Hacks Quotes

“Donald Trump is an extraordinary salesman. He knew how to exploit those grievances by deepening them instead of finding a way to address them. He put his supporters in this huge box, cut them off from the rest of the country, and said, “We are going to make America great again because everyone else but you has abandoned those American values. They have put other people’s interests before your interest, and I’m going to take care of you. I alone can fix it.” As I write this, we’re well into President Trump’s first year in office, and he has not been able to fix anything.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“Chip knows my routine is to sit in front of the television and watch Rachel Maddow, and he has his place on the sofa where he watches, too, but I didn’t have any more tolerance for politics that night. Bernie called to see how I was doing, and to ask me if I intended to stay on as chair. I certainly did not.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“If the DNC was a small business, it was like no small business I’ve ever seen. We change bosses and objectives with each election cycle and our goal is to spend every dime we raise to get people elected. Long-term planning for things like investment in cybersecurity is hard to do in this environment. And in this cycle it sometimes seemed like Brooklyn wanted to strip it of its functionality nearly as much as the Russians had.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“Pitting these two angry bears against the DNC was not a fair fight, Shawn Henry of CrowdStrike said in the Post article: “This is a sophisticated foreign intelligence service with a lot of time, a lot of resources, and is interested in targeting the U.S. political system. You’ve got ordinary citizens who are doing hand-to-hand combat with trained military officers, and that’s an untenable situation.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“By evening the campaign had worked to craft a statement from her doctor saying she had allergies that made her cough and now she had pneumonia. Did that make sense? Allergies do not cause pneumonia. When you have two explanations, my gut always senses one is a lie. And who was going to believe that a grandma with pneumonia would go to her daughter's house to recover with two vulnerable little ones around? The situation had to be pretty dangerous for her to risk exposing the grandbabies. The whole story stank, and the way the campaign handled it just made matters worse.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks Lib/E: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“By September 7, the day I was making this call to Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart. I thought the party I had given so much of my life to was better than this.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks Lib/E: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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 up the staff to Philadelphia to celebrate the nomination. Cheapskates. They were sitting on close to half a billion dollars.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks Lib/E: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“They thought that Hillary spent too much time trying to appeal to people based on their race, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, and not enough time appealing to people based on what really worried them—issues like income inequality and climate change.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“I had promised Bernie when I took the position of interim chair of the DNC that I would get to the bottom of whether or not Hillary’s team had rigged the party process in her favor so that only she would win the nomination.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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 a chair but not the responsibilities.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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 controlling it since before she got the nomination?” Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“The hotel hosting the meeting threatened to shut me down for serving alcohol without a license, but somehow the DNC staff made that problem disappear.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“want to talk about the arrogance and isolation of the Clinton campaign and the cult of Robby Mook, who felt fresh but turned up stale, in a campaign haunted by ghosts and lacking in enthusiasm, focus, and heart. More than that, Hillary’s campaign and the legacy project of the outgoing Obamas drained the party of its vitality and its cash, a huge contributing factor to our defeats in state and local races.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“While Trump refuses to admit that the Russians hacked our election, I lived it. I saw how it impacted the lives of everyone around me. The Russians may not have changed the totals in the voting machines, but they confused us, inflamed our doubts and our worst impulses, and destabilized the Democratic Party, making it an unfair fight. They paralyzed a significant portion of the electorate with all these disruptions. We're a country of more than 320 million people. In 2016, 69 millioin voted for Hillary, 66 million voted for Donald Trumpt, and 90 million eligible citizens did not vote.

To this day it is astonishing to me that we do not treat this as a national emergency. Fair elections are the foundation of our collaboration, our unity, and htis is something we all agree on. The heqads of intelligence agencies and members of Congress predict our 2018 election hack is coming, but there have been no moves to block this next assault on our democracy. Both parties should come together to take the necessary steps to protect the ballot in 2018 and beyond, but the chaos sewn by the hacking still reverberates in our politics and in our media, preventing us from feeling hope and taking action.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House

“When we finished our work that day [posting flyers offering a reward for information about the murder of Seth Rich] I was reminded of the fundamental decency of most Americans, how they want the best for each other and that most of us are more human than we are Republican or Democrat. That was the country I wanted back.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House

“To me campaigning is about persuading, but this campaign was about models and data. I knew data was important. I had used it in campaigns I led, but my focus on energy, enthusiasm, and emotion had made me feel like a dinosaur. What electrified young people for Bernie was not data. It was the old-fashioned kind of politics that I knew, and that the party needed to know again.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks Lib/E: The Inside Story of the Break-Ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“It all seemed like an election fable, like many that had been cooked up to confuse the voters about the integrity of the election.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“Never mind that Hillary has not served in Congress, the branch of government that writes the tax laws.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“Although the Russians had sown disinformation through fake news in the Ukrainian election in 2014 and hacked into the election system to manipulate the vote totals,”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“hacking had become a government operation done by well-trained teams.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“These top security engineers are much in demand, the hardest to hire in the industry, and usually stay at a firm for only two years before they get bored and want another challenge.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“Although Russia now was smaller and weaker, it was wily and well-informed about the intricacies of American politics. 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 manipulate the media, spreading propaganda and disinformation along with forgeries of official documents. These active measures create discord within communities, making people doubt their leaders and believe false narratives about what is transpiring right before their eyes.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“bodegas and barrios of Little Haiti”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“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.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House

“We decided about six in the morning that we did not want Chip to suffer. His last act was to kiss Betsy on the nose, where he would always kiss her, as if to wipe away her tears. We took turns holding him until he passed, and it was the lowest moment that I’d felt in a long, long time.”
― Donna Brazile, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House