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June 16, 2018 - July 5, 2019
“Also make sure that the DNC cooperates fully with the investigators, promise me that,” she said.
Who stopped me on my way to the dance floor but Eric Holder, the former attorney general. He grabbed me by the shoulder and led me to a less crowded spot where we could hear each other better. “I want to ask you if you’ve had a chance to get up to speed on the hacking of the DNC,” Eric said.
Yes, I said, I was moving as fast as I could to get there, but I had a lot to
learn. Good, he said. The DNC was not very responsive to the FBI. I’m glad you are taking this seriously.
Those were the magic letters: F, B, I. Once I said those letters to Eric and to Susan, they knew I was in capable hands.
That first week at the DNC I was busy, but I was lonely. I had a notebook I was filling up with the things I needed to do or get a handle on in order to run this party. I had a page dedicated to the hacking, and at the top of it I wrote, “I need people to help me with cyber stuff.” This was an area where I knew I needed outside advisors. I had a page on finances, too, and a page on party politics.
The young men that surrounded Robby Mook—and they were all men in his inner circle—had mastered a cool and removed style of politics. They knew how to size up voters not by meeting them and finding out what they cared about, what moved their hearts and stirred their souls, but by analyzing their habits.
That small focus missed the big picture, and it undervalued the emotion that drives people to the polls. You might be able to persuade a handful of Real Simple magazine readers who drink gin and tonics to change their vote to Hillary, but you had not necessarily made them enthusiastic enough to want to get up off the couch and go to the polls. When I interacted with Brooklyn I could not feel positive emotion behind the campaign.
was the inclusive, galvanizing feeling of sweeping up toward victory, of attaching yourself to the cause.
He had a deep love of its traditions and history.
Despite the attempts by Robby and the rest to strip the party of its functionality and independence,
hiring Tom was not just important to me, it was vital to Hillary’s victory.
We are being attacked every day by cyber forces that want to bring our party down, and I need money to ensure the integrity of our operation. You’re stripping the party to a shell. I have no ability to act to defend it.”
“You know, this does not feel like a negotiation to me,” I said. “This feels like power and control. Gentlemen, let’s just put our dicks out on the table and see who’s got the bigger one, because I know mine is bigger than all of yours.”
The DNC had two political consulting firms who were getting paid $25,000 a month: Hilary Rosen and Anita Dunn via SKDKnickerbocker and another firm headed by Jen O’Malley Dillon, the co-founder of Precision Strategies.
also needed to talk to the president about his $180,000-a-year pollster, too.
We also needed to find a way to talk about the hacking of the DNC that did not reflect poorly on Hillary.
He suggested we have prominent Democrats write op-eds for major newspapers about the hacking and to take this message on television, too.
Also, couldn’t the Democrats propose legislation to strengthen our cyberdefenses? Doing so would be a constructive way to show we were learning from the experience and trying to help others, too.
Although Brandon saw himself as a power broker, he rarely stayed in DC long enough to build a power base. The staff told me that once or twice a week, without telling anyone, he did not show up to work. The next day they would discover that he had been up in Brooklyn reporting to his handlers.
As the agents described the Russians’ methods and the extent of the cyberattacks in the United States, not just in the political sphere, I was so scared I wanted to walk out the door and flee the country.
“Donna, if God forbid I was ever appointed to the Senate and told that I was going to be on the Intelligence Committee, I would resign,” he said. “There is something to living in a world where you just don’t know.”
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear were still trying to penetrate the DNC computers, my mind spun the various other nefarious ways they might be trying to mess with our democracy and throw the election to Donald Trump. Were there spies on the streets following our staffers? Were there moles inside the DNC building? Now that I was the chair, did they have their sights set on me?
Most of the donors I contacted were grateful that I called, so I kept doing it, putting in fourteen-hour workdays, in the hope that this personal touch from the party chair would make them less inclined to sue
The campaign was raising millions of dollars through the DNC, and because of the agreement they had made to pay off the party’s debt I could not touch a cent. The states were raising money, too, but that money was not under the states’ control, either. All of this was in the hands of Robby Mook,
They were less interested in helping the down-ballot races unless the money flowed through to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to elect members of Congress. Brooklyn’s idea seemed to be that the coattails of Hillary’s victory would sweep all the grateful candidates into office as a great wind was at the party’s back.
The candidate at the top benefits from the energy at the bottom of the ticket, the state and local races that build excitement, a sense that we are all part of the team that is sweeping forward to victory. If you neglect those races, not only do you lose an opportunity to foster the next generation of candidates, you just might lose the whole damn election.
