On an April afternoon earlier this year, Russian president Vladimir Putin headlined a gathering of some four hundred journalists, bloggers, and media executives in St. Petersburg. Dressed in a sleek navy suit, Putin looked relaxed, even comfortable, as he took questions. About an hour into the forum, a young blogger in a navy zip sweater took the microphone and asked Putin what he thought of the "so-called Panama Papers."
The blogger was referring to a cache of more than eleven million computer files that had been stolen from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm. The leak was the largest in history, involving 2.6 terabytes of data, enough to fill more than five hundred DVDs. On April 3, four days before the St. Petersburg forum, a group of international news outlets published the first in a series of stories based on the leak, which had taken them more than a year to investigate. The series revealed corruption on a massive scale: Mossack Fonseca's legal maneuverings had been used to hide billions of dollars. A central theme of the group's reporting was the matryoshka doll of secret shell companies and proxies, worth a reported $2 billion, that belonged to Putin's inner circle and were presumed to shelter some of the Russian president's vast personal wealth.
Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg at a media forum in April 2016
When Putin heard the blogger's question, his face lit up with a familiar smirk. He nodded slowly and confidently before reciting a litany of humiliations that the United States had inflicted on Russia. Putin reminded his audience about the sidelining of Russia during the 1998 war in Kosovo and what he saw as American meddling in Ukraine more recently. Returning to the Panama Papers, Putin cited WikiLeaks to insist that "officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this." The Americans' aim, he said, was to weaken Russia from within: "to spread distrust for the ruling authorities and the bodies of power within society."
Though a narrow interpretation of Putin's accusation was defensible—as WikiLeaks had pointed out, one of the members of the Panama Papers consortium had received financial support from USAID, a federal agency—his swaggering assurance about America's activities has a more plausible explanation: Putin's own government had been preparing a vast, covert, and unprecedented campaign of political sabotage against the United States and its allies for more than a year.
The Russian campaign burst into public view only this past June, when The Washington Post reported that "Russian government hackers" had penetrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee. The hackers, hiding behind ominous aliases like Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks, claimed their first victim in July, in the person of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, whose private emails were published by WikiLeaks in the days leading up to the Democratic convention. By August, the hackers had learned to use the language of Americans frustrated with Washington to create doubt about the integrity of the electoral system: "As you see the U. S. presidential elections are becoming a farce," they wrote from Russia.
The attacks against political organizations and individuals absorbed much of the media's attention this year. But in many ways, the DNC hack was merely a prelude to what many security researchers see as a still more audacious feat: the hacking of America's most secretive intelligence agency, the NSA.
Russian spies did not, of course, wait until the summer of 2015 to start hacking the United States. This past fall, in fact, marked the twentieth anniversary of the world's first major campaign of state-on-state digital espionage. In 1996, five years after the end of the USSR, the Pentagon began to detect high-volume network breaches from Russia. The campaign was an intelligence-gathering operation: Whenever the intruders from Moscow found their way into a U. S. government computer, they binged, stealing copies of every file they could.
By 1998, when the FBI code-named the hacking campaign Moonlight Maze, the Russians were commandeering foreign computers and using them as staging hubs. At a time when a 56 kbps dial-up connection was more than sufficient to get the best of Pets.com and AltaVista, Russian operators extracted several gigabytes of data from a U. S. Navy computer in a single session. With the unwitting help of proxy machines—including a Navy supercomputer in Virginia Beach, a server at a London nonprofit, and a computer lab at a public library in Colorado—that accomplishment was repeated hundreds of times over. Eventually, the Russians stole the equivalent, as an Air Intelligence Agency estimate later had it, of "a stack of printed copier paper three times the height of the Washington Monument."
The Russians stole the equivalent of "a stack of printed copier paper three times the height of the Washington Monument."
The Russians' tactics became more sophisticated over time; they even hacked satellites to cover their tracks. But while the American code names used to track the Russian effort changed—from Moonlight Maze to Storm Cloud to Makers Mark—the operation itself never really stopped. Over the next two decades, the FSB (successor to the KGB) and the GRU (Russia's premier military intelligence organization) went after political and military targets, while the NSA and the UK's GCHQ returned the favor.
This sort of espionage was business as usual, a continuation of long-standing practice. And during the cold war, both the USSR and the United States subtly, and sometimes covertly, interfered with foreign elections. What changed over the past year, however—what made the DNC hack feel new and terrifying—was Russia's seeming determination to combine the two. For the first time, Russia used a hacking operation, one that collected and released massive quantities of stolen information, to meddle in an American presidential election. The inspiration and template for this new attack was a poisonous cocktail of fact and fabrication that the Russians call kompromat, for "compromising material."
Kompromat had been deployed by the Soviet Union since at least the 1950s, but in 1999 the Kremlin gave the tactic a high-tech update. With parliamentary elections fast approaching, and with post-USSR corruption at a peak, the government of president Boris Yeltsin used anonymous websites to sling mud at opposition candidates. One notorious kompromat repository was run specifically to slander the mayor of Moscow, a rising star in the opposition with his eyes on the presidency. In 2009, a senior British diplomat working in Russia was forced to resign after the appearance online of a four-minute video that showed him having sex with two blond women in a brothel.
One of the first American targets of kompromat was Victoria Nuland, who served as the top U. S. diplomat for Europe during Obama's second term. In February 2014, at the peak of the crisis in Ukraine, Nuland was surreptitiously recorded while speaking on the phone with the U. S. ambassador to Kiev. Frustrated with Europe's lackluster response to the Ukrainian crisis, Nuland said, "Fuck the EU." Shortly after, an aide to the Russian deputy prime minister tweeted a link to a recording of the intercepted phone call. The State Department called the leak "a new low in Russian tradecraft."
Victoria Nuland
The Nuland leak prompted a minor diplomatic hiccup between the European Union and the United States. But the kompromat campaign of the past year appears to be aimed at much bigger game: the American electoral system. According to Reuters, the FBI first contacted the DNC in the fall of 2015, obliquely warning the Democrats to examine their network. It wasn't until May, however, that the DNC asked for help from a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike, which had experience identifying digital espionage operations by nation-states. CrowdStrike immediately discovered two sophisticated groups of spies that were stealing documents from the Democrats by the thousands.
