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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.

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.