Dnc Quotes

For 70 years Democrats bitterly denied being "socialists". Bernie Sanders has done the service of exposing them.

It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a "draft-dodging chickenhawk" during one of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping with how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters, but also in those of us who opposed him. It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that failed to call us to our highest values.

When there are no ceilings the sky's the limit

the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house.

You're really not frightened of what might happen" "No, I mean, of course I am," he says. "It definitely stays a secret until after the election. And I know it'll be messy. But if we can get ahead of the narrative, wait for the right time and do it on our own terms, I think it could be okay." "How long have you been thinking about this?" "Consciously? Since, like, the DNC. Subconsciously, in total denial? A long-ass time. At least since you kissed me." Henry stares at him from the pillow. "That's... kind of incredible." "What about you?" "What about me?" Henry says. "Christ, Alex. The whole bloody time." "The whole time?" "Since the Olympics." "The Olympics." Alex yanks Henry's pillow out from under him. "But thats', that's like --" "Yes Alex, the day we met, nothing gets past you, does it?" Henry says, reaching to steal the pillow back. "'What about you,' he says, as if he doesn't know--" "Shut your mouth," Alex says, grinning like an idiot, and he stops fighting Henry for the pillow and instead straddles hima nd kisses him into the mattress. He pulls the blankets up and they disappear into the pile, a laughing mess of mouths and hands, until Henry rolls onto the phone and his ass presses the button on the voicemail. "Diaz, you insane, hopeless romantic little shit," says the voice of the President of the United States, muffled on the bed. "It had better be forever. Be safe.

Pitting these two angry bears against the DNC was not a fair fight, Shawn Henry of CrowdStrike said in the Post article: “This is a sophisticated foreign intelligence service with a lot of time, a lot of resources, and is interested in targeting the U.S. political system. You’ve got ordinary citizens who are doing hand-to-hand combat with trained military officers, and that’s an untenable situation.

If the DNC was a small business, it was like no small business I’ve ever seen. We change bosses and objectives with each election cycle and our goal is to spend every dime we raise to get people elected. Long-term planning for things like investment in cybersecurity is hard to do in this environment. And in this cycle it sometimes seemed like Brooklyn wanted to strip it of its functionality nearly as much as the Russians had.

One day in September 2015, FBI agent Adrian Hawkins placed a call to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., and asked to speak to the person in charge of technology. He was routed to the DNC help desk, which transferred the call to Yared Tamene, a young IT specialist with The MIS Department, a consulting firm hired by the DNC. After identifying himself, Hawkins told Tamene that he had reason to believe that at least one computer on the DNC’s network was compromised. He asked if the DNC was aware of this and what it was doing. Tamene had nothing to do with cybersecurity and knew little about the subject. He was a mid-level network administrator; his basic IT duties for the DNC were to set up computer accounts for employees and be on call to deal with any problems. When he got the call, Tamene was wary. Was this a joke or, worse, a dirty trick? He asked Hawkins if he could prove he was an FBI agent, and, as Tamene later wrote in a memo, “he did not provide me with an adequate response.… At this point, I had no way of differentiating the call I received from a prank call.” Hawkins, though, was real. He was a well-regarded agent in the FBI’s cyber squad. And he was following a legitimate lead in a case that would come to affect a presidential election. Earlier in the year, U.S. cyber warriors intercepted a target list of about thirty U.S. government agencies, think tanks, and several political organizations designated for cyberattacks by a group of hackers known as APT 29. APT stood for Advanced Persistent Threat—technojargon for a sophisticated set of actors who penetrate networks, insert viruses, and extract data over prolonged periods of time.

campaign aides came to believe that there was a big and telling difference between the disclosure of DNC e-mails earlier in the summer and the reveal of the Podesta rounds. Rather than a massive, untargeted one-time release, this time there seemed to be greater political sophistication in the slow-burn method of daily releases for the final month of the campaign—and the Podesta e-mails were presented in an easily searchable format. The biggest difference they detected was that WikiLeaks had seemed to acquire a close enough understanding of American domestic politics to time its releases and publish e-mails on days when they would have greater relevance in the news.