CrowdStrike was soon able to reconstruct the hacks and identify the hackers. One of the groups, known to the firm as Cozy Bear, had been rummaging around the DNC since the previous summer. The other, known as Fancy Bear, had broken in not long before Putin's appearance at the St. Petersburg forum. Surprisingly, given that security researchers had long suspected that both groups were directed by the Russian government, each of the attackers seemed unaware of what the other was doing.
Meanwhile a mysterious website named DC Leaks was registered on April 19. In early June, a Twitter account associated with the site started linking to the private conversations of Philip Breedlove, who had been, until a few weeks earlier, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. DC Leaks was well designed, but nobody seems to have noticed it until early July.
DC Leaks was well designed, but nobody seems to have noticed it until early July.
On June 14, less than an hour after The Washington Post reported the breach at the DNC, CrowdStrike posted a report that detailed the methods used by the intruders. The firm also did something unusual: It named the Russian spy agencies it believed responsible for the hack. Fancy Bear, the firm said, worked in a way that suggested affiliation with the GRU. Cozy Bear was linked to the FSB.
The day after the Post story broke, a website appeared that claimed to belong to a hacker who identified himself as Guccifer 2.0. (Guccifer was the nickname of a Romanian hacker who, among other things, broke into the email account of George W. Bush's sister.) The operators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, dismissed CrowdStrike's attribution, insisting instead that the DNC had been "hacked by a lone hacker." As proof, Guccifer published eleven documents from the DNC, including an opposition-research file on Donald Trump and a list of major Democratic donors. In the weeks that followed, Guccifer offered interviews and batches of documents to several journalists, but he wrote that "the main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks."
Ultimately, more than two thousand confidential files from the DNC found their way to the public. Throughout the campaign, Guccifer maintained that he was the only person behind the hacking and leaking. "This is my personal project and I'm proud of it," he—or they—wrote in late June. But several sloppy mistakes soon revealed who was really behind the operation. The unraveling happened more quickly than anybody could have anticipated.
As soon as Guccifer's files hit the open Internet, an army of investigators—including old-school hackers, former spooks, security consultants, and journalists—descended on the hastily leaked data. Informal, self-organized groups of sleuths discussed their discoveries over encrypted messaging apps such as Signal. Many of the self-appointed analysts had never met in person, and sometimes they didn't know one another's real names, but they were united in their curiosity and outrage. The result was an unprecedented open-source counterintelligence operation: Never in history was intelligence analysis done so fast, so publicly, and by so many.
Matt Tait, a former GCHQ operator who tweets from the handle @pwnallthethings, was particularly prolific. Hours after the first Guccifer 2.0 dump, on the evening of June 15, Tait found something curious. One of the first leaked files had been modified on a computer using Russian-language settings by a user named "Feliks Dzerzhinsky." Dzerzhinsky was the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police—a figure whose mythic renown was signaled by a fifteen-ton bronze statue that once stood in front of KGB headquarters. Tait tweeted an image of the document's metadata settings, which, he suggested, revealed a failure of operational security.
A second mistake had to do with the computer that had been used to control the hacking operation. Researchers found that the malicious software, or malware, used to break into the DNC was controlled by a machine that had been involved in a 2015 hack of the German parliament. German intelligence later traced the Bundestag breach to the Russian GRU, aka Fancy Bear.
There were other errors, too, including a Russian smile emoji—")))"—and emails to journalists that explicitly associated Guccifer 2.0 with DC Leaks, as the cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect pointed out. But the hackers' gravest mistake involved the emails they'd used to initiate their attack. As part of a so-called spear-phishing campaign, Fancy Bear had emailed thousands of targets around the world. The emails were designed to trick their victims into clicking a link that would install malware or send them to a fake but familiar-looking login site to harvest their passwords. The malicious links were hidden behind short URLs of the sort often used on Twitter.
To manage so many short URLs, Fancy Bear had created an automated system that used a popular link-shortening service called Bitly. The spear-phishing emails worked well—one in seven victims revealed their passwords—but the hackers forgot to set two of their Bitly accounts to "private." As a result, a cybersecurity company called SecureWorks was able to glean information about Fancy Bear's targets. Between October 2015 and May 2016, the hacking group used nine thousand links to attack about four thousand Gmail accounts, including targets in Ukraine, the Baltics, the United States, China, and Iran. Fancy Bear tried to gain access to defense ministries, embassies, and military attachés. The largest group of targets, some 40 percent, were current and former military personnel. Among the group's recent breaches were the German parliament, the Italian military, the Saudi foreign ministry, the email accounts of Philip Breedlove, Colin Powell, and John Podesta—Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman—and, of course, the DNC.
The rapid public reconstruction of the DNC break-in appears to have caught the hackers off guard. Researchers surmised that the Russian spies had not expected to be identified so quickly, a theory that would explain, among other things, the peculiar animus Guccifer seemed to have for CrowdStrike. According to this hypothesis, the tradecraft blunders that Tait and others had identified were the result of a hasty effort by the GRU to cover its tracks.
As if to regroup after the initial rush of activity, Guccifer and DC Leaks went quiet at the end of June. But the 2016 presidential campaign, already the most bizarre in living memory, had a further surprise in store, one that worked in favor of the Russians. At a time when only 32 percent of Americans say that they trust the media to report the news fairly and accurately, the hackers were about to learn that getting called out publicly didn't really matter: Their kompromat operations would still work just fine.
The hackers were about to learn that getting called out publicly didn't really matter.
On July 22, three days before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks published the largest trove of files to date, which included nearly twenty thousand hacked emails. Press coverage of the release quickly centered on emails that suggested a bias among some DNC staffers in favor of Hillary Clinton. The leaked emails lent credence to a suspicion held by some Democrats that the party establishment had never intended to give Bernie Sanders, Clinton's opponent in the primaries, a fair shake. Protesters in Philadelphia held up signs that read election fraud and dnc leaks shame. One day before the convention, the Russian kompromat campaign took its first trophy: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, resigned from the organization.
