Clinton Campaign Refused FBI Request for Computer Logs

Details, dates and motivations are everything when it comes decisions to cooperate with the FBI or not. Seems the powerbrokers in the Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn did not trust the FBI either but one department within the agency is different from another.

Image result for clinton campaign headquarters brooklyn Reuters Image result for clinton campaign headquarters brooklyn

FBI warned Clinton campaign last spring of cyberattack

Yahoo: The FBI warned the Clinton campaign that it was a target of a cyberattack last March, just weeks before the Democratic National Committee discovered it had been penetrated by hackers it now believes were working for Russian intelligence, two sources who have been briefed on the matter told Yahoo News.

In a meeting with senior officials at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters, FBI agents laid out concerns that cyberhackers had used so-called spear-phishing emails as part of an attempt to penetrate the campaign’s computers, the sources said. One of the sources said agents conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email addresses of senior campaign officials. But the campaign, through its lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request for sensitive personal and campaign information data was too broad and intrusive, the source said.

A second source who had been briefed on the matter and who confirmed the Brooklyn meeting said agents provided no specific information to the campaign about the identity of the cyberhackers or whether they were associated with a foreign government. The source said the campaign was already aware of attempts to penetrate its computers and had taken steps to thwart them, emphasizing that there is still no evidence that the campaign’s computers had actually been successfully penetrated.

Related reading: Also Hacked, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Related reading: Hey FBI, the Investigation into the DNC Hacking is Over Here

But the potential that the intruders were associated with a foreign government should have come as no surprise to the Clinton campaign, said several sources knowledgeable about the investigation. Chinese intelligence hackers were widely reported to have penetrated both the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008.

The Brooklyn warning also could raise new questions about why the campaign and the DNC didn’t take the matter more seriously. It came just four months after the DNC had also been contacted by FBI agents alerting its information technology specialists about a cyberattack on its computers, the sources told Yahoo News. As with the warning to the Clinton campaign, the FBI initially provided no details to the DNC.

As Yahoo News first reported this week, in early May a DNC consultant who was investigating Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s work for pro-Putin political figures in Ukraine alerted senior committee officials that she had been notified by Yahoo security that her personal email account had been targeted by “state-sponsored actors.” The DNC had already realized that it was the victim of a serious breach, but the red flag from the staffer prompted committee security officials to conclude for the first time that the suspected cyberhackers were likely associated with the Russian government.

By mid-May, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was telling reporters that US. Intelligence officials “already had some indications” of hacks into political campaigns that were likely linked to foreign governments and that “we’ll probably have more.”

In a talk at the Aspen Security Forum Thursday, Clapper said the U.S. government is not “quite ready yet” to “make a public call” on who was behind the cyberassault on the DNC, but he suggested one of “the usual suspects” is likely to blame. “We don’t know enough [yet] to … ascribe a motivation, regardless of who it may have been,” Clapper said.

Related reading: The Covert Russian Influence, Targets Europe/USA

Clapper’s comments come amid a mounting debate within the Obama administration about whether to publicly blame the Russian government for the cyberattack on the DNC. (A senior law enforcement official told Yahoo News that the Russians were “most probably” involved in the cyberattack, but cautioned that the investigation is ongoing.) On Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, wrote President Obama calling for a stern response, asserting that if the accounts of Russian involvement are true, “It would represent an unprecedented attempt to meddle in American domestic politics.”

But Clapper is reportedly among a number of U.S. intelligence officials who have resisted calls to publicly blame the Russians, viewing it as likely the kind of activity that most intelligence agencies engage in. “[I’m] taken aback a bit by … the hyperventilation over this,” Clapper said during his Aspen appearance, adding in a sarcastic tone, “I’m shocked somebody did some hacking. That’s never happened before.”

The confirmation that the campaign was warned by the FBI as early as March of an attempted breach of its computers is a further indication that the scope of the possible Russian attack may have been far wider and extensive than the official DNC accounts.

The FBI’s request to turn over internal computer logs and personal email information came at an awkward moment for the Clinton campaign, said the source, familiar with the campaign’s internal deliberations. At the time, the FBI was still actively and aggressively conducting a criminal investigation into whether Clinton had compromised national security secrets by sending classified emails through a private computer server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. There were already press reports, to date unconfirmed, that the investigation might have expanded to include dealings relating to the Clinton Foundation. Campaign officials had reason to fear that any production of campaign computer logs and personal email accounts could be used to further such a probe. At the Brooklyn meeting, FBI agents emphasized that the request for data was unrelated to the separate probe into Clinton’s email server. But after deliberating about the bureau’s request, and in light of the lack of details provided by the FBI and the absence of a subpoena, the Clinton campaign chose to turn down the bureau’s request, the source said.

Documents Recovered in Manbij in Northern Syria, FBI Warning

FBI director: The terrorism threat out of Syria is ‘an order of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen before’

BusinessInsider:As a number of ISIS attacks have rocked Europe, it can be difficult to remember that the group is largely on the back foot.