On July 13, 2018, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment charging Russian military intelligence officers from the GRU with conspiring to hack into various U.S. computers used by the Clinton Campaign, DNC, DCCC, and other U.S. persons, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030 and 371 (Count One); committing identity theft and conspiring to commit money laundering in furtherance of that hacking conspiracy, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1028A and 1956(h) (Counts Two through Ten); and a separate conspiracy to hack into the computers of U.S. persons and entities responsible for the administration of the 2016 U.S. election, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030 and 371 (Count Eleven). Netyksho Indictment.1277 As of this writing, all 12 defendants remain at large.

We can’t get seduced by the idea that if only we just rebuild the DNC we’ll be fine. We really have to jump in now to shape the narrative. The starting point—and this is the gift that abolition as an ideology and a practice has given me—is the idea that the system isn’t actually broken. Right? Because then I’m not preoccupied with trying to fix it. That’s not my goal. All I want to do is abolish and end it, therefore the imperatives of what I’m trying to do—the training, the questions, the analysis—all have to be geared towards that, and then this doesn’t force me to run around in circles plugging my fingers in the dyke everywhere as the water is just threatening to overwhelm all of us. Also, this allows me to think of how we can crowd out the current system by building the things that we want to see in the world, that will promote our well-being.

The only path McAuliffe saw to hard-money parity ran through cycles of prospecting new donors, in the mail and online. To accomplish that on the scale he believed crucial, Democrats needed the list of 100 million new names, sortable by party registration or voting behavior, that would fill a national voter file. McAuliffe proposed a deal to the state chairs, that the DNC would effectively borrow their files, help clean them up, add new data like donor information and commercially available phone numbers, and then return them for the state party’s use. At the same time, McAuliffe went to Vinod Gupta, a major Democratic fund-raiser and Clinton friend who was the founder and CEO of InfoUSA, one of the country’s large commercial data vendors. Like many of his rivals, Gupta had been trying for years to find customers in the political world, and offered McAuliffe a good deal for his product. McAuliffe agreed, and as the state files came in, the DNC would send them out to InfoUSA’s Omaha servers, where hundreds of pieces of new information were added to each voter’s profile. A new interface was built to navigate it all. It was called Demzilla.

I had promised Bernie when I took the position of interim chair of the DNC that I would get to the bottom of whether or not Hillary’s team had rigged the party process in her favor so that only she would win the nomination.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

Chalupa’s actions appear to show that she was simultaneously working on behalf of a foreign government, Ukraine, and on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign, in an effort to influence not only the US voting population but US government officials.

The hotel hosting the meeting threatened to shut me down for serving alcohol without a license, but somehow the DNC staff made that problem disappear.

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.

Kramer would later serve as a liaison between McCain and former British spy Christopher Steele to collect his DNC-funded fictionalized dossier on Trump and hand it over to the FBI. Kramer’s involvement in the dossier delivery would later lead him to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself when interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.

DNC Department had a small modelmaking section and a simple model would be made at an early stage – Lords of the Admiralty could not read drawings.

You don't want respect! You want representation! ...Asking for respect will never get you any respect at all. But seeking and demanding representation will give you self-respect and the true respect you deserve. Is this just a political statement, you tell me is not everything political?

The right-wing culture-war mentality is a political distraction used by the right-wing talking heads to manipulate their voters. But if you wanna truly stop a right-wing ideology you must replace it with a better ideology! Oppressing an ideology makes it stronger. But give people a better option and you can replace it permanently. You don't want respect! You want representation! ...Asking for respect will never get you any respect at all. But seeking and demanding representation will give you self-respect and the true respect you deserve.

Like instinctively; love differently; lust indefinitely.

All of the old lessons of identifying Russian mantraps started to come back to me as the stolen DNC data was revealed. It had a pattern that was familiar and that virtually every other intelligence officer could recognize. The pattern showed that someone was playing 3 Dimensional chess with our democracy.