The episode shocked the Democratic establishment, not least because of what it augured for the future. As Clinton's lead in the polls widened after the convention, commentators began to speculate that a damaging leak late in the campaign might be the only chance for Donald Trump to win the election. Fears of a Russia-sponsored October surprise grew as it became clearer that the subversion effort was improving. When files appeared, they were now scrubbed of the sort of distinguishing metadata that had allowed analysts to trace the leak back to Russian intelligence.
The operators behind Guccifer and DC Leaks also appear to have recognized that American journalists were desperate for scoops, no matter their source. The Russians began to act like a PR agency, providing access to reporters at Politico, The Intercept, and BuzzFeed. Journalists were eager to help. On August 27, when part of the DC Leaks website was down for some reason, Twitter suspended the @DCLeaks account. The Daily Caller, a conservative news website, posted a story about the events, drawing an outcry from Trump supporters. Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business anchor, sneered that "leftist fascism" was throttling the last best hope for a Trump victory. Twitter soon reinstated @DCLeaks.
The most effective outlet by far, however, was WikiLeaks. Russian intelligence likely began feeding hacked documents to Julian Assange's "whistleblower" site in June 2015, after breaching Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry. A group called WikiSaudiLeaks, probably a Guccifer-like front for Fancy Bear, claimed that "WikiLeaks have been given access to some part of these documents." The so-called Saudi Cables showed princes buying influence and monitoring dissidents. They became a major news story, proving that the old methods worked even better in the twenty-first century.
Julian Assange
A leak released at the end of this past summer showed how frictionlessly the kompromat campaign was able to operate in the fact-free atmosphere of the 2016 American presidential campaign. In late September, DC Leaks published hundreds of emails from the account of a twenty-two-year-old freelancer for the Clinton campaign. Lachlan Markay, a reporter for The Washington Free Beacon, found an audio clip buried deep in the cache. In the recording, which was made at a fundraiser in Virginia, Hillary Clinton could be heard describing Sanders supporters as "children of the Great Recession" who "are living in their parents' basement." The comments were clumsy but, in context, hardly damning; Clinton was describing the appeal of Sanders's "political revolution" for young voters. ("We want people to be idealistic," she said.) Nevertheless, within a few days, Donald Trump was telling a roaring crowd in Pennsylvania, "Clinton thinks Bernie supporters are hopeless and ignorant basement dwellers."
In mid-August, when Guccifer and DC Leaks were making near-daily news, a third mysterious social-media account popped up out of nowhere. A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers announced that it had published "cyberweapons" that belonged to the NSA on file-sharing sites such as Github. The group said that it would soon hold an auction to sell off a second cache of tools. After a security researcher posted a link to a repository of the supposed NSA software, analysts flocked to the dump. Security researchers quickly discovered that the tools, a collection of malware designed to steal data from their targets, were the real thing. Crucially, The Intercept, a media outlet with access to the NSA files leaked by Edward Snowden, found a sixteen-character string ("ace02468bdf13579") in the Shadow Brokers' tools that was referenced in a top-secret, and previously unpublished, NSA manual. The connection proved the provenance of the Shadow Brokers' find.
Robbing the NSA, of course, is not easy. The agency's elite hacking unit, called Tailored Access Operations, has an internal network known as the "high side" that is physically segregated from the Internet (the "low side"). Data diodes, devices that allow data to flow one way only, like water from a faucet, make it nearly impossible to hack high-side computers from the low side. When TAO hackers want to attack an adversary, they move their tools from the high side to a server on the low side, navigate through a series of addresses that make their tracks difficult to trace, and install malware on their target. To steal the NSA's malware, the Shadow Brokers had to compromise a low-side machine that the TAO was using to hack its targets. The Shadow Brokers likely got lucky: Some analysts believe that an NSA operator mistakenly uploaded a whole set of tools to a staging computer the hackers were already watching. The alternative theory: an old-fashioned mole passed on the tools.
After going to all that trouble, why publish the results? A possible answer is suggested by a surprising discovery made by the U. S. intelligence community around the time Putin was addressing the journalists in St. Petersburg. American investigators had long known that the Russians were doing more than spear-phishing, but sometime around April they learned that the intruders were using commercial cloud services to "exfiltrate" data out of American corporations and political targets. Cozy Bear, the hacking group believed to be affiliated with the FSB, used some two hundred Microsoft OneDrive accounts to send data from its victims back to Moscow.
Using cloud services such as OneDrive was a clever but risky move—it was a little like taking the bus to make off with stolen goods from a burglary. Though the widespread use of the services by legitimate users offered a degree of cover for the hackers, data provided by Microsoft also helped America's elite digital spies identify the DNC intruders "with confidence" as Russian. It is even possible that the U. S. government has been able to identify the names and personal details of individual operators. The Russians knew they'd been caught. On July 30, an FSB press release announced that twenty government and defense organizations had been hit by high-powered spying tools.
Some intelligence analysts believe that the Shadow Brokers' publication of the NSA spy kit was a message from one group of professionals to another. "You see us?" the Russians seemed to be saying, perhaps in reference to ongoing U. S. efforts to investigate the DNC breach. "Fine, but we see you, too." Similarly, the announcement of an auction—all but certainly phony—was probably intended as a warning that the hackers were prepared to publish a key that would unlock an encrypted container holding a second batch of stolen tools. Like a severed ear in an envelope, the announcement told the Americans: Don't mess with us.
Like a severed ear in an envelope, the announcement told the Americans: Don't mess with us.
Meanwhile, the kompromat campaign proceeded apace. August and September each saw six data dumps, including files from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had also been hacked. In October, as the presidential election drew near, Guccifer published a massive cache, more than twenty-one hundred files. Three days later, WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of emails stolen from John Podesta's account.
On the day WikiLeaks published the first batch of Podesta's emails, the U. S. government took the unprecedented step of announcing that it was "confident" Russia's "seniormost officials" had authorized the DNC hacks. So far U. S. investigators have not said publicly who was responsible for the Podesta hack, but the data harvested by SecureWorks makes it clear that Fancy Bear broke into the Clinton chairman's account as early as late March. The CIA briefed Trump about the origin of the kompromat, but he continued to cite the material, telling a Pennsylvania crowd, "I love WikiLeaks!"