“They are on the run,”US Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview on CNN last week while addressing the spate of terror attacks by the group. “And I believe what we are seeing are the desperate actions of an entity that sees the noose closing around them.”

Through satellite photos and other data, it’s clear that the terror group has been steadily losing territory in its heartlands of Iraq and Syria.

Even now, major efforts are underway to reclaim Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control.

However, as ISIS does steadily lose ground through conventional warfare in the Middle East, the group’s attacks against civilians around the world will only likely increase — at least for the time being.

“At some point there is going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we’ve never seen before,” explained FBI Director James B. Comey at a cybersecurity conference at Fordham University on Wednesday, The New York Times reports. “Not all of the Islamic State killers are going to die on the battlefield.”

As the terror group’s territory shrinks, dedicated fighters within the group will travel to find new locations to conduct their operations — most likely in hiding. Comey continued by saying that many of these core fighters would migrate to Western Europe as ISIS loses ground. And there is always the risk that some of them would eventually reach the US. More here.

The intelligence community gathers evidence everyday from countless sources, but when actual documents from Islamic State have been retrieved, the threat level and investigations mount even higher.

US seize haul of 10,000 documents and 4.5 terabytes of information from ISIS fighters in Syria – including clues on ‘foreign fighters’ entering Europe 

US intelligence agents are studying files captured from ISIS in a bid to identify potential terrorists returning to the west. 

The cache includes some 10,000 documents and 4.5 terabytes of information containing the identities and countries of origin of the terror group’s fighters.

Also contained in the intelligence files are details of the routes used to smuggle terrorists in and out of the warzone.

The information was captured in Manbij in Northern Syria after the terror group was pushed back from the city.

Brett McGurk, President Obama’s special envoy confirmed the details of foreign fighters was being shared among coalition allies.

McGurk told the New York Times: ‘We want to make sure that all that information is disseminated in a coherent way among our coalition partners so that we can track the networks from the core and all the way to wherever the dots might connect, whether that is in Europe or in North Africa or Southeast Asia.’

Intelligence agents hope the information will help them identify ISIS terrorist cells while also providing details of the group’s finances and might even lead to military strikes against senior terror leaders.

It is estimated that almost 43,000 terrorists from 12 countries have at least attempted to go to Iraq and Syria.

McGurk added: ‘The operation in Manbij is about shutting down the main corridor from Raqqa and then out, in which some of the attackers that launched the Paris attacks we know traveled through that route. By shutting that down, you make it harder for them to kind of plan the larger-scale, kind of more coordinated attacks.’

However, despite the successful operation against ISIS in the city, the coalition has been criticized over an airstrike which killed innocent civilians on July 19.

Colonel Chris Garver said there was credible evidence to support the complaint.

Manbij is just south of the Turkish border and is used by ISIS to smuggle terrorists in and out of the country  Image result for Manbij isis Image result for Manbij isis Image result for Manbij isis

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians, including 11 children, died as they fled from a village near Manbij, a strategic waypoint between Turkey and the jihadist stronghold of Raqa.

A death toll of that magnitude would appear to be the worst in nearly two years of coalition air strikes against ISIS targets.

Garver said Wednesday that death estimates from residents near Manbij ranged from a low of ’10 to 15′ to a high of 73.

Garver had earlier accused ISIS of using civilians as ‘human shields’.

Coalition officials often say theirs is the most precise air campaign in history.

Nearly all coalition air strikes use guided munitions, involving laser or GPS systems, or else missiles. Targets are often viewed at length using surveillance drones before the order to attack is issued.

After the Manbij bombardment, Amnesty International urged the coalition to redouble its efforts to prevent civilian deaths and to investigate possible violations of international humanitarian law.

The London-based nongovernmental organization Airwars has estimated that the roughly 14,000 coalition bombing attacks since August 2014 have claimed at least 1,513 civilian lives.

The coalition has officially acknowledged only a few dozen civilian victims.

After the air strikes of July 19, the main Syrian opposition group, the Istanbul-based National Coalition, called on the US-led forces to suspend bombardments.

The group’s president, Anas al-Abdeh, said civilian casualties could heighten a sense of desperation among Syrians and provide a recruiting tool for extremist groups like ISIS.

Garver said last week that the jihadists had been mounting exceptionally fierce resistance in Manbij.

He added: ‘It’s a fight like we haven’t seen before. More detail, photos and videos here from DailyMail.

Hillary’s Dedication to Women/Girls but Ignores This

There is an organization that works to stop child-trafficking and performs investigations on predators and holds seminars on this topic called ERASE. Curiously however, not much has come out of government about it outside of the FBI and Hillary has never made mention of it.

For to listen to a podcast on this topic with a top FBI investigator:

also here:

A Call to Action: Ending ‘Sextortion’ in the Digital Age

Author: Thomson Reuters Foundation, Legal Momentum and Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLP

Throughout the world, those in power extort vulnerable women and girls by demanding sex, rather than money. “Sextortion” is a pervasive yet under-reported form of corruption involving sexual exploitation: judges demanding sex in exchange for visas or favorable custody decisions, landlords threatening to evict tenants unless they have sex with them, supervisors making job security contingent on sex, and principals conditioning student graduation on sex. Today the crime has become digital and cyber-sextortion is rapidly on the rise.