With that said, Operation LUCKY-7 had its cut-out. The FSB’s Information Warfare Management Cell (IWMC) would create a false flag source to feed Assange the data taken from the DNC and any subsequent hacks through Guccifer 2.0. Assange was desperate to be relevant and the IWMC was going to create a new era where his own hatreds and agenda could be skillfully manipulated by the FSB’s active measures officers, while the cyber teams would keep him well fed. Assange was primed to do LUCKY-7’s bidding and now only needed the data they had stolen. WikiLeaks was now a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB and essentially the cyber equivalent of a Laundromat, a Russian laundry —ready to clean and give a white appearance to the dirt.

It was refreshing to see the cybersecurity communities pushback when the DNC attempted to introduce the cold war “It’s the Russians” mantra when fear mongers found that their completely unprotected networks were infiltrated by script kiddies.

What about the Russians? They had tried to destroy us. Was she going to help? I wanted to file a lawsuit. We needed to sue those sons of bitches for what they did to us. I knew the campaign had over $3 million set aside in a legal fund. Could she help me get this lawsuit started? And don’t forget the murder of Seth Rich, I told her. Did she want to contribute to Seth’s reward fund? We still hadn’t found the person responsible for the tragic murder of this bright young DNC staffer. You’re right, she said. We’re going to get to that. But she really had to go. She had made the call and checked it off her list, and

Then came that Friday, when WikiLeaks dumped twenty thousand Democratic Party emails in a move deliberately timed to disrupt our convention. The WikiLeaks emails—written by a wide range of DNC staff from the top leadership all the way down to the lowest employees—were carefully chosen to reveal senior members of the DNC staff speaking disrespectfully of Bernie and his supporters;

I decided to call Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe for advice on getting the DNC back on its feet. I knew he’d just be getting out of church. “Terry,” I said. “I’m sitting here in Debbie’s office about to meet the staff. What should I do?” “Paint that damn office blue!” he said. I guess he didn’t like her Florida pink walls any more than I did. I knew I’d keep some part of the office pink out of respect for Debbie, who was a breast cancer survivor.

You know, Brandon, I want to have a black-on-black conversation with you.” He looked so startled it was as if I had slapped him in the face. “What are you here for? What is your purpose in life? Why do I need you? I have never needed a liaison or a translator in my life. I am the chair of the DNC and as far as I can see, you are nothing more than a clerk. Take that message up to Brooklyn next time you sneak off up there. Tell them the chair of the DNC doesn’t make requests, and she doesn’t talk to clerks.

All my life, I have binge-watched crime dramas and love movies with cops being the heroes, but this wasn’t a movie. This was real life and it was happening in real time. At the conclusion of the two-hour meeting, I wanted to tell the taxi driver not to take us back to the DNC but right to the Pentagon. This was a war, clearly, but waged on a different kind of battlefield. During that twelve-block ride up Capitol Hill, we didn’t say a thing. Henry looked left, Ray looked right, Tom was checking his phone, and I was in suspended disbelief looking straight up at the dome of the U.S. Capitol. As soon as we got back into the building, we sat numb and silent on the couches in Debbie’s office. I am not one to tremble, because I am my daddy’s girl and I do not scare easily.

By the next morning I got a call from Charlie Baker wanting to know why I was worried about the duck. “Charlie, because I’m still—I’m on leave from Walt Disney, which owns ABC. I’m an ABC contributor, and it’s their duck. Not my duck. Not the DNC’s duck. It’s their duck and they do not want us to use the duck. Please stop using the fucking duck.

Only to Elaine could I say that I felt some responsibility for Seth Rich’s death. I didn’t bring him into the DNC, but I helped keep him there working on voting rights. With all I knew now about the Russians’ hacking, I could not help but wonder if they had played some part in his unsolved murder. Besides that, racial tensions were high that summer and I worried that he was murdered for being white on the wrong side of town. Elaine expressed her doubts about that, and I heard her. The FBI said that they did not see any Russian fingerprints there, but they promised to look into the case. I didn’t feel comfortable enough to ask more than that first question, but his death continued to tear me up inside.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings. I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer. When the party chooses the

The next morning, Monday, September 12, I snuck into the office through a back door. Reporters were camped out on the steps of the DNC. Journalist David Shuster had reported that a meeting on the future of Hillary’s candidacy was imminent, although I had not called one. When I got to my desk I found I was the most popular person in the Democratic Party.

