Then, in early June, Marc got a disturbing message from the Democratic National Committee. The DNC’s computer network had been penetrated by hackers thought to be working for the Russian government. According to the New York Times, the FBI had apparently discovered the breach months earlier, in September 2015, and had informed a tech support contractor at the DNC, but never visited the office or did much to follow up. As a former head of the FBI Cyber Division told the Times later, that was a bewildering oversight. “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana,” he said. The offices were just a mile and a half apart. After the election, FBI Director Comey admitted, “I might have walked over there myself, knowing what I know now.”
Word didn’t reach the DNC’s leadership until April. They then brought in a respected cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike to figure out what was going on, kick out the hackers, and protect the network from further penetration. The CrowdStrike experts determined that the hackers had likely come from Russia and that they had gained access to a large trove of emails and documents. All of this would become public when the Washington Post broke the story on June 14.
The news was unsettling but not shocking. The Russian government had been attempting to hack sensitive American networks for years, as had other countries, such as China, Iran, and North Korea. In 2014, Russians had breached the State Department’s unclassified system and then moved on to the White House and the Pentagon. They also hacked think tanks, journalists, and politicians.
The general view was that all of these hacks and attempted hacks were fairly run-of-the-mill intelligence gathering, albeit with twenty-first-century techniques. That turned out to be wrong. Something far more insidious was happening. On June 15, one day after the DNC attack became public, a hacker named Guccifer 2.0—thought to be a front for Russian intelligence—claimed credit for the breach and posted a cache of stolen documents. He said he had given thousands more to WikiLeaks, the organization supposedly devoted to radical transparency. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, promised to release “emails related to Hillary Clinton,” although it wasn’t at all clear what that meant.
The publication of stolen files from the DNC was a dramatic turn of events for several reasons. For starters, it showed that Russia was interested in doing more than collecting intelligence on the American political scene—it was actively trying to influence the election. Just as it had done a year earlier with the audio recording of Toria Nuland, Russia was “weaponizing” stolen information. It did not occur to me at the time that anyone associated with Donald Trump might be coordinating with the Russians, but it seemed likely that Putin was trying to help his preferred candidate. After all, he disliked and feared me, and had an ally in Trump. This was underscored when the Trump campaign removed language from the Republican Party platform calling for the United States to provide Ukraine with “lethal defensive weapons”—a gift to Putin that might as well have come with a ribbon and a bow.
Careful analysis of the documents from Guccifer also revealed an alarming prospect: at least one of the files seemed like it could have come from our campaign, not the DNC. Further research suggested that the file might have been stolen from the personal Gmail account of John Podesta, my campaign chairman. We couldn’t be sure, but we feared that more trouble was coming.
Shouting into the Wind
On July 22, WikiLeaks published about twenty thousand stolen DNC emails. It highlighted a handful of messages that included offensive comments about Bernie Sanders, which predictably set off a firestorm among Bernie’s supporters, many of whom were still angry about having lost the primaries. But nothing in the stolen emails remotely backed up the charge that the primaries had been rigged. Nearly all of the offending messages were written in May, months after I had amassed an insurmountable vote and delegate lead.
More important, though, was the fact that the Russians or their proxies had the sophistication to find and exploit those handful of provocative stolen emails in order to drive a wedge between Democrats. That suggests a deep knowledge and familiarity of our political scene and its players. Also, imagine how many inflammatory and embarrassing things they would have found if they’d hacked Republican targets. (Spoiler alert: they did, but never released anything.)
The timing of the WikiLeaks release was terrible—and it didn’t seem like a coincidence. I had defeated Bernie and locked up the nomination in early June, but he hadn’t endorsed me until July 12, and now we were working hard to bring the party together before the Democratic National Convention started in Philadelphia on July 25. Plus, the news hit on the same day I was introducing Tim Kaine as my running mate, turning what should have been one of the best days of our campaign into a circus.
The document dump seemed designed to cause us maximum damage at a critical moment. It worked. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned two days later, and the opening of the convention was marred by loud boos and catcalls from Sanders supporters. I was sick about the whole thing. After so many long, hard months of campaigning, I wanted the convention to be perfect. It was my best chance until the debates to present my vision for the country directly to the voters. I remembered what a boost Bill received from his convention in Madison Square Garden in 1992, and I hoped to gain similar momentum. Instead, we were now dealing with a divided party and distracted press corps. Democratic leaders, especially Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, Reverend Leah Daughtry, and Donna Brazile, helped bring order to the chaos. And Michelle Obama’s masterful, moving speech brought the hall together and quieted the dissenters. Then Bernie spoke, endorsed me again, and helped cement the détente.
On July 27, the day before I formally accepted the Democratic nomination, Trump held one of his wild, stream-of-consciousness press conferences. He said that as President he might accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea, deflected blame from the Kremlin for the DNC hack, and then, remarkably, urged the Russians to try to hack my email account. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,” he said, referring to the personal, non-work-related emails that were deleted from my account after everything else had been provided to the State Department. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” As the New York Times described it, Trump was “urging a power often hostile to the United States to violate American law by breaking into a private computer network.”
Katy Tur of NBC News followed up to see if this was a joke or he really meant it. She asked if Trump had “any qualms” about asking a foreign government to break into Americans’ emails. Instead of backing off, he doubled down. “If Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them,” he said. He also refused to tell Putin not to try to interfere in the election: “I’m not going to tell Putin what to do; why should I tell Putin what to do?” This was no joke.
Despite Trump’s attempts to cover for Putin, cybersecurity experts and U.S. intelligence officials were confident that the Russians were behind the hack. There still wasn’t official consensus about whether their goal was to undermine public confidence in America’s democratic institutions or if Putin was actively trying to derail my candidacy and help elect Trump. But I didn’t have any doubt. And the timing of the public disclosure, as well as the specific nature of the material (did Russian intelligence really understand the ins and outs of DNC politics and the decisions of Debbie Wasserman Schultz?), raised the strong possibility that the Russians had gotten help from someone with experience in American politics—a truly alarming prospect.