Democracy in Danger by Jake Braun

Author:Jake Braun
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

She stood outside his door for hours. Periodically, she would come into my office and say, “Jake, I have been standing there for three hours, and he hasn’t asked for anything. He is going to think I am crazy.”

I told her to continue stalking him, and eventually things worked as planned. Steinberg eventually needed help from Laura, and she did an outstanding job performing even the most mundane tasks. When he went into his role as number two of the State Department, he brought Laura with him. Almost every other campaign staffer who worked for Obama in the primary was blocked by the HRC team for the first two years.1 In fairness, any HRC primary campaign staffer who had not worked for Obama in the general election had an infinitesimally small chance of breaking into the Obama administration, too.

Laura’s experience, coupled with Chris’s anecdote about the Reagan and H. W. Bush administrations, made me decide that if HRC won and I wanted to be involved in the national security establishment for the next four to eight years, I would be better off forgoing a position in the last two years of the Obama administration and try to help the Clinton campaign instead.

I had always hated fund-raising, but that was the most highly valued activity you could do for the campaign short of quitting your job and moving to work full time for the campaign somewhere like Iowa or New Hampshire. So I became a fund-raiser, or “bundler,” as they call it in federal campaigns, because you can’t just write a huge $50,000 or $1 million check to the campaign. Federal Election Commission rules state that to raise $50,000 or $1 million or whatever amount, you must collect, or “bundle,” checks from many people of no value greater than $2,700 each per individual donor. Even Warren Buffett and Bill Gates can only give a particular federal candidate’s political action committee $2,700. There are myriad ways around this rule because of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens’ United” ruling that are too complex and numerous to go into here. Bottom line is I had to call, text, and otherwise harass lots of people for checks of $2,700 or less.

My first foray into the fund-raising arena for Clinton was to try and organize some people I knew in the cybersecurity industry to host cybersecurity-themed fund-raisers. To my knowledge, these were the first “cyber fund-raisers,” at least on the Democratic side of the aisle.

The second one we did was called the “Hackers for Hillary” fund-raiser, and it happened at Black Hat, the sister event to DEF CON. Black Hat was the more buttoned-up, professional, and corporate of the two conferences. As such, Jeff Moss, who founded Black Hat and DEF CON, and I figured it would be a better place to hold a fund-raiser because we assumed people there would have more money to donate. This fund-raiser was held on August 3, 2016, at a Mexican restaurant near the Black Hat conference.

I didn’t realize it at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.