On October 12, Putin appeared at another forum, this time with more than five hundred guests in Moscow. Sitting comfortably in front of a giant banner that said russia calling! he answered an audience question about the hacks. "Everyone is talking about who did it," Putin said. "Is it so important?" The former KGB officer, proving his full command of U. S. political intrigue, suggested that the Democrats had "supported one intraparty candidate at the expense of the other." Any talk of the hacks being in Russia's interest, he said, was "hysteria" intended to distract Americans from what the hackers discovered: "the manipulation of public opinion." When the audience applauded, a smirk returned to Putin's face. "I think I answered your question," he said.
Emails released by WikiLeaks -- allegedly hacked from the Gmail account maintained by longtime Clinton adviser John Podesta -- have sparked partisan outrage on the right, and we-told-you-so head-shaking among liberals who worry that Hillary Clinton’s leftward promises during the campaign could prove temporary, based on aides’ exchanges.
Which begs the question: What do more than 20,000 emails released to date, unverified but not refuted by Podesta and the Democratic nominee’s team, foretell about how Clinton might govern if she defeats Donald Trump?
Within the leaked communications, which the campaign asserts hackers stole at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin to bolster Donald Trump’s candidacy, Clinton herself emerges largely as a shadow. In the chatter, she is relentlessly interpreted and swaddled by handlers, dissected (sometimes unflatteringly) by allies and stakeholders, and heard from directly only rarely.
But Clinton’s long tenure in politics and service in two branches of government, render the emails, which WikiLeaks says it is releasing in batches until Election Day, as more than a campaign embarrassment. There have been no smoking guns – at least not yet – but the communications offer insights about governance questions and ways of operating inside the modern White House.
Here are some examples:
Rationale for a Clinton Presidency: The Podesta emails, covering everything from internal campaign spats to Italian cooking tips to entreaties from climate-change warriors seeking to fund-raise off the candidate, offer insights into one of the essential challenges all presidents face: What are his or her core beliefs? Without the vision thing – which is not the same as a policy agenda – presidents throughout American history have struggled to lead and succeed.
The emails reveal how Clinton’s team labored to lock in a rationale for the candidate’s second bid for the White House, especially in a political environment in which her 1990s-era bona fides and her determination to stick close to President Obama cut her adrift from Americans who saw her as yesterday’s choice. Bernie Sanders, on the left, and Trump, on the right, encouraged frustrated voters eager for change to view Clinton as a disappointing appendage to Bill Clinton’s presidency as well as to President Obama’s White House tenure.
While writing the address that launched Clinton’s campaign in the spring of 2015, her speechwriting team chewed on the problem before the candidate reviewed an initial draft.
"`The Vision Thing,’" wrote lead speechwriter Dan Schwerin in an email that distributed an early text to colleagues. “This remains a challenge. As you read, does it feel like a vision for the future comes through? If not, that's a place we really need to focus.”
Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who worked for President Clinton, privately analyzed the former first lady’s “core message” last January, at Podesta’s invitation. Focused on Clinton’s remarks at a town-hall event in Iowa, he described in a lengthy email how off-kilter he thought Clinton’s pitch had become in comparison to Sanders’ (the Democratic socialist who took his bid for a “revolution” all the way to the Democratic National Convention in July).
“I think the overall message is tone death [sic] on what is happening in the country and even more, in the Democratic primary electorate,” Greenberg wrote. “Your core message is about the past. It is about Clinton’s character and qualities as a leader. The message is not economic, and it is not about the country.”
Joel Benenson, Clinton’s campaign senior adviser and a veteran pollster who worked for Obama’s presidential campaigns, searched for the aspirational signposts guiding the candidate a year after her campaign was underway.
“Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” he asked colleagues in February. “[I]t is still not clear what her singular message is.”
Benenson’s efforts to identify what his client “believes” was reminiscent of a similar challenge Clinton faced in 2008 against then-Sen. Obama. Surrounded again this cycle by message experts, pollsters, speechwriters and ad makers, Clinton’s decisions to tailor some of her positions to the electorate, as she did with her change of heart about the merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact she initially helped negotiate, suggest a capacity for shape-shifting that could follow her into the West Wing.
Because pollsters have predicted Clinton could be elected with help from a percentage of the electorate that strongly opposes Trump rather than passionately admires her, any capitulations or compromises while in office could undermine public trust in her as president.
Preparation to Govern. Clinton has navigated – not always smoothly -- some of the thorniest governance challenges of the modern era, from health care reform and the shrinking middle class to the Iraq War and the rise of the Islamic State. President Obama tells voters that his former Cabinet official is the most experienced presidential candidate ever to face the voters.
The emails underscore what Clinton has argued on the stump: She would enter the White House with reams of policy positions she has internalized, accompanied by budget breakdowns, and gaggles of advocates and experts flapping over each.
Clinton is a politician who has been publicly rebuked for lacking vision while also being commended for a lifelong commitment to the good that government can do. She is a planner who favors control, and she does not relish the high wire of improvisation. Clinton is comforted by a command of the smallest details -- and the hacked emails once again showcase her dependency on a tight circle of loyalists who give her the briefings and materials to appear a mile wide on policy as well as 10-feet deep when it comes to her opponents.
Even the swiftest public responses in a 24/7 political environment during this campaign were drafted for Clinton and hastily reviewed and approved by a tribe of senior advisers, the WikiLeaks emails indicate. No detail seemed to escape scrutiny or preparation, even as Clinton’s aides discussed criticism that the candidate was perceived as inauthentic. Her 140-character tweets were devised by advisers with the same care as major statements, and carefully posted with Clinton’s approval.
Micromanaging is a tough trait to overcome in the Oval Office. In one of the most famous examples, Jimmy Carter, in his first six months as president, personallyreviewed and approved the use of the White House tennis court.