While you’re laughing, the hackers are dropping malware into your system. They can also use voice mail if the phone system is integrated with the computer network. In the case of Cozy Bear, a voice purporting to be a female journalist left messages on DNC staffers’ phones asking for information on a story. While the listener was playing the message, she was unknowingly accepting malware.

We no longer used the DNC email system for important communications. Any sensitive phone calls took place via FaceTime audio, and we were advised not to talk freely while standing in front of a window.

Even the Hacker House team sensed the low mood of the DNC and wanted to do what they could to boost it. They wanted the staff to feel safer in their daily lives.

Chris discovered malware on Raider, the most important server in the whole system. Raider was the server that all the other servers backed up their data through. Any malicious entity that gained access to Raider essentially had the keys to our whole digital kingdom. When Chris discovered malware still running on it, the team was shocked. They thought Raider had been taken off the network when the DNC remediated the hacking, but there it was still trying to make connections to servers in a foreign country. With the discovery of malware on Raider, the team realized the scope of this attack might be much larger than predicted, placing the core of the DNC’s systems at risk. Heather flew to DC and worked alongside the Hacker House crew for the first time.

data. Tom was alarmed, fearing that in these crucial last days before the election the DNC system was giving campaigns false data.

Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the DNC on an allowance.

American democracy is backsliding in the twenty-first century. The root cause is the combination of three factors. First, political tribalism that enflames age-old cognitive biases. Second, brand-new social-media platforms that transform how people publish, consume, and process information. And third, long-entrenched structural deficiencies, like the two-party duopoly, that distort the US political system. The combination of these three components is a flywheel spinning faster and faster every day. Social media exacerbates tribalism by feeding users confirmatory and incendiary political news. The two-party political system compounds the resulting irrationality by pitting two juggernauts against each other in a bitter, all-consuming rivalry that stifles and deforms the marketplace of ideas. The polarized political debate, in turn, turbocharges over-stimulated tribal biases with partisan falsehoods (e.g., Trump colluded with Russia to hack the DNC’s email servers), gross caricatures (e.g., Hillary Clinton is a crooked felon), and abhorrent stupidities (e.g., Barack Obama was born in Kenya). And so the flywheel spins. This throbbing frenzy erodes respect for the Constitutional principles and essential traditions of American democracy examined in Part One—a respect that is necessary for them to function. Indeed, these principles and traditions aren’t laws of physics; they are rules for structuring society that require good faith, compromise, and broad consent to work. And they will eventually disintegrate if the American people continue to ignore them while fixating instead on short-term political battles.

When the Trump wing of the conservative media isn’t simply inventing something out of nothing—the murder “conspiracy” of the DNC staffer Seth Rich is a perfect example—it loves to take one bit of truth and abuse it into a much larger lie.

May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light joined in the battle for the soul of the nation.

The Clinton campaign wasn’t entirely surprised by the dumping of Podesta’s private e-mails. After the DNC e-mails were first leaked in July and posted on a website called DC Leaks, Democrats had done a forensic analysis of the documents to determine whether it was possible that any of them had come from a source other than the national committee. They had identified at least one that plausibly could have come from the personal e-mail accounts of either Podesta or longtime Hillary confidante Capricia Marshall. The day before the Podesta dump, DC Leaks published some of Marshall’s e-mails, none of which were particularly damning.

The DNC was right: an amazingly large segment of the population disliked and mistrusted Richard Nixon instinctively. What they did not acknowledge was that an amazingly large segment of the population also trusted him as their savior. “Nixonland” is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States.

When Kevn Kinney, DNC’s frontman, heard “Jealous Again” at sound check, he stopped dead in his tracks. “Where did THAT come from?” he asked, excitedly. “We just wrote it,” Chris said, proudly. “Wow. That’s a whole ’nother thing.