In 2015, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, in collaboration with the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), launched a guide: “Combating Sextortion: A Comparative Study of Laws to Prosecute Corruption Involving Sexual Exploitation.” The study outlined laws and practices relating to the crime in nine jurisdictions, spanning six continents. This new report was borne out of that research, and takes a more specific look at the United States and at how sextortion has evolved.

Despite increasing recognition from law enforcement agencies that sextortion exists and that it is indeed on the rise—the United States lacks adequate legal solutions to ensure justice for victims. This leaves women and young girls vulnerable at the hands of those willing to abuse their power, and—increasingly—online predators.

“A Call to Action: Ending ‘Sextortion’ in the Digital Age” shines a spotlight on the growing threat of sextortion, and highlights how easy it is to infiltrate computers to record and steal sexual imagery. The report calls for public education to help prevent sextortion and provides concrete examples of revisions to existing criminal statutes in order to combat this rapidly developing crime.

The report is an innovative collaboration between Legal Momentum and Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLP facilitated by TrustLaw, the global pro bono programme of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

We hope this study becomes a powerful tool to raise public awareness about sextortion, and to support legislators, advocates and citizens in the fight to end this shameful practice in the United States and beyond.

Read the report: A CALL TO ACTION: Ending “Sextortion” in the Digital Age, JULY 2016

FORWARD

Sextortion. A new word but a very old concept: it is a widespread form of

corruption in which sex, not money, is the currency of the bribe. The perpetrator

asks for sex instead of cash. Today the crime has become digital and cybersextortion

is spreading fast.

In 2015, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, in collaboration with the

International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), launched a guide:

“Combating Sextortion: A Comparative Study of Laws to Prosecute Corruption

Involving Sexual Exploitation.” The study outlines laws and practices relating

to the crime in nine jurisdictions, spanning six continents. This new report was

borne out of that research, and takes a more specific look at the United States

and at how sextortion has evolved.

Despite increasing recognition from law enforcement agencies that sextortion

exists and that it is indeed on the rise—the United States lacks adequate

legal solutions to ensure justice for victims. This leaves women and young

girls vulnerable at the hands of those willing to abuse their power, and—

increasingly—online predators.

In the United States, in fact, sextortion has proliferated in the digital age.

Traditionally, the crime was perpetrated by abusers who knew their victims, but

today perpetrators hack into personal computers and smart phones to obtain

private information (including sexual images) and then demand sex or more

sexual imagery. Many perpetrators have abused multiple, even hundreds, of

victims. Victims are powerless. When they have not complied, perpetrators have

released sexual images to the victims’ friends, family members, congregations,

teachers, co-workers, and the world at large, via the Internet.

Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by cyber-sextortion.

Predators exploit digitally-savvy children and teenagers, often by pretending

to be peers on social networking sites. Using false identities, offenders

manipulate children and teenagers to give them information or images that

the victims would not want friends, family or their school community to know

about. Predators then use these images to demand sex or more sexual images.

The whole report is here.

 

Obama: 16 Years of Progressivism, the Cover for Hillary

Things are never as they seem or as the rumors are told. It was never going to be a Biden Warren ticket according to Barack Obama, and the machinery is working that it wont be Trump Pence either. While there was a real hate and fractured relationship between Obama and Hillary, socialism, justice, rights and progressivism transcends relationships, hence the reason Bernie Sanders moved Hillary more to the left.

Below is quite a read and provides deep in sight into the operatives for which the Republicans may not be fully ready to combat. It is war, but a war that has millions of moving parts and thousands of people. This is actually terrifying and should be for the sake of voters and the future of America.

The summary below explains the FBI/DoJ decision on the email-server investigation, doesn’t it?

Stripes/CNN

Party of Two

Politico: How Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (with help from Elizabeth Warren) are trying to save the Democratic establishment.

Joe Biden wouldn’t take the hint, and Barack Obama wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer.

It was the fall of 2015, Donald Trump was rocketing up in the polls, Hillary Clinton was already wilting, and there was Obama’s vice president, occupying national center stage in an awkward public display of grief and political vacillation. Biden’s son Beau had died at age 46 that May, and the vice president was coping, it seemed, by throwing himself into a very open exploration of running against Clinton.

To Obama, this was a big, unwelcome problem. He had picked Biden for the ticket back in ’08 because he didn’t want him to run for president again, and besides, he honestly believed Biden would be crushed by a defeat he viewed as inevitable.

Still, this wasn’t personal for the president; it was business. Protecting his vulnerable accomplishments from the GOP wrecking ball and safeguarding his legacy have always been top priorities for Obama, and he had told friends as early as late 2014 that Clinton, for all her flaws, was “the only one” fit to succeed him. If Biden had come to him six months earlier—who knows? But it was much too late, and time to push Biden toward a graceful exit.