The torrential rain of two or three inches an hour dumped three times as much water as Katrina had. Thirty-one inches of rain fell in a single day.
The weather service said in all the storm had released 7.1 trillion gallons, enough to fill Lake Pontchartrain about four times; Katrina had drenched my home state with 2.3 trillion gallons.
felt a moral obligation to help the entire people of Louisiana, not just my family, to rebuild.
Eleven years after Katrina, when the state was getting back on its feet, here was this no-name storm to knock it back on its heels again.
Evidently someone in a Donald Duck costume kept showing up at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies calling him out for ducking the release of his taxes.
Richard Bates of the Walt Disney Company is trying to reach you about the DNC’s using Donald Duck.
“Kill the damn duck!” I said. “Kill the fucking duck, goddammit!
And, by the way, was this not proof of paid protestors? Every time Donald Trump made the claim that we were paying people to protest his rallies, we denied it furiously. That was just not something that the Democrats would ever do, and then here was the Damn Duck.
By the afternoon I had made some progress in convincing some of the campaign leaders and lawyers that the duck had to go, so I could concentrate on making my case for Hillary at the panel, but the duck was always in the back of my mind.
“Donna, this was Hillary’s decision to use the duck,” he said. He explained a close friend had suggested it to Hillary and she thought it was a great idea. Apparently someone wanted to use Uncle Sam but Hillary’s friend vetoed that, saying a duck was a lot funnier.
Wait a minute, I thought. The Russians were in Trump’s campaign operation, too? If they were, it seemed they were not operating in the same way they were in the DNC.
How you respond to these questions about climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership determines the amount these donors will give. These are smart people who know a tremendous amount about the subject they’re questioning you on, so you cannot give vague answers. You have to be on your toes. You also have to look confident and casual and show that you are not manipulating or hiding anything.
Yet it was impossible to refute him with facts. While Hillary, with her packed schedule of fund-raisers, soldiered on, the campaign issued a statement that listed all the ways in which Trump had taunted Obama about his birthplace and the housing discrimination in the Trump buildings. It was a dry and stiff response to a man who was an expert in playing with the emotions of despair. No one had asked me to help the campaign craft a response that would have been more suited to the audience that I knew so well. Ignoring me felt like another blow. We were almost a month into my time as chair, and
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Attacks on me had escalated dramatically now that I was working for a female candidate. In this campaign it was as if whatever constraints that had kept people from expressing the worst aspects of their characters had been lifted, and now they were free to take to social media to humiliate, degrade, and harass with no shame, no feeling that this is not what one does in a polite society. Were we no longer civil? Had this campaign unleashed something dire and dark within us? I feared for the country, and I feared that this was no longer a fair fight.
He was less interested in the hacking and the Russians, which he seemed already to know something about, than he was concerned about my personal safety. Where did I live? Did I live alone? What kind of security system did I have at home? I didn’t have any security system, I said. Just good locks on the doors and sturdy windows. He said I needed to have more systems to protect myself. I needed motion-sensitive lights and a power backup system in case there was an outage so that I could be protected even if someone cut the power. He wanted me to prepare for the worst.
Before I left for Martha’s Vineyard, Guccifer released cell phone numbers and passwords from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee so that those candidates would not begin their campaign season undistracted. Less than a week later, documents describing voting turnout models for Florida and Pennsylvania and a few other battleground states appeared online, along with some private emails from Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s staff.
had to be escorted up from the lobby to the offices on the tenth floor, where I felt some of that campaign energy I craved. By contrast, on the executive floor, where Hillary’s top staff worked, it was calm and antiseptic, like a hospital. It had that techno-hush, as if someone had died. I felt like I should whisper. Everybody’s fingers were on their keyboards, and no one was looking at anyone else. You half-expected to see someone in a lab coat walk by.
my friend Tony Coelho used to ask me about my campaigns. He’d always ask, “Are the kids fucking? Are they having sex? Are they having fun? If not, let’s create something to get that going, or otherwise we’re not going to win.”
I didn’t sense much fun or fucking in Brooklyn.
Robby Mook believed he understood the country by the clusters of information about voters he had gathered.
“If we’re not talking to new people, how are we going to register new voters?”
The data helped bring Obama’s message to an audience of people who might be receptive to his message but did not know about him.
The attitude in Brooklyn was that Hillary was such a superior candidate that she had already locked up the race.