As first lady, Clinton was knee-deep in her husband’s major policy initiatives. But she also became immersed in smaller concerns: She banned smoking and removed ash trays at the White House in her first week, and later decided with staff that news crews’ camera equipment on the North Lawn looked unsightly wrapped in black garbage bags. Customized green canvas covers appeared.
If elected, Clinton’s natural caution and committee-driven decision-making could be valuable. But as she told the Las Vegas debate audience Wednesday night, not all presidential decisions occur after lengthy deliberations. Some of the most significant ones are reactive. While campaigning in 2008, Clinton argued in a “3 a.m. phone call” campaign ad that she was ready to lead in emergency situations. In this election, she has approached the same idea by asserting that Trump is too rash and explosive to make swift life-or-death decisions in a dangerous world.
“The bottom line on nuclear weapons is that when the president gives an order, it must be followed,” she said during the final debate with the Republican nominee. “There’s about four minutes between the order being given and the people responsible for launching nuclear weapons to do so,” she added.
Transparency. Presidents since Richard Nixon have promised Americans they would be transparent, accountable and committed to the truth while in the White House.
Clinton, as illustrated by the continuing controversy over her handling of her State Department emails, sought to control access to her official government communications in ways the FBI subsequently determined were “extremely careless.”
If elected, her instinct for secrecy, her guardedness when facing critics and political opponents, combined with concern about the cyber-breaches of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign are likely to make Clinton less transparent than some of her predecessors.
(The Obama administration, which has not publicly affirmed that the Russian government was behind the hacking of Podesta’s emails, last week encouragedEcuador to cut off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s access to the internet. Assange, who created the whistle-blowing site in 2006, has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for more than four years to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces an arrest warrant on allegations of rape.)
Clinton already had a reputation for strained relations with the news media. The digital evolution in media, and changes in the public’s news consumption habits since she and her husband last occupied the White House, would encourage Clinton and her staff to fortify their information lockdown if she’s elected.
The WikiLeaks emails reveal a team tackling communications with practiced techniques designed to maximize control and to minimize damage. The news angles and information sought by news outlets and individual reporters were circulated internally in real time, according to Podesta’s Gmail inbox. Copies of news articles, reporters’ tweets, blog posts, and television broadcasts were constantly monitored. Clinton’s traveling spokesman, Nick Merrill, emailed daily reports to headquarters about questions posed to Clinton on the campaign trail, her answers, and his enthusiastic assessments about her performances on the stump.
If a reporter approached a Clinton ally seeking information, the ally circled back to the campaign via email to offer staff members an early warning. If the campaign frowned on a journalist’s news coverage or inquiry, the campaign advisers instructed one another to ignore the journalist or deliver pushback.
In the modern White House, a president’s control of information and efforts to work with what the Clinton campaign called media “friendlies” is referred to as “message discipline.” Journalists less charitably refer to some techniques as propaganda.
What works for candidates inside campaigns is almost always imported into the West Wing because presidents typically tap political aides to fill out senior White House positions. (Some presidents, including Bill Clinton – who arrived late to the recognition that campaigning and governing were different endeavors – expressed regret about some early staffing decisions.)
In Clinton’s case, her top advisers are veterans of the Clinton administration, or worked with her in the Senate or at the State Department. Many became familiar with White House operations under President Clinton or Obama, or both. Clinton is known for her loyal, insular crew, and has been faulted over the years for favoring aides who catered to her idiosyncrasies.
After talking with State Department staff members in June 2015 about emails received by Secretary Clinton on her private server from longtime friend and former journalist Sidney Blumenthal, spokesman Merrill described a proposed strategy to his campaign colleagues. He said State ought to blunt the impact when the department turned Blumenthal’s emails over to the House Select Committee onBenghazi. The plan: Unveil the information in advance of the committee’s release via outreach to a “friendly” reporter at the Associated Press.
“They [State] do not plan to release anything publicly, so no posting online or anything public-facing, just to the committee,” Merrill wrote. “That said, they are considering placing a story with a friendly at the AP (Matt Lee or Bradley Klapper), that would lay this out before the majority on the committee has a chance to realize what they have and distort it,” he added.
Lee and Klapper’s coverage appeared on June 25, 2015, including input from State Department officials, Merrill, and committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy.
Political Instincts, Temperament and Judgment. Even Clinton’s most ardent admirers have fretted about her tendencies to favor friends who present conflicts; her reluctance to publicly admit mistakes; and choices that somehow balloon into self-inflicted wounds.
Clinton has weathered a failed health care reform effort in the 1990s, her Senate vote backing the Iraq invasion, her push for a military intervention that left a vacuum after Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was removed from power in 2011, a transparently expedient about-face on TPP, and multiple investigations of her private emails that dominated headlines for nearly two years.
Former White House aide George Stephanopoulos, in his 1999 book “All Too Human,” contrasted Hillary and Bill Clinton during his time in the West Wing.
“Her husband looks soft, but his accommodating nature cushions him; Hillary looks hard, but her often brittle exterior masks a more vulnerable core,” he wrote.
Neera Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who succeeded Podesta as president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, functions as a close adviser to Clinton’s campaign. In a January email to Podesta, she applauded one of the former White House chief of staff’s campaign tweets, which he complained had initially been “held.”
“Got held by who? Hillary. God. Her instincts are suboptimal,” Tanden replied.
To nudge Clinton to publicly apologize for her email “mistakes” proved a protracted ordeal last year, according to exchanges among top campaign officials and Clinton allies. “Apologies are like her Achilles heel,” Tanden wrote in September to Podesta and campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “But she didn't seem like a bitch in the [NBC] interview. And she said the word sorry. She will get to a full apology in a few interviews.”
Throughout the WikiLeaks disclosures this month, such glimpses of Clinton’s foibles and her team’s ambitions for the candidate reinforced impressions of her political vulnerabilities. But leading up to Nov. 8, thousands of stolen communications may be a preview of Clinton’s governance traits, as well.
Alexis Simendinger covers the White House for RealClearPolitics.
Leaked Emails Offer Clues to How Clinton Would Govern by Alexis Simendinger ( Republished with permission of the author and Real Clear Politics (polls) in which the article first appeared.)