Since its founding in 1929, the DNC fought against every civil rights initiative proposed in the U.S. The Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction, provided the foot soldiers for the KKK, imposed segregation, perpetuated lynching throughout the country, imposed labor policies intended to hurt blacks, and fought against most of the civil rights acts of the 20th century.

In part because they had fought through the private-server scandal and the DNC hacks stories already, and in part because the Podesta e-mails didn’t all hit at once, it took a while for Clinton and her team to appreciate just how much damage WikiLeaks would do over the final four weeks of the campaign.

The day before this Saturday rollout, WikiLeaks had released a trove of damaging internal DNC e-mails that suggested anti-Bernie bias on the part of Wasserman Schultz and her aides. A cyberattacker going by the alias Guccifer 2.0, a name that would crop up again later in the campaign, claimed credit for swiping the e-mails and giving them to WikiLeaks. They had been published just before the Kaine event and a few days before the start of the party’s convention. It didn’t take a political pro to know that the leak was designed to sow dissent within the party just as Hillary was trying to bring Democrats together.

Though the VP rollout would generally garner good headlines, the choice of Kaine infuriated Bernie supporters who had hoped Sanders’s campaign would force Hillary into picking a more liberal running mate. Kaine, an early endorser of then senator Barack Obama in 2007 and later a chairman of the DNC and governor and senator from Virginia, reflected Hillary’s comfort with the business community and free trade. He had campaigned in Virginia as an opponent of abortion but had since made clear that he would support abortion rights in office. The movement of Hillary toward Kaine, and the inability of Bernie’s supporters to get everything they wanted in the party’s platform, did nothing to take the focus off Wasserman Schultz, who suddenly became the most visible and vulnerable target for their outrage.

Can't wait to see my parents! They died 20 years ago, but the DNC has the power to raise the dead.

On July 13, 2018, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment charging Russian military intelligence officers from the GRU with conspiring to hack into various U.S. computers used by the Clinton Campaign, DNC, DCCC, and other U.S. persons, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030 and 371 (Count One); committing identity theft and conspiring to commit money laundering in furtherance of that hacking conspiracy, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1028A and 1956(h) (Counts Two through Ten); and a separate conspiracy to hack into the computers of U.S. persons and entities responsible for the administration of the 2016 U.S. election, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030 and 371 (Count Eleven).

There is an old joke about a country lawyer who, when he was hired to defend a man accused of killing a family of four and their dog, produces a dog and denies everything. When the Trump wing of the conservative media isn’t simply inventing something out of nothing—the murder “conspiracy” of the DNC staffer Seth Rich is a perfect example—it loves to take one bit of truth and abuse it into a much larger lie. Some of this is merely silly and falls into the category of life imitating high school. But some has profound impact on domestic and foreign policy. When the Mueller Report was complete and did not find grounds sufficient to bring a charge of criminal conspiracy against the Trump campaign, it became for Trump “complete and total exoneration,” and he immediately renewed his demand for an investigation into the “conspiracy” against him. Conspiracies are dominant realities in the world Trump and his followers inhabit.

Comey’s unprecedented public condemnation of her handling of the server, the Russian cyberattacks on the DNC and Podesta’s e-mail account, and new voter ID laws suppressed support for her.

Almost as soon as I became interim chair I began to notice the ways that the Hillary campaign seemed not to respect the DNC and its staff. I had to beg the campaign to hire two buses to bring up the staff to Philadelphia to celebrate the nomination. Cheapskates. They were sitting on close to half a billion dollars.

Almost as soon as I became interim chair I began to notice the ways that the Hillary campaign seemed not to respect the DNC and its staff.

Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the DNC on an allowance.

Gary was not familiar with the way the DNC was governed, but he described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp.

We learned that David Kramer pleaded the Fifth on February 22, 2018, roughly three weeks after President Trump declassified the sensational House Intelligence Committee memo. This four-page-memo[227] reported that the uncorroborated Steele dossier — bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, augmented by Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal, moved along by Kramer and McCain (among others) — “formed an essential part” of the application the FBI and DOJ presented to the FISA court to gain authorization to spy, first, on the Trump campaign, and then the Trump presidency.

