Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House by Donna Brazile

Author:Donna Brazile [Brazile, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

To help boost morale, I decided I’d hold impromptu parties in Debbie’s office. I called it my Wings and Wine Caucus. I have always loved wings and I believe they pair well with wine, but I’d offer beer, too. Debbie left behind some pretty good wine, and by the time we got through that, people were starting to stay later and work better together.

At first Wings and Wine was a big confessional. I heard how the hacking was affecting the staff in their lives outside the office. Tom McMahon said he kept finding himself in places where the people around him were speaking Russian. He did not recall that had ever happened before. My assistant, Anne Friedman, was very conscious of her phone. She had been sitting out with friends on the deck enjoying a summer evening when she started to wonder if the Russians had turned on the microphone in it. Both Tom and Anne tried to talk themselves out of this paranoia. That was ridiculous, they agreed, and called it lunacy. But was it? As I looked around the table, I wondered how many others had had moments, like I’d had at my office window, when they second-guessed their safety. This is what the Russians were doing to us, too.

These meetings were helpful in other ways. We bonded with each other, even bonded through those fears. Everyone was invited, but you know how that goes. After a few times you are down to a core group with a few surprise guests every once in a while. I already knew Tom and Anne, the daughter of a close friend, but I got to know Julie Greene, Patrice Taylor, and Adam Parkhomenko better. Also, I learned to trust Charles Olivier, the CFO sent down by Brooklyn, and he grew to trust and later to respect me.

I was suspicious of Charles from the beginning, because he was good friends with Brandon. Now that he was a regular part of Wings and Wine, the barriers between us were starting to fall, and he was open to my questions about how I was perceived in Brooklyn. It was still chapping my hide that they did not include me on the national election strategy conference calls, as if my decades of experience in the black community were not needed for a victory in November.

Over many evenings of Wings and Wine, I got Charles to describe the point of view Brooklyn had of my old, ragged ass. To Robby’s boys, my moment of glory had been the Gore campaign, which we lost. To them my campaign knowledge was from a bygone era. The common wisdom was that my inability to accept that things were different now was what was making me so feisty (meaning “unpleasant to work with”), but the truth was that no matter how much noise I made, my thoughts were irrelevant to them. I saw myself as making a sacrifice to help the party. They saw me as desperate for significance and trying to claw my way back into the national conversation.

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