The choice was long understood by the president’s confidants. “My supposition always was that when the smoke cleared, he would be for Hillary,” David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign message guru and former White House adviser, told me. “It was just in the air, assumed.” Another former top Obama aide added, “After the 2014 midterms, when he could sense the end … it was like, ‘Who gives me the best chance to win?’”

One of the most important if hidden story lines of 2016 has been Obama’s effort to shape a race he’s not running in an anti-establishment environment he can no longer control. Over the past two years, he has worked quietly but inexorably on Clinton’s behalf, never mind the not-so-convincing line that he was waiting for the Democratic electorate to work its will. He has offered his former rival strategic advice, shared his top talent with her, bucked her up with cheery phone chats after her losses, even dispatched his top political adviser to calm the Clintons during their not-infrequent freakouts over the performance of their staff, according to one of the two dozen Democrats I interviewed for this story.

The one thing he wouldn’t do was endorse her before she cleared the field. And once, when things were darkest after Clinton’s devastating defeat to Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, Clinton’s staff urged him to break his pledge and rescue her—but his team refused, a senior Democrat told me.

Clinton’s view of Obama is more conflicted, people close to both politicians told me. She has repeatedly said, “I’m not running for Obama’s third term,” while taking pains to emphasize their differences on issues such as free trade and Syria. And she started the campaign committed to earning the nomination without his overt help.

But Clinton has been pulled closer to the president out of mutual self-interest and circumstance as the long primary season has worn on: Both Sanders’ unexpected success and Obama’s 80 percent-plus approval ratings with registered Democrats have forced the former secretary of state into a tighter embrace than she anticipated. Indeed, her campaign’s internal polling showed that one of the most effective attack lines against the socialist from Vermont was his 2011 remark that Obama’s moderate governing record was “weak” and a “disappointment” to progressives.

Clinton and Obama have something else in common: They both failed to anticipate seriously the rise of Trump. Early on, they were looking out for challenges from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Sanders on the left, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio as the most dangerous Republican in the field. But Trump’s ascent has only increased the urgency of the president’s last White House mission. “Mr. Trump will not be president,” Obama declared flatly back in February.

Obama’s ultimate goal in his final year has been strikingly ambitious, according to those I spoke with: not only blocking from office the birther who questioned his legitimacy as president, but preserving the Democratic Party’s hold over the presidency during an era of anti-establishment turbulence. Obama, always one to embrace a grand goal, talks in terms of creating “a 16-year era of progressive rule” to rival the achievements of Roosevelt-Truman and to reorient the country’s politics as a “Reagan of the left,” as one of his longtime White House advisers put it to me.

Which is why Obama first needed to stop Biden, and without seeming like he was trying to. As much as Obama loved him, Biden didn’t fit into the plan—especially when polls showed he would enter the race against Clinton with 20 percent of the Democratic vote.

So for most of last summer, Obama emphasized Biden’s weaknesses, gently jousting with him at their weekly lunches. He dispatched his de facto political director, Dave Simas, to Biden’s office to deliver a steady diet of polls showing a steep uphill climb, while a former Obama communications adviser presented Biden a plan that showed how tough it would be to attack Clinton, a woman Biden had previously praised in over-the-top terms. The most influential naysayer from the presidential orbit was David Plouffe, the disciplined brand manager and architect of Obama’s two White House campaign victories who remains Obama’s political emissary despite his day job on the board at Uber.

Eventually, Obama toughened his tone, telling Biden in a meeting that it was simply too late to run, a former White House aide told me.

But by the end of September, Biden still hadn’t gotten the message (though my sources insist he already was leaning toward no, at the advice of his still-grieving family), and Obama was getting itchy. Plouffe stepped up the pressure on his fellow Delawarean after months of gingerly trying but not succeeding to get Biden to step aside gently.

“Mr. Vice President, you have had a remarkable career, and it would be wrong to see it end in some hotel room in Iowa with you finishing third behind Bernie Sanders,” he said, according to a senior Democratic official briefed on the effort to ease Biden out of the race.

When Biden finally did tell Obama he wasn’t running, on the morning of October 21, the president comforted his veep—then sprinted into action like a man liberated. Within minutes, Obama ordered up a Rose Garden announcement—that same day. Although Obama saw it as a generous way to give his friend a chance to bow out on his own terms, several former White House staffers told me it also reflected Obama’s jitters; he wanted to lock in the decision before Biden had a chance to change his mind.

And with that, Obama and Clinton, rivals-turned-colleagues who had spent eight years perfecting the art of insider deals, assumed they had cleared their biggest hurdle in the Democratic primaries. But this was the 2016 election. Nothing would be easy.

In hindsight, of course, Biden’s departure didn’t end the threat to Clinton’s candidacy; it opened the way for a more disciplined and dangerous outsider to challenge her, a challenge made all the harder to recognize given that it came in the guise of a comically disheveled Vermont independent.