Emails released by WikiLeaks -- allegedly hacked from the Gmail account maintained by longtime Clinton adviser John Podesta -- have sparked partisan outrage on the right, and we-told-you-so head-shaking among liberals who worry that Hillary Clinton’s leftward promises during the campaign could prove temporary, based on aides’ exchanges.
Which begs the question: What do more than 20,000 emails released to date, unverified but not refuted by Podesta and the Democratic nominee’s team, foretell about how Clinton might govern if she defeats Donald Trump?
Within the leaked communications, which the campaign asserts hackers stole at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin to bolster Donald Trump’s candidacy, Clinton herself emerges largely as a shadow. In the chatter, she is relentlessly interpreted and swaddled by handlers, dissected (sometimes unflatteringly) by allies and stakeholders, and heard from directly only rarely.
But Clinton’s long tenure in politics and service in two branches of government, render the emails, which WikiLeaks says it is releasing in batches until Election Day, as more than a campaign embarrassment. There have been no smoking guns – at least not yet – but the communications offer insights about governance questions and ways of operating inside the modern White House.
Here are some examples:
Rationale for a Clinton Presidency: The Podesta emails, covering everything from internal campaign spats to Italian cooking tips to entreaties from climate-change warriors seeking to fund-raise off the candidate, offer insights into one of the essential challenges all presidents face: What are his or her core beliefs? Without the vision thing – which is not the same as a policy agenda – presidents throughout American history have struggled to lead and succeed.
The emails reveal how Clinton’s team labored to lock in a rationale for the candidate’s second bid for the White House, especially in a political environment in which her 1990s-era bona fides and her determination to stick close to President Obama cut her adrift from Americans who saw her as yesterday’s choice. Bernie Sanders, on the left, and Trump, on the right, encouraged frustrated voters eager for change to view Clinton as a disappointing appendage to Bill Clinton’s presidency as well as to President Obama’s White House tenure.
While writing the address that launched Clinton’s campaign in the spring of 2015, her speechwriting team chewed on the problem before the candidate reviewed an initial draft.
"`The Vision Thing,’" wrote lead speechwriter Dan Schwerin in an email that distributed an early text to colleagues. “This remains a challenge. As you read, does it feel like a vision for the future comes through? If not, that's a place we really need to focus.”
Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who worked for President Clinton, privately analyzed the former first lady’s “core message” last January, at Podesta’s invitation. Focused on Clinton’s remarks at a town-hall event in Iowa, he described in a lengthy email how off-kilter he thought Clinton’s pitch had become in comparison to Sanders’ (the Democratic socialist who took his bid for a “revolution” all the way to the Democratic National Convention in July).
“I think the overall message is tone death [sic] on what is happening in the country and even more, in the Democratic primary electorate,” Greenberg wrote. “Your core message is about the past. It is about Clinton’s character and qualities as a leader. The message is not economic, and it is not about the country.”
Joel Benenson, Clinton’s campaign senior adviser and a veteran pollster who worked for Obama’s presidential campaigns, searched for the aspirational signposts guiding the candidate a year after her campaign was underway.
“Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” he asked colleagues in February. “[I]t is still not clear what her singular message is.”
Benenson’s efforts to identify what his client “believes” was reminiscent of a similar challenge Clinton faced in 2008 against then-Sen. Obama. Surrounded again this cycle by message experts, pollsters, speechwriters and ad makers, Clinton’s decisions to tailor some of her positions to the electorate, as she did with her change of heart about the merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact she initially helped negotiate, suggest a capacity for shape-shifting that could follow her into the West Wing.
Because pollsters have predicted Clinton could be elected with help from a percentage of the electorate that strongly opposes Trump rather than passionately admires her, any capitulations or compromises while in office could undermine public trust in her as president.
Preparation to Govern. Clinton has navigated – not always smoothly -- some of the thorniest governance challenges of the modern era, from health care reform and the shrinking middle class to the Iraq War and the rise of the Islamic State. President Obama tells voters that his former Cabinet official is the most experienced presidential candidate ever to face the voters.
The emails underscore what Clinton has argued on the stump: She would enter the White House with reams of policy positions she has internalized, accompanied by budget breakdowns, and gaggles of advocates and experts flapping over each.
Clinton is a politician who has been publicly rebuked for lacking vision while also being commended for a lifelong commitment to the good that government can do. She is a planner who favors control, and she does not relish the high wire of improvisation. Clinton is comforted by a command of the smallest details -- and the hacked emails once again showcase her dependency on a tight circle of loyalists who give her the briefings and materials to appear a mile wide on policy as well as 10-feet deep when it comes to her opponents.
Even the swiftest public responses in a 24/7 political environment during this campaign were drafted for Clinton and hastily reviewed and approved by a tribe of senior advisers, the WikiLeaks emails indicate. No detail seemed to escape scrutiny or preparation, even as Clinton’s aides discussed criticism that the candidate was perceived as inauthentic. Her 140-character tweets were devised by advisers with the same care as major statements, and carefully posted with Clinton’s approval.
Micromanaging is a tough trait to overcome in the Oval Office. In one of the most famous examples, Jimmy Carter, in his first six months as president, personallyreviewed and approved the use of the White House tennis court.
As first lady, Clinton was knee-deep in her husband’s major policy initiatives. But she also became immersed in smaller concerns: She banned smoking and removed ash trays at the White House in her first week, and later decided with staff that news crews’ camera equipment on the North Lawn looked unsightly wrapped in black garbage bags. Customized green canvas covers appeared.
If elected, Clinton’s natural caution and committee-driven decision-making could be valuable. But as she told the Las Vegas debate audience Wednesday night, not all presidential decisions occur after lengthy deliberations. Some of the most significant ones are reactive. While campaigning in 2008, Clinton argued in a “3 a.m. phone call” campaign ad that she was ready to lead in emergency situations. In this election, she has approached the same idea by asserting that Trump is too rash and explosive to make swift life-or-death decisions in a dangerous world.