Long before the hacked DNC emails were published, the Obama administration was speculating—whether out of partisanship or predisposition about Trump—that the Republican nominee was in a corrupt conspiracy with Russia to sabotage the election. When the hacked DNC emails were published, Obama officials distorted Papadopoulos’s gossipy statements to an Australian diplomat—which the diplomat himself had initially dismissed as nonsense—into the formal rationalization for commencing a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that they had already been conducting.

That is to say, a month before WikiLeaks on July 22 began leaking thousands of hacked DNC emails to the press on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, the Clinton campaign–sponsored dossier reports had already framed the collusion narrative into which all subsequent developments would be fit.

Equally worrisome was the way Trump used information from Russian affiliated sites on the campaign trail. We didn’t think it was necessarily nefarious. He just amplified evidence to buttress a viewpoint, however wild or incredible, that he wanted to insert into the debate. But it troubled us that he was willing to use what amounted to Russian disinformation in pursuit of those ends. The information wasn’t coming from CNN or FOX. It was coming from places like RT and Sputnik. Outlets that were clearly closely affiliated with Russia. Similarly, we knew that WIKILEAKS had released material that the Russian government had stolen from the DNC and the Clinton campaign. By late summer 2016, the public did too, thanks to reports in the press. But Trump and his campaign, didn’t seem to care. The stolen material was helpful to them and he mentioned it, a lot. Over the course of 2016, Trump made reference to WIKILEAKS over 135 times on the campaign trail. From a counterintelligence perspective, it was problematic that a presidential candidate would use material stolen by a hostile foreign adversary for his own political gain. From a patriotic perspective, I wasn’t just worried about a candidate relying on actors outside the US to help his presidential prospects, I was repulsed.

Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders,” Trump tweeted on July 23. “Mock his heritage and much more. On-line from WikiLeakes [sic], really vicious. RIGGED.” The Russians had to be cheering. An American presidential nominee was using his massive media microphone to amplify their work. Score.

What does it take for a DNC delegate to retreat from the party of her childhood and embrace the pussy-grabber, Donald Trump? For Sarah, it took a firsthand glimpse at the corruption and dishonesty of Hillary Clinton and the DNC war machine.

They kissed. “Okay,” Dooney said. “Now pay attention. Evil number one, competition. Evil number two, government. So let’s say you’re a respectable, all-American robber baron; you’re sick and tired of all the save-the-water, save-the-whatever EPA types, IRS types, SEC types, DNC types, name your traitor. How can you be a robber baron if you can’t rob anybody?” “Got me,” said Cal. “Retire?” “Uh-uh,” said Dooney. “Think vertical. If you’re fed up with government, you hike up your trousers and throw your hat in the ring. You become the government. You go vertical. You install yourself right up there at the tippy-top of the pyramid. Corporations, Cal—they’re people. Law of the land. Therefore you nominate your corporation for president of the United Capitalist States of America, that’s what you do, you do an acquisition, you buy a subsidiary called the presidency, you install yourself as commander in chief—you install Amazon, you install PS&S and yours truly—because PS&S is a living, breathing, bona fide human being just like you and me and Jeff Bezos—human rights, legal rights—and, bingo, the IRS is your errand boy, the SEC is your own personal masseuse, the EPA is the groundskeeper on that golf course of yours down in Florida, and, hey, if you catch any flack, tough shit, you fire the whistleblower and hire somebody with the sense to do exactly what you want, what PS&S wants, what Amazon and the USA want. You make this country great again. Because you are this country. Because you are great. And if anybody thinks you’re not, fair enough, you buy yourself another subsidiary, you buy a Congress, so then it’s your Congress, the PS&S Congress, and you scare the shit out of anybody who thinks differently. That’s vertical. That’s king of the Monopoly board. That’s queen of Sheba. That’s why the Pilgrims showed up.