Biden himself signaled the problem at that awkward Rose Garden ceremony, sounding the very populist refrain that would soon bolster Sanders and rattle the best-laid plans of Obama and Clinton. Reflecting a party whose base has been racing left much faster than either the president or his designated successor had realized, Biden used his improvised speech that day—squinting into a low autumn sun as the boss stood nearby, arms folded—for a blunt discussion of all the progressive goals his boss had not achieved, calling for a reorientation of the party toward a simpler message of economic fairness. “We can’t sustain the current levels of economic inequality,” he said. “The political elite … the next president is going to have to take it on.”

A few blocks away, two unassuming barbarians at the gates were sitting in a bar across from the old Washington Post, after being stood up by a pair of reporters who had been diverted to the Biden announcement. Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver and strategist Tad Devine gnawed their sandwiches and watched Biden on a flat-screen TV above the liquor bottles, astonished as he hit virtually every element of their own insurgent platform: free public college tuition, a nonpartisan pitch to independents and blue-collar Republicans, a call for purging big money from politics.

“Holy shit,” Devine said. “That’s our message. That’s what we’re running on.”

Everyone seemed to get it. Except Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

***

As intuitive as their alliance now seems, there is simply no modern precedent for the 2016 Obama-Clinton political partnership. In the words of one staffer in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, the pairing represents “the historic merger of two historic candidates.”

Americans really don’t like dynastic politics, or the perception that the presidency can be handed off between cronies like a borrowed lawn mower. Just ask Jeb Bush, who learned the hard way that there wasn’t much of a White House market for a third member of his family. The popular perception that the vice presidency (or a top Cabinet position, for that matter) is a steppingstone to the big job is also myth demolished by fact.

Over the past 50 years, two-term presidents have routinely endorsed their vice presidents, and it’s been a mess. Dwight Eisenhower was deeply skeptical of Richard Nixon’s executive judgment and he demurred from issuing a formal endorsement even after Nixon had cleared the field in early 1960. Ike felt no great obligation to rush his decision, and Nixon, a magnet for slights and political side-eye, was bitter, as was his wont, until interred. “If you give me a week, I might think of something,” was the president’s answer when asked to tick off his vice president’s accomplishments. Eisenhower bit his lip and in March 1960 finally offered a stiff endorsement of his party’s nominee.

George H.W. Bush succeeded in winning the White House where other veeps had flopped, and like Clinton, he did so in part by incorporating key elements of his predecessor’s political team. But his relationship with Ronald Reagan was never especially close—Bush had savaged the boss’ tax-cut plan as “voodoo economics” in 1980—and by 1988, the Gipper was diminished politically after the humiliating Iran-Contra scandal and physically fading. Reagan’s endorsement in May, after Bush dispatched televangelist Pat Robertson in a sluggish primary, came almost as an afterthought during a fundraiser for Hill Republicans.

“I’m going to work as hard as I can to make Vice President George Bush the next president of the United States,” Reagan intoned. The Times noted that Reagan had somehow managed to mispronounce his understudy’s name, “as if it rhymed with ‘rush.’”

Bill Clinton, who vanquished Bush after just one term in 1992, was the only recent president emotionally and politically invested in electing his vice president, but Al Gore, fearing a backlash against Clinton’s sex scandals and keen on asserting his independence, famously snubbed the happy warrior’s offer to barnstorm in battleground states on his behalf. Many of the Democratic staffers who worked that campaign (including Tad Devine) believe Gore might have prevailed in the Electoral College had he embraced the boss—whose popularity ratings were a stratospheric 70 percent, post-impeachment.

Clinton, deeply hurt, has never entirely forgiven Gore, and later told his biographer Taylor Branch that Gore was living in “Neverland” to think he’d be a liability. When the two families appeared onstage together during an awkward endorsement event in August 2000, President Clinton had to pull Hillary into the frame with the Gores, the first lady looking less than thrilled amid the blizzard of confetti. She never forgot that moment, and has told people around her, time and again, that she didn’t intend to repeat Gore’s sin of pride. (The ambivalence is apparently mutual. As of mid-July, Gore was perhaps the only major Democratic figure yet to endorse Clinton.)

By comparison, her relationship with Obama has strengthened over the years, sealed by their shared White House experiences, like the tense deliberations over the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and Obama’s 2012 reelection, when Bill Clinton cast aside his resentments to deliver the capstone nomination speech in Charlotte, North Carolina.

They still make an unlikely pair, so friendly today that it’s hard sometimes to remember their 2008 primary campaign was one of the longest and most competitive in Democratic history, and that both sides accused the other of dirty tricks. The tone was set early when a prominent Clinton supporter in New Hampshire questioned whether Obama had really stopped using drugs at the young age he claimed in his memoir. When Clinton approached the then-Illinois senator on the tarmac of a D.C. airport to say she had nothing to do with the attack, Obama angrily accused her of planting stories about him in the press—including the claim that he was secretly a Muslim—and what previously had been a frosty détente devolved into a shouting match.

Clinton’s millions of primary votes, celebrated in her career-defining “Glass Ceiling” speech when she dropped out of the race in 2008, and her canny team-player approach as secretary of state secured her future leverage with Obama. Still, the early going was rough as Clinton pushed to carve out her own empire within the administration. The West Wing even tried to blackball two of her closest aides—communications adviser Philippe Reines and Capricia Marshall, a Clinton confidante tapped as director of protocol—until the secretary’s top aide, Cheryl Mills, personally wrangled a deal with Obama fixer and future White House chief of staff Denis McDonough.

