Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House QUOTES

1 " 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. "

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

2 " 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. "

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

3 " 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. "

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

4 " Donald Trump is an extraordinary salesman. He knew how to exploit those grievances by deepening them instead of finding a way to address them. He put his supporters in this huge box, cut them off from the rest of the country, and said, “We are going to make America great again because everyone else but you has abandoned those American values. They have put other people’s interests before your interest, and I’m going to take care of you. I alone can fix it.” As I write this, we’re well into President Trump’s first year in office, and he has not been able to fix anything. "

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

5 " 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 "

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

6 " After CrowdStrike rebuilt the system, all of our staff had to learn new computers, new log-ins, new procedures, at the moment when their personal lives were being destroyed by these leaks. Then their bosses resigned because of the emails that were distributed by WikiLeaks, creating even more chaos and insecurity. All of this was on top of a contentious campaign. Our regular task force conference calls gave me a new appreciation of the dedication of our staff, who endured this incredibly stressful time. "

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

7 " 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; "

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

8 " This was part of the removed way that he and his team encountered the world, the very quality that Minyon had warned me about that she suspected might lead to friction developing between him and me. If I was strong and made my demands in a forceful way, he was likely to flee from me immediately and avoid me in the future. The young men that surrounded Robby Mook—and they were all men in his inner circle—had mastered a cool and removed style of politics. "

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

9 " Minyon said first I needed to talk to Gary Gensler. Again with the Gary Gensler. Who was Gary Gensler? Minyon assured me that I knew him. I’d worked with him on the platform committee. “Was he that bald guy with the big glasses who acts like he knows everything?” Minyon said the reason he acted like that was because he did know everything. Gary had been an undersecretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Obama. He had worked at Goldman Sachs before he got into politics. Not Goldman Sachs again! "

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

10 " Gary told me they were paying for CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity services out of the building fund, not paying it out of regular receipts, thereby depleting the rainy day fund. "

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

11 " I had scheduled an appearance on a Haitian AM radio station program, Morning Glory with Bishop Victor T. Curry. These Haitian stations play gospel and speak in Creole, but they do a lot of talking and some of it is about politics. The listeners are not millions of people, but the thousands that do listen have the radio turned on for hours every day. The radio brings the community together, and it costs very little to advertise there. When the bishop asked me when the campaign was going to start a dialogue with his audience, I knew what he meant by that. When were they going to spend a few hundred dollars in advertising there, which would encourage him to urge his followers to get out and vote? "

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

12 " 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. "

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

13 " My feeling of not wanting to leave mixed with my sense of urgency for the campaign. That mood in Brooklyn was one of self-satisfaction and inevitability. The polls were showing Hillary holding steady, between five and eight points ahead of Trump and with a clear path to 270 electoral college votes. The mood I was gathering on the ground, however, was much more restless. "

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

14 " Before I called Bernie I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call. "

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

15 " As I saw it, we had three Democratic parties: the party of Barack Obama, the party of Hillary Clinton, and this weak little vestige of a party led by Debbie that was doing a very poor job getting people who were not president elected. As I saw it, these three titanic egos—Barack, Hillary, and Debbie—had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes "

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

16 " 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 "

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

17 " 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. "

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

18 " The fact that the press could not get a straight explanation out of Hillary or her staff meant they turned to the next person on their list: me. I emailed advice to the campaign: “The media is going to run with the health narrative, "

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

19 " 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. "

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

20 " By evening the campaign had worked to craft a statement from her doctor saying she had allergies that made her cough and now she had pneumonia. Did that make sense? Allergies do not cause pneumonia. When you have two explanations, my gut always senses that one of them is a "

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