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

by Donna Brazile

heard them saying that they only needed to register five new Hillary voters in this neighborhood, and seven over here. Why five? Why not ten? Or why not fifty?

Well, that was the precise number of people we needed in order to win a precinct. “Well, good, but you better get five more so you can go to bed thinking that you really have a margin that will win,”

gave a speech off the cuff that was designed to remind them of the reasons we do this. How we see a better future for ourselves and for our families and we want to do everything we can, sacrifice our evenings, weekends, and holidays to bring this message to the world.

I did not leave Brooklyn feeling enthusiastic, though. They saw me only as someone who could rouse up the emotions, but they were not interested in my practical advice.

And into this hushed atmosphere, week after week, WikiLeaks dropped stolen emails, thousands at a time, with the clear purpose of distraction. Every time emails were released, the press stopped dead in its tracks to paw through them and see what they could find that would embarrass the candidate or the campaign. With the damaging information contained in the leaked emails, and the antics of the GOP nominee covered hour after hour by the cable stations, it was as if Hillary was not even campaigning. She was always reacting, rarely advancing.

Then one young man asked me how he was going to talk to his family. All of his relatives were voting for Trump. I had heard this question before. Hearing it in Florida made me realize for this election I was fast becoming a family therapist. “First, don’t start an argument with them, because that will only harden them,” I advised. “Here’s what you have to tell them. Take a look at Donald Trump’s life. I know people are enamored of him that he’s a businessman and people think that he’s successful, but there is nothing in his history that indicates he will help people like your family. Remind them that he has stiffed so many workers, the people who have helped him build his huge hotels and casinos. Rather than pay them, he has stiffed them. Why do they think that he would not treat the country the same way?” I felt good after that answer. I hoped the young man on the phone felt that it was a good answer, too.

I also visited black radio stations, where the hosts would take calls from listeners. They were not encouraging. People on the ground in Orlando said no one was talking about Hillary on the radio, and those who wanted to support her didn’t have any literature to hand out or yard signs to display.

Nowhere did I see any visible support for Hillary.

Brooklyn told me that the battleground states had signs. Then they said, “Don’t worry about signs.”

When the bishop asked me when the campaign was going to start a dialogue with his audience, I knew what he meant by that. When were they going to spend a few hundred dollars in advertising there, which would encourage him to urge his followers to get out and vote?

This ran counter to everything I had learned in politics. You build enthusiasm among those you can depend on and make that support so powerful that it spills over into the areas surrounding the little piece of turf you can depend upon. This is how you build enthusiasm for Election Day.

The state highlighted the campaign’s other big problem: the rift between the Bernie supporters and the Hillary supporters. Brooklyn needed to concentrate on winning the election. Healing the divisions between these factions was a problem I felt the party should solve for the campaign.

We went from being enemies to being buddies. I liked people like Dennis—disrupters working for good—because I had been one when I worked on Jesse Jackson’s campaign for president in 1984.

Ninety percent of the party platform represented what Bernie believed. Take the win, I said, and build upon it.

The campaign was telling people that electing Hillary would be a historic change, but in their daily lives they did not see how it would change anything for them. I didn’t see much evidence that the campaign had a story it wanted to tell these voters that would persuade them otherwise.

They saw Hillary as not much different from any other candidate: chasing money instead of reflecting the will of the people. They were not satisfied by the strides they had made in changing the party platform victory. They saw it as a symbolic win. And they were not that far off.

The platform could be seen as a yardstick to use to measure the candidates’ actions, but it never has been something they are beholden to accomplish.

Debbie had not been the most active chair in fund-raising at a time when Obama had left the party in significant debt.

As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the DNC debt and put the party on a starvation diet.

It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operation. Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long w...

Right around the time of the convention the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races.

A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up… when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had d...

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him.

I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brookly...

When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, was signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

The other campaigns—Martin O’Malley and Bernie—also signed victory fund agreements that kicked in should they secure the nomination, not seven months before. They also did not specify as much immediate control from the campaign as the one Hillary signed with the DNC.

had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed dec...

The victory fund agreement seemed to confirm my suspicions about Brandon’s role. He was there to watch the money and make sure that it...

Other than that, what I found was the normal order of political business. The party did nothing different tha...

A defeated candidate might argue whether or not the rules were written fairly, but they were negotiated in the open with lots of input from the members of the party long before most candidates declared their interest in running. The party did that on purpose so that there could be no influence exerted by those trying to win the nomination.

The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

seeing what had happened made me acknowledge that I could have prevented this if I had been more involved.

met him at a hotel bar the week after I returned home to Washington—just like in the movies. He had significant experience in Russia from his time working for international organizations in the days when the old Soviet Union crumbled after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sometimes the word “spook” is considered a racial slur but I did not see it this way with my spooky friend. As the weeks of this strange election unfolded he was like a ghost who appeared early in the morning, calling me on my home landline often as early as 4 am, to tell me what to be aware of, and often knowing what would happen in the campaign days before it occurred. This quality was spooky to me, as if he operated in a mysterious world that only a few could see. In my head, the nickname stuck.

Russia still could have an impact in sowing dissension inside the United States. The term the Russians had for this was “active measures.”

Active measures are designed to destabilize the politics of whatever country the Russians attack.

“They call it political warfare,”

When he described these techniques, it was as if he was describing WikiLeaks. None of what WikiLeaks did was clandestine; it was right out in the open. The impact of its actions was to split the Democratic Party into warring factions that sought to discredit each other.

The fact that we had pulled off a harmonious convention defeated these active measures that time, but it was clear that the Russians were not done yet.

As Trump was campaigning, he spoke with admiration about Putin and cast doubt on the idea that these leaked emails came from the Russians. Trump, unwittingly or on purpose, was part of these active measures.