victory for Hillary in November without setting fire to the Democratic Party. Before I left the sanctuary, I went up to the statue of Mother Mary and placed five dollars in the donation box. I took a white candle with me and poured some holy water into a plastic bottle to bring with me to the DNC.

got to the office before noon on Sunday carrying a box of items I brought from home to make my office more personal.

This was another thing I wanted to do while I was chair: pressure the mayor’s office to find out who killed Seth Rich.

“Paint that damn office blue!” he said. I guess he didn’t like her Florida pink walls any more than I did.

Terry promised to help me solve the DNC’s financial difficulties. He said that he would encourage other governors to help with fund-raising, and he offered his chief of staff to help me strategize my transition into my new role as chair.

His title at the DNC was chief of staff, but really his role was acting as Brooklyn’s eyes and ears in DC so that he could ensure that the party did not do anything that the campaign did not want it to do. No one was to breathe or to move unless Brooklyn told them it was okay.

Did I know that Debbie had a car and a driver? That big Tahoe SUV in the garage? That was mine now. I told Brandon I intended to sell the SUV. I could drive myself around town, as I always had.

Debbie had a chief of staff and a body woman. She also had media consultants and a fund-raising consultant. I was free to hire my own consultants, two or three if I liked, and bring in a new communications team. All of that would go on the DNC payroll.

This was one way of getting the burn rate down, I thought. I wondered how many other hangers-on and sycophants were draining the lifeblood out of this party. This was the way to keep the chair fat and happy: Give her a huge staff and lots of perks and don’t ask her to do anything.

Some of the staff gave me attitude, too. I had to be very specific in the way I asked my questions. Unless I asked the right question, I couldn’t get an answer.

I came to realize that I could not fire some of the people who were cagey in their responses. No matter how sneaky they seemed, they held inside them crucial institutional knowledge.

found an empty office near Debbie’s that had a window that looked right over the train tracks. I grew up next to the tracks, and the sound of a train passing is always a comfort to me. I brought in my box from home and took out a few pictures of Kai, one of my dog, Chip, and a sage smudge stick. I sprinkled a little holy water on the chairs and the desk and said a prayer for healing and for strength. The last thing I took out of the box was my bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.

Political veterans always remember a campaign by the vice they had adopted before Election Day.

As I saw it, we had three Democratic parties: the party of Barack Obama, the party of Hillary Clinton, and this weak little vestige of a party led by Debbie that was doing a very poor job getting people who were not president elected. As I saw it, these three titanic egos—Barack, Hillary, and Debbie—had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes.

Barack never had seen himself as connected to the party. He had not come up through it the way Joe Biden and Hillary had, but had sprung up almost on his own and never had any trouble raising money for his campaigns. He used the party to provide for political expenses like gifts to donors, and political travel, but he also cared deeply about his image. Late into his second term, the party was still paying for his pollster and focus groups. This was not working to strengthen the party. He had left it in debt.

Hillary bailed it out so that she could control it, and Debbie went along with all of this because she liked the power and perks of being...

Yet they had leeched it of its vitality and were continuing to do so.

Just that weekend, I’d gotten a notice from Home Depot that if I’d used my credit or debit card at a self-checkout stand between April and September 2014, it was likely that my identity had been compromised. The DNC had not issued a similar statement to our donors and others who had left their information on our website. Home Depot offered to repay the losses of those who had been hacked and encouraged people to sign up for a service that would monitor their online identity for fraud. If Home Depot was doing that, why wasn’t the DNC?

The part of it that I found most alarming was that most of the states required citizens be notified within thirty days or less.

Thirty days! We’d known about this since late April, and we had not done anything to alert the hundreds of thousands of people who had placed their trust in us.

Everybody was acting as if this had not happened and encouraging us not to talk about it. Hillary was enjoying a solid postconvention bounce in her poll numbers and the first positive coverage since the beginning of the campaign. No one in Brooklyn wanted to dis...

Talking about these emails might confuse voters who knew that Hillary had been investigated by Congress and the FBI for the email server she kept in her home. People might...

Donald Trump was doing his best to conflate the WikiLeaks dump with Hillary’s email server problem, and we did not want to get in...

On July 27, the day before Hillary accepted the nomination, Trump addressed a press conference in Miami where he suggested that the hackers also had emails Hillary had deleted from her private server. “By the way, if they hacked, they probably have her thirty-three thousand emails. I hope they do,” he said. “They probably have her thirty-three thousand emails that she lost and deleted because you’d se...

that are missing. I think you will be rewarded mightily by our press.” He was encouraging a hostile foreign power to co...

Just thinking about the enormity of this task crushed my spirit, while at the same time I was very aware of how much I didn’t know.

When Howard Dean was chair, Tom McMahon had been his executive, the man who best understood Dean’s fifty-state strategy—his goal to make the party viable in the red as well as in the blue states. I wanted to copy that in the time we had left before November 8.

Tom and Donnie knew people in every state because of all their time in the field. I sensed we could add great value to the campaign. There is a big difference between someone from the Clinton campaign showing up who has never visited that state before, and Tom or Donnie or me calling someone they’d known in elections stretching back two decades. That kind of personal touch is the glue that holds campaigns together.

I’ve found it is smart for me to hire people who are the opposite of me.

had decided that I would not take a salary, either, as a contribution to the party that had given so much to me.

cleared away most of my speaking engagements and took a hiatus from my role as a comm...

“We care about the Democratic Party as if it is our own,” I said. “He knows everybody in all fifty states, and that’s what we need. He knows everybody and everybody loves Tom.” They told me no. They wanted me to rely on Brandon.

As far as I could see, he was just a clerk, the messenger who absorbed what was going on and took all that information back up to Brooklyn.

Then Brandon told me that Brooklyn was sending me down a chief financial officer named Charles Olivier. Oh no, I thought, now I’m going to have two Brandons. This job was getting worse by the minute.

As party officials, we were stewards of the party, charged with making sure that issues were addressed promptly so that the party could survive and prosper.

It was a sobering phone call, but in another way it was uplifting. Instead of making them feel like marginalized figures who were not that important to the party, I had empowered my colleagues. I promised I would keep them informed, and they promised that they would help me make these tough decisions as we continued on toward the election.

I was outside the Blue Room when National Security Advisor Susan Rice, whom I’d known since she was a young woman in flip-flops and cutoffs working on the Dukakis campaign, took my hand.

Susan had a tight grip on me and she was staring at me sternly as she pulled me into an alcove.

“What do you know about the hacking?” she asked. “I don’t know much of anything about the hacking,” I told her. I had been spending the last few days trying to educate myself. The lawyers had talked to me, and I was reaching out to experts. She told me I had to take this very seriously. “I do,” I said. “It took a long time for the FBI to get any response from the party,” she said. “I wanted you to know that you need to stay on top of this.”

I couldn’t understand why no one had taken it seriously before. I heard from Evan Perez, a CNN reporter, that the FBI had been calling and calling the DNC in the fall of

2015 to tell them that the Russians were in our system, but they never ...

Susan said she wasn’t concerned about the past. “You must promise me you will get a briefing at the FBI as soon as possible.”