“The bottom line on nuclear weapons is that when the president gives an order, it must be followed,” she said during the final debate with the Republican nominee. “There’s about four minutes between the order being given and the people responsible for launching nuclear weapons to do so,” she added.
Transparency. Presidents since Richard Nixon have promised Americans they would be transparent, accountable and committed to the truth while in the White House.
Clinton, as illustrated by the continuing controversy over her handling of her State Department emails, sought to control access to her official government communications in ways the FBI subsequently determined were “extremely careless.”
If elected, her instinct for secrecy, her guardedness when facing critics and political opponents, combined with concern about the cyber-breaches of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign are likely to make Clinton less transparent than some of her predecessors.
(The Obama administration, which has not publicly affirmed that the Russian government was behind the hacking of Podesta’s emails, last week encouragedEcuador to cut off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s access to the internet. Assange, who created the whistle-blowing site in 2006, has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for more than four years to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces an arrest warrant on allegations of rape.)
Clinton already had a reputation for strained relations with the news media. The digital evolution in media, and changes in the public’s news consumption habits since she and her husband last occupied the White House, would encourage Clinton and her staff to fortify their information lockdown if she’s elected.
The WikiLeaks emails reveal a team tackling communications with practiced techniques designed to maximize control and to minimize damage. The news angles and information sought by news outlets and individual reporters were circulated internally in real time, according to Podesta’s Gmail inbox. Copies of news articles, reporters’ tweets, blog posts, and television broadcasts were constantly monitored. Clinton’s traveling spokesman, Nick Merrill, emailed daily reports to headquarters about questions posed to Clinton on the campaign trail, her answers, and his enthusiastic assessments about her performances on the stump.
If a reporter approached a Clinton ally seeking information, the ally circled back to the campaign via email to offer staff members an early warning. If the campaign frowned on a journalist’s news coverage or inquiry, the campaign advisers instructed one another to ignore the journalist or deliver pushback.
In the modern White House, a president’s control of information and efforts to work with what the Clinton campaign called media “friendlies” is referred to as “message discipline.” Journalists less charitably refer to some techniques as propaganda.
What works for candidates inside campaigns is almost always imported into the West Wing because presidents typically tap political aides to fill out senior White House positions. (Some presidents, including Bill Clinton – who arrived late to the recognition that campaigning and governing were different endeavors – expressed regret about some early staffing decisions.)
In Clinton’s case, her top advisers are veterans of the Clinton administration, or worked with her in the Senate or at the State Department. Many became familiar with White House operations under President Clinton or Obama, or both. Clinton is known for her loyal, insular crew, and has been faulted over the years for favoring aides who catered to her idiosyncrasies.
After talking with State Department staff members in June 2015 about emails received by Secretary Clinton on her private server from longtime friend and former journalist Sidney Blumenthal, spokesman Merrill described a proposed strategy to his campaign colleagues. He said State ought to blunt the impact when the department turned Blumenthal’s emails over to the House Select Committee onBenghazi. The plan: Unveil the information in advance of the committee’s release via outreach to a “friendly” reporter at the Associated Press.
“They [State] do not plan to release anything publicly, so no posting online or anything public-facing, just to the committee,” Merrill wrote. “That said, they are considering placing a story with a friendly at the AP (Matt Lee or Bradley Klapper), that would lay this out before the majority on the committee has a chance to realize what they have and distort it,” he added.
Lee and Klapper’s coverage appeared on June 25, 2015, including input from State Department officials, Merrill, and committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy.
Political Instincts, Temperament and Judgment. Even Clinton’s most ardent admirers have fretted about her tendencies to favor friends who present conflicts; her reluctance to publicly admit mistakes; and choices that somehow balloon into self-inflicted wounds.
Clinton has weathered a failed health care reform effort in the 1990s, her Senate vote backing the Iraq invasion, her push for a military intervention that left a vacuum after Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was removed from power in 2011, a transparently expedient about-face on TPP, and multiple investigations of her private emails that dominated headlines for nearly two years.
Former White House aide George Stephanopoulos, in his 1999 book “All Too Human,” contrasted Hillary and Bill Clinton during his time in the West Wing.
“Her husband looks soft, but his accommodating nature cushions him; Hillary looks hard, but her often brittle exterior masks a more vulnerable core,” he wrote.
Neera Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who succeeded Podesta as president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, functions as a close adviser to Clinton’s campaign. In a January email to Podesta, she applauded one of the former White House chief of staff’s campaign tweets, which he complained had initially been “held.”
“Got held by who? Hillary. God. Her instincts are suboptimal,” Tanden replied.
To nudge Clinton to publicly apologize for her email “mistakes” proved a protracted ordeal last year, according to exchanges among top campaign officials and Clinton allies. “Apologies are like her Achilles heel,” Tanden wrote in September to Podesta and campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “But she didn't seem like a bitch in the [NBC] interview. And she said the word sorry. She will get to a full apology in a few interviews.”
Throughout the WikiLeaks disclosures this month, such glimpses of Clinton’s foibles and her team’s ambitions for the candidate reinforced impressions of her political vulnerabilities. But leading up to Nov. 8, thousands of stolen communications may be a preview of Clinton’s governance traits, as well.
Alexis Simendinger covers the White House for RealClearPolitics.
Diplomacy: WikiLeaks gives glimpse of Clinton-Israel relationship
Stuart Eizenstat’s hacked emails provide a peep into how the Israeli government views Hillary Clinton, and also his own efforts at shaping the presidential candidate’s messaging on Israel.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange makes a speech from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy, in central London, Britain February 5, 2016.. (photo credit:REUTERS)
Loathe WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange or love him, think that he is a Russian tool or one of freedom’s champions, believe that email hacking is an illegal and unethical invasion of privacy or a way to make politics and diplomacy more transparent, his website makes for riveting reading.
And the recent dump of thousands of emails hacked from John Podesta’s account is no exception.
Podesta is the chairman of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the emails that have appeared on the WikiLeaks website proved a fascinating, unfiltered look at the inner workings of the Clinton campaign.
They also provide a small peep into her thinking on Israel, how some Israeli leaders view her positions on Israel, and efforts to shape her Israel messaging.