Those battles seem like ancient history now. But Obama’s people still tend to have a Barack-first sense of loyalty. (One high-ranking current Clinton aide keeps a life-sized cardboard cutout of the 44th president in his office as a talisman.) And the old Hillaryland crewmembers (Mills, Marshall, Huma Abedin) remain ferociously pro-Hillary.

Over the years, the two staffs have inevitably melded into something the Republicans envy, though: a core team of 100 or so professionals who form the functioning heart of the national Democratic Party, working mostly in harness—a product of eight years in power and three campaigns’ worth of collaboration. These days, the big worry isn’t about division but excessive togetherness, a blurring of the lines between the presidency and the campaign (duly noted by the White House counsel’s office, which churns out advisories defining legal protocols for communication and coordination in keeping with the Hatch Act).

But it’s hard to police all the checkpoints, especially when friends on both sides are kibitzing in a bar or at a birthday party. And almost all the key players in Clinton’s Brooklyn high command have served time in both camps. John Podesta, the campaign chairman, was Bill Clinton’s last White House chief of staff, informally advised Hillary Clinton in 2008 and headed back to the White House in 2013 as Obama’s senior in-house strategist—with the caveat that he would hop back over to the Clintons the minute they set up the campaign. Campaign communications director Jen Palmieri, a former Podesta deputy, held the same job in the Obama White House. Clinton’s top strategist Joel Benenson was Obama’s pollster—and Clinton ad-maker Jim Margolis was part of Obama’s Chicago mafia.

Sometimes, it seems like family tree software would be useful: Take Brian Fallon, Clinton’s press secretary, who worked as Attorney General Eric Holder’s flack before joining the campaign, is married to Obama’s former legislative affairs director and interacts frequently with his West Wing counterpart Eric Schultz, a Clinton alum who preceded Fallon on Chuck Schumer’s Senate communications staff.

***

Planning for the campaign began in mid-2014, when Cheryl Mills began reaching out to potential Clinton staffers in the West Wing, while Clinton’s State Department aide-de-camp Jake Sullivan began putting together a compendium of policy options for the wonky would-be candidate.

A parallel effort to gear up for 2016 was emerging in the White House. Three years after eliminating his scandal-prone political office, Obama essentially reconstituted it under a new name and tapped a chipper veteran campaign organizer, Simas, to act as his point of contact with the campaigns.

The most important early meeting, in terms of both symbolism and synergy, was in late 2014, when Plouffe, acting with Obama’s blessing (and a mandate to report back), sat down with Clinton in her Washington mansion to map out his vision of her campaign.

Plouffe, a low-key, data-obsessed strategist who made his name as the architect of Obama’s two campaigns, had been one of the last anti-Clinton holdouts in 2008, and he was also the party’s most-respected electoral engineer. He was dispatched with Obama’s explicit intention to help “stand up” Clinton’s effort, according to a person involved in the planning. But he took to the Clinton cause with the zeal of the converted and would emerge over the following 18 months as a surprisingly hands-on campaign operative, coaching Clinton’s young staff during free time.

“Plouffe is everywhere. You can’t see him, but he’s everywhere,” a Clinton aide told me during the Iowa caucuses this winter.

At that first meeting with Clinton, Plouffe laid out a set of imperatives to deal with the shortcomings of her ’08 effort: She needed to assemble a first-rate analytics, targeting and data team; limit the freakouts and impulsive personnel changes; and hire (as well as empower) a steady, technically proficient campaign manager. He threw his support behind the leading candidate, a thirtysomething party stalwart named Robby Mook, who had run Terry McAuliffe’s successful campaign for Virginia governor. Clinton was already sold on a lower-drama campaign (even if she didn’t always practice what she preached).

But if her campaign organization started out on a more solid footing than in 2008, there remained a political problem on Clinton’s left that neither she nor her White House friends fully grasped. They didn’t anticipate the populist uprising that hit both parties, and missed the Sanders revolution until it was nearly too late, in part because they were so focused on eliminating what they saw as a far more dangerous threat on the left, Elizabeth Warren.

The 67-year-old former Harvard professor had long maintained that she wasn’t running, but no one in Brooklyn or the White House quite believed her. That concern spiked to panic in October, when Clinton lavishly praised Warren at a campaign event—“I love watching Elizabeth give it to those who deserve to get it”—only to get a cold shoulder from the senator, who barely acknowledged her presence.

So as Obama’s team was jockeying behind the scenes to maneuver Biden to the sidelines, Clinton’s aides were desperately doing all they could to keep Warren happy and prevent her from joining forces with Sanders.

Luckily for Clinton, Warren resisted Sanders’ entreaties, for months telling the senator and his staff she hadn’t made up her mind about which candidate she would support. For all her credibility on the left, Warren is more interested in influencing the granular Washington decisions of policymaking and presidential personnel—and in power politics. Warren’s favored modus operandi: leveraging her outsider popularity to gain influence on the issues she cares about, namely income inequality and financial services reform.

