We were doing a million things at once that week. The convention was all-consuming. So it was hard to stop and focus on the gravity of what was happening. But I realized we had crossed a line. This wasn’t the normal rough-and-tumble of politics. This was—there’s no other word for it—war. I told my team I thought we were at a “break glass” moment. “We’re under attack,” I said. It was time to take a much more aggressive public posture. Robby Mook did a round of interviews in which he pointed the finger squarely at Russia. He said they weren’t trying just to create chaos, they were actively trying to help Trump. That shouldn’t have been particularly controversial, but Robby was treated like a kook. Jennifer Palmieri and Jake Sullivan held a series of background briefings for news networks to explain in more detail. After the election, Jennifer wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “The Clinton Campaign Warned You About Russia. But Nobody Listened to Us.” She recalled how journalists were generally more interested in the gossipy content of the stolen emails rather than the prospect that a foreign power was trying to manipulate our election. The press treated our warnings about Russia like it was spin we’d cooked up to distract from embarrassing revelations—a view actively encouraged by the Trump campaign. The media was accustomed to Trump peddling crazy conspiracy theories—like that Ted Cruz’s dad helped kill John F. Kennedy—and it acted as if the Russian hacking was “our” conspiracy theory, a tidy false equivalency that let reporters and pundits sleep well at night. As Matt Yglesias of the news site Vox described it later, most journalists thought the argument that Moscow was trying to help Trump was “outlandish and borderline absurd,” and our attempt to raise the alarm “was just too aggressive, self-serving, and a little far-fetched.”
Maybe the press wouldn’t listen to us, but I figured they would listen to respected intelligence officials. On August 5, Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, wrote a highly unusual op-ed in the New York Times. Despite being a strictly nonpartisan career professional, he said that he had decided to endorse me for President because of my strong record on national security, including my role in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. By contrast, he said Trump was “not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.” Coming from America’s former top spy, that was a shocking statement. But it paled compared with what Morell said next. Putin, he noted, was a career intelligence officer “trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them.” And here’s the shocking part: “In the intelligence business,” Morell said, “we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”
Morell’s argument was not that Trump or his campaign was conspiring illegally with the Russians to rig the election—although he certainly didn’t rule it out. It was that Putin was manipulating Trump into taking policy positions that would help Russia and hurt America, including “endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.” That’s an important point to keep in mind, because it often gets lost amid the intense focus on potential criminal acts. Even without a secret conspiracy, there was plenty of troubling pro-Putin behavior right out in the open.
Morell’s op-ed was the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm in a crowded building. And yet, somehow, most in the media—and many voters—continued to ignore the danger staring us in the face.
Snakes!
I was not shocked to see the connection between WikiLeaks and the Russian intelligence services. At least that helped further discredit its odious leader, Julian Assange. In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions. He claims to be a champion of transparency, but for many years, he’s been helpful to Putin, one of the most repressive and least transparent autocrats in the world. It’s not just that WikiLeaks avoids publishing anything Putin won’t like and instead targets Russia’s adversaries—Assange actually hosted a television show on RT, Putin’s propaganda network, and receives adoring coverage there. And if hypocrisy isn’t bad enough, Assange was charged with rape in Sweden. To avoid facing those charges, he jumped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After years of waiting, Sweden eventually said it would no longer try to extradite him, but promised that if Assange came back to the country, the investigation could be reopened.
Assange, like Putin, has held a grudge against me for a long time. The bad blood goes back to 2010, when WikiLeaks published more than 250,000 stolen State Department cables, including many sensitive observations from our diplomats in the field. As Secretary of State, I was responsible for the safety of our officers around the world, and I knew that releasing those confidential reports put not only them in danger but also their foreign contacts—including human rights activists and dissidents who could face reprisals from their own governments. We had to move fast to evacuate vulnerable people, and, thankfully, we don’t believe anyone was killed or jailed as a result. I thought Assange was reckless and wrong, and said so publicly.
The fact that these two old adversaries from my time as Secretary of State—Assange and Putin—seemed to be working together to damage my campaign was maddening. It was bad enough to have to go up against a billionaire opponent and the entire Republican Party; now I also had to take on these nefarious outside forces. The journalist Rebecca Traister observed once that there was “an Indiana Jones–style, ‘It had to be snakes’ inevitability” about me facing Trump. “Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white, and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America,” she wrote. I was up for the challenge. And I might add: Of course I had to face not just one America-bashing misogynist but three. Of course I’d have to get by Putin and Assange as well.
By midsummer 2016, the whole world knew that Trump and his team were cheering on the Russian attack on our democracy, and doing everything they could to exploit it. Trump never even tried to hide the fact that he was making common cause with Putin. But what if they were doing more than that? What if they were actually conspiring with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks? There wasn’t any evidence of that yet, but the coincidences were piling up.
Then, on August 8, Trump’s longtime consigliere Roger Stone, who cut his teeth as one of Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricksters,” bragged to a group of Florida Republicans that he was in communication with Assange and predicted that an “October surprise” was coming. This was a shocking admission, made in public, from Trump’s longest-serving political advisor. Stone made similar statements on August 12, 14, 15, and 18. On August 21, he tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary”. This was particularly notable because, as I mentioned earlier, we had determined there was a good chance that John’s email might have been hacked, but didn’t know for sure. Stone kept at it over the next few weeks, even calling Assange his “hero.”
I wasn’t the only one who noticed. At the end of August, Harry Reid, one of the congressional “gang of eight” who are briefed on the most sensitive intelligence matters, wrote a letter to FBI Director Comey that cited Stone’s claims and asked for a full and thorough investigation. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” Reid wrote. He also raised the prospect that there might be an attempt to falsify official election results. This was a reference to public reports that Russian hackers had penetrated voter registration databases in both Arizona and Illinois, prompting the FBI to warn state election officials across the country to upgrade their security. Like Morell’s op-ed, Reid’s letter was an attempt to shake the country out of its complacency and get the press, the administration, and all Americans focused on an urgent threat. It didn’t work.