Indeed, many of the emails dealing with Israel were written by Stuart Eizenstat, 73, a veteran of Democratic politics who served in Jimmy Carter’s administration as chief domestic adviser, and in Bill Clinton’s administration in a variety of roles, including ambassador to the EU and deputy secretary of the Treasury. Along with Dennis Ross, Eizenstat is currently the co-chairman of the Jewish People Policy Institute’s board of directors. In the 2008 election he served as a surrogate for Clinton with Jewish audiences.
As he writes of himself to Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s chief foreign policy adviser and his main email interlocutor, “By way of background, I have very deep connections to the State of Israel and to its elected officials and leading academics. I go to Israel two to three times a year, perhaps 50 times since my first visit in 1965. My grandfather and great-grandfather are buried in Israel, and I have scores of relatives and friends there.”
Sullivan, who has been touted as a possible candidate for national security adviser if Clinton wins in November, indicated in the emails that Eizenstat’s comments and recommendations are taken seriously.
In a July 2015 email, during which he briefed Sullivan on a meeting he had with Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, Eizenstat wrote, “Let me premise this summary by telling you that we are so personally close to him that my late wife, Fran, and I went to his bar mitzva in Miami (tragically, his father, the mayor of Miami Beach, died of a heart attack two weeks before the event). We have been close ever since, although our politics are far apart. Also, I am fully and painfully aware of his role in the Romney- Obama election.”
That last sentence has to do with allegations that Dermer actively supported Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. No such charges have been leveled this time around in Clinton’s race against Donald Trump.
In fact, in a December 2015 email, Eizenstat writes of an unnamed senior Israeli official who “is very close to the prime minister, and knows his thinking,” who said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a good relationship with Clinton. This official is widely believed to be Dermer.
The official, Eizenstat writes, had a number of insights. The first one was the following: “The prime minister always had a ‘surprising good relationship’ with Hillary; she is ‘easy to work with,’ and [he believes] that she is more instinctively sympathetic to Israel than the White House.
“Even during their ‘famous 43-minute phone call, when he felt like slamming down the phone, he felt she was simply heavily scripted and reading from points prepared by the White House.’” That phone call refers to a telephone dressing down Netanyahu received from Clinton in March 2010 following the announcement of building in a Jerusalem neighborhood over the Green Line during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel. Clinton was secretary of state at the time.
According to Eizenstat, the official did wonder if a Clinton administration “will be a Saban Forum for four years,” referring to the annual conference sponsored at the Brookings Institution each year by billionaire Clinton backer Haim Saban, and which Clinton addressed in 2015, as she has in the past. This concern, Eizenstat wrote, had to do more with the “people around her, but not her. Her [2015 Saban Forum] speech, in the eyes of the official, was ‘95% good, although there was some moral equivalence language.’” Asked by Sullivan in a follow-up email what the official meant by wondering whether a Clinton administration would be a four-year-long Saban Forum, Eizenstat replied: “What he meant was that they are concerned that the focus of an HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] administration would be on the Palestinian peace process and two-state solution rather than on the external threats to Israel (Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas), and that the administration would be populated with officials of this bent. He was less worried about HRC’s own views.”
In an email from March 2015, Eizenstat wrote of a meeting with Dermer to discuss a recent JPPI meeting in Jerusalem. In that email he spelled out some of Dermer’s concerns. The ambassador, according to Eizenstat, said that the administration was “tone deaf” about the existential threat Iran posed to Israel, and that Clinton should “recognize and empathize with Israel’s concerns with the Iran deal.”
The email also shed light on how the Israeli government views J Street.
Dermer, according to Eizenstat, “distinguishes between liberal groups like Peace Now, which he supports, and J Street, which he does not. The reason, he said, is that although they are officially anti-BDS, they actively lobby against Israeli positions supported by a democratically elected government in Israel, and are constantly critical of Israel, rather than the Palestinians.
By lobbying Congress and the administration against Israeli positions, they are ‘denying Israel’s right to self-determination.’ They are lobbying to change what the popularly elected government of Israel supports.”
A few months earlier, in March 2015, soon after Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and after his reelection and hints from sources close to US President Barack Obama that the administration may take a new look at the US-Israel relationship following comments Netanyahu made about two states and Arab voters, Eizenstat wrote that “the Obama White House-Bibi relationship is obviously deteriorating to the point of no return.”
Eizenstat said the relationship was “more poisonous” than at any other time in his lifetime, and that there has never been the “public personal animosity that exists now” between Netanyahu and Obama. “Olive branches have been spurned,” he wrote.
He said this “obviously places Hillary in an extremely difficult position,” and suggested she make the following points: First, the need to “lower the temperature level” of rhetoric on all sides, stressing that “the overall political, military, defense relationship with Israel is too important to allow personal differences to intrude on the future direction of US policy.”
Second, he suggested she stress the “enduring commitment of the United States to Israel’s security interests,” including battling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. He also suggested she “express a strong feeling that Israel MUST remain a bipartisan issue, as it has been since its formation.”
In another email three months later he writes of a weeklong visit to Israel during which he was struck “not only among Israeli officials, but among my friends across the political spectrum (most are former officials) and apolitical relatives, at the depth of antipathy and distrust of President Obama as ‘weak,’ ‘pro-Muslim’ and ‘anti-Israel.’” This theme appeared in an email written a month earlier about a JPPI conference in the US attended by a number of Israeli officials, past and present; former US officials, such as Henry Kissinger; academics, rabbis and leaders of organized American Jewry.
“Most troubling was the pervasive feeling that the US has withdrawn from a leadership position in the Middle East, leaving our allies in the Arab world, and Israel, to fend for themselves. The level of vitriol against the president was striking, to such a degree that one participant urged that he was being unfairly demonized.”
Eizenstat wrote that he hoped his report of the two-day conference, during which he spelled out the concerns across a wide range of issues, “is helpful in shaping Hillary’s positions on these difficult issues.
But more broadly, she needs to understand the great angst in the Jewish community over the cascade of challenges I have described. The empathy and appreciation she can demonstrate would itself be important and reassuring.”