“Elizabeth is all about leverage, and she used it,” a top Warren ally told me. “The main thing, you know, is that she always thought Hillary was going to be the nominee, so that was where the leverage was.”

Warren, several people in her orbit say, never really came close to endorsing the man many progressives consider to be her ideological soulmate. She made a point of meeting with Sanders to hear his pitch and continued checking in. But she prioritized opening a channel to Clinton on policy. Warren’s personal relationship with Clinton was originally frosty (she was irked by Clinton’s support for a bankruptcy bill more than a decade earlier). And while the pair have never developed an easy rapport, they did develop a working relationship, thanks in part to their mutual friendship with a shared consultant, longtime Clinton hand Mandy Grunwald. In early 2015, Warren sent a major signal that she would ultimately endorse Clinton, telling a senior campaign aide, “I’m getting a lot of pressure to endorse Bernie, but I’m not going to do it.”

Clinton made it clear through those back channels that she planned to move in Warren’s direction on several key issues. Her first step: consulting Warren on a bill she had sponsored jointly with liberal Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin that would prevent private-sector executives from receiving big bonuses before heading into government service. Clinton endorsed the measure months later than Sanders did, but Warren told a friend that she was satisfied with Clinton’s “progress” on the issue and hoped to keep pulling her in the right direction.

Here was a textbook example of Warren’s chess-game approach: The bill, which never had a chance of passing the GOP-controlled Senate, was partly intended to handcuff Clinton if she was elected, weeding out many top finance executives who demanded big payouts before entering the public sector.

Warren made her agenda plain to Clinton when she earned her own tea-and-tactics invitation to Clinton’s Washington home in December 2014—a stilted meeting that left Clinton annoyed and put upon, according to one top Democrat. Warren was in a feisty frame of mind, and had just announced her opposition to the appointment of Lazard banker Antonio Weiss to a top Treasury post. West Wing staffers were infuriated by her decision, but Clinton, differentiating herself from Obama’s team, was more receptive. And when Warren pointedly pressed Clinton not to appoint Wall Street-friendly officials, Clinton didn’t appreciate the full-court press, but she signaled her general agreement, according to a person in Clinton’s inner circle. It was hardly a coincidence that, that spring, she named a key Warren ally, Gary Gensler, a former federal regulator loved by the left for his clashes with Obama’s Treasury Department, as her campaign’s chief financial officer.

None of this was quite enough to push Warren into an early endorsement. Support for that position came from an unexpected quarter: In an early 2015 conversation, Biden counseled the Massachusetts senator to hold off on endorsing Clinton until after the primary, according to a Democrat briefed on the interaction.

Ultimately, it was Donald Trump who brought the two women politicians closer together. Warren (“Pocahontas” in Trump-speak) detests the GOP candidate on a deeply personal level as a racist and sexist. And even though she harbored doubts about Clinton’s ideology, Warren viewed the former secretary of state as a fighter, and opined to friends that Clinton would make a tougher-minded negotiator on all kinds of deals than the comparatively easygoing Obama.

By late spring, Warren and Clinton were talking on the phone from time to time, lamenting the timidity of Democrats still reluctant to bash Trump and agreeing on the gut-punch approach Warren would soon use in a series of Facebook posts that garnered millions of views. (Clinton and her team were especially tickled by Warren’s description of the GOP nominee as “a small, insecure moneygrubber who doesn’t care about anyone or anything that doesn’t have the Trump name splashed all over it,” I was told.)

 

Warren’s effectiveness as a punch-thrower played a critical role in the Clinton campaign’s late-May pivot away from fighting Sanders to taking on Trump directly. Warren wasn’t initially a serious candidate for a vice-presidential slot, people close to Clinton told me. But her late-in-the-game performance has changed that, and she warmed to the idea after initially viewing it as just another leveraging tool, according to senior Democrats.

Mutual self-interest as much as anything dictated it. Clinton admired Obama’s team, but she was still convinced that in 2008 he had benefited from unfair advantages like a cheerleading press and undemocratic small-state caucus system that slighted her strength among big-state Democrats. “It was important for her to do this on her own,” one top 2008 Clinton adviser told me.

But the president’s team had little doubt on substance—even if timing was an issue. Plouffe, in particular, was determined to preserve the tarnished ’08 hope-and-change brand, and he and Obama shared the opinion that Sanders simply didn’t have the bandwidth or willingness to compromise his job required. (When I asked Obama in January whether the 74-year-old senator reminded him of himself in 2008, the president quickly shot me down: “I don’t think that’s true”).

Still, Sanders’ direct call for a revolution had chastened Obama, and he was intent on keeping to the no-endorsement deal. Clinton’s team had no problem with that—until her lackluster Iowa and New Hampshire performances, which induced a collective anxiety attack among some of her team in Brooklyn.

