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Dragnet

After the election, I tried to unplug, avoid the news, and not think too much about all this. But the universe didn’t cooperate.

Just four days after the election, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister bragged in an interview that his government had “contacts” with Trump’s “immediate entourage” during the campaign. Both the Kremlin and Trump’s people tried to walk back this remarkable admission, but the bell couldn’t be unrung. A few days after that, President Obama ordered the Intelligence Community—the collection of the government’s seventeen different intelligence agencies—to conduct a full review into Russian interference into the election.

Then, in early December, a twenty-eight-year-old man from North Carolina drove to Washington, D.C., with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-caliber Colt revolver, and a knife. He had read on the internet that a popular local Washington pizzeria was secretly hosting a child sex abuse ring run by John Podesta and me. This particularly disgusting fake news got its start with an innocuous email released by WikiLeaks about John going out for pizza. It was quickly refracted through the dark corners of the internet and emerged as a blood-curdling conspiracy theory. Alex Jones, the right-wing talk show host effusively praised by Trump who claims that 9/11 was an inside job and the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, recorded a YouTube video about “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.” Soon that young man from North Carolina was in his car on his way to Washington. When he got to the pizzeria, he searched everywhere for the children supposedly being held captive. There weren’t any. He fired off one shot before being apprehended by police and eventually sentenced to four years in prison. Thankfully, no one was harmed. I was horrified. I immediately contacted a friend of mine who runs a bookstore on the same street. She told me that her employees also had been harassed and threatened by conspiracy nuts.

In early January, the Intelligence Community reported back to President Obama and published an unclassified version of its findings for the public. The headline was that Putin himself had ordered a covert operation with the goal of denigrating and defeating me, electing Trump, and undermining the American people’s faith in the democratic process. That was no surprise to me or anyone else who had been paying attention, although it was notable that it was now the official view of the U.S. government. The real news, however, was that the Russian intervention had gone far beyond hacking email accounts and releasing files. Moscow had waged sophisticated information warfare on a massive scale, manipulating social media and flooding it with propaganda and fake news.

Soon it felt like every day there was a new revelation about the scope of the Russian operation, secret contacts with the Trump campaign, and an ongoing federal investigation digging into all of it. Congressional hearings began. The New York Times and the Washington Post competed to break scoop after scoop. I know I give the press a lot of grief, especially the Times, but this really was journalism at its finest.

I wasn’t just a former candidate trying to figure out why she lost. I was also a former Secretary of State worried about our nation’s national security. I couldn’t resist following every twist and turn of the story as closely as possible. I read everything I could get my hands on. I called friends in Washington and Silicon Valley and consulted with national security experts and seasoned Russia hands. I learned more than I ever imagined about algorithms, “content farms,” and search engine optimization. The voluminous file of clippings on my desk grew thicker and thicker. To keep it all straight, I started making lists of everything we knew about the unfolding scandal. At times, I felt like CIA agent Carrie Mathison on the TV show Homeland, desperately trying to get her arms around a sinister conspiracy and appearing more than a little frantic in the process.

That’s not a good look for anyone, let alone a former Secretary of State. So instead, let me channel a TV show that I grew up watching as a kid in Park Ridge: Dragnet. “Just the facts, ma’am.”

We’ve learned a lot about what the Russians did, what the Trump campaign did, and how the U.S. government responded. Let’s go through it step-by-step.