In mid-February, three officials with direct knowledge told me, Podesta approached Plouffe and McDonough to float an idea: If Clinton somehow managed to lose the upcoming Nevada caucuses, which had been unthinkable weeks earlier, would Obama offer his endorsement to stop Sanders’ momentum? It was clearly an act of desperation—“a break-glass and push-the-panic-button moment,” in the words of a Democrat close to the situation—and Obama’s team quickly vetoed it. Plouffe said the endorsement wouldn’t help—in fact, he said, it would be “counterproductive”—prompting a backlash that would swamp both the president and his chosen successor. Podesta, a four-decade veteran of campaigns and White Houses, wasn’t pleased, but he conceded the point; it’s not clear if Clinton or Obama even knew about the idea at the time, several aides told me.

The question turned out to be moot; Clinton won a 5-point victory in Nevada and established a pattern of solid performances in diverse big states (with Sanders winning in mostly white states, caucuses and open primaries where independents could vote).

The White House did have a counter-offer: Obama would consider making an early announcement if Clinton wrapped things up during the March 15 primaries. But that deal died when Sanders won Michigan unexpectedly on March 8, upending the race.

***

As clear-eyed as Obama has been about Clinton, some campaign-season friction has been inevitable. The arrangement is inherently schizophrenic: Clinton’s team wants Obama’s support when they need it most, while demanding the latitude to break with him whenever they need to get out of a political corner. On some issues, it hasn’t mattered much. Sources told me Obama waved off Clinton’s more hawkish stance on intervention in Syria (she has suggested supporting a no-fly zone, something he has rejected), and that he didn’t much mind when she vowed in Iowa last October to “go beyond President Obama” in pursuing immigration reform.

But he’s been deeply frustrated by her machinations on free trade, an issue he views as the final big-ticket legislative priority of his presidency. And he expressed anger over Clinton’s tortured decision to reverse her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. At the time, he told one visitor to the Oval Office that he viewed it not only as bad policy but “bad politics,” because it would reinforce the impression, pushed by Sanders, that Clinton was an opportunistic flip-flopper.

The flashpoint came in June 2015, when Clinton told Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston that she would have voted against “fast-track” authority for the trade deal—the very procedural tool Obama was hoping to use to hammer through the deal against a growing populist backlash. Obama’s complaint was that Clinton, who was speaking off the cuff, hadn’t given him a heads-up before trumpeting such a major break with him on policy. The president was furious and—as polite principals do when they don’t want to berate other principals directly—he transmitted his displeasure to McDonough for broadcast to Hillaryland. The man tasked with blunting that anger was none other than Podesta, McDonough’s longtime jogging partner, the man who had hired him at the liberal Center for American Progress and McDonough’s tutor in the use of executive power in the West Wing.

Still, Obama and his team kept their eyes on the bigger prize—Clinton’s election—and sweated right alongside her team when she swooned in January and February. Obama, who boasted about not watching the debates to stick with TV hoops, never lost confidence in Clinton. But no one better knew her weaknesses, and he watched Sanders’ rise with alarm and a tinge of admiration for the septuagenarian’s out-of-nowhere challenge to the system. The shocker came in late January, one senior Democrat told me, when Simas offered him a readout of internal Democratic polling showing Clinton in serious trouble. “She could actually lose this thing,” Simas said.

There wasn’t a lot the White House could do at that point. But Plouffe, acting in his dual role as an Obama operative and shadow strategist, developed a close mentoring relationship with Mook, whom he viewed as a clear-headed team builder. During the Iowa caucuses, Plouffe, who had helped implement Obama’s innovative voter targeting there, was talking to Mook several times a day, offering tactical advice and encouragement, according to people close to the campaign. And he counseled his protégé to make what would turn out to be one of the campaign’s best hires: Obama veteran Jeff Berman to quarterback Clinton’s delegate operation.

Plouffe wasn’t the only one working the phones. Obama, according to aides, also dialed through to Clinton on several occasions to offer encouragement and a little heartfelt if obvious advice. “Loosen up and be yourself,” he told her during one long post-New Hampshire call, counseling Clinton to ditch the laundry-list speeches and mix in “some poetry with the prose,” in the words of one aide.

***

If Obama’s early commitment to Clinton had any downside, it was the sense of inevitability, of complacency, that it fostered, the notion that anybody could control a process that was rapidly being taken over by outsiders and insurgents. “We caught them flat-footed,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told me.

And it was true: Both Clintons had initially dismissed Sanders’ candidacy as a long shot. “He’s a socialist!” she had said incredulously when someone in late 2015 suggested that Sanders’ message was taking root. And while Clinton herself would point the finger at her pollsters and consultants for failing to anticipate his rise until last December, the fault ultimately lay with a candidate who later told me she preferred to deliver long, policy-packed speeches to pithier calls to battle.

Sanders, who vaulted from less than 3 percent in national polls in early 2015 to a dead-heat by April 2016, turned out to be Clinton’s equal in debates, exposing all the flaws that had dogged Clinton as a candidate eight years earlier—the wooden delivery, the deliberative poll-tested position papers, the focus on incremental progress—when her opponent was electrifying crowds with promises of seismic (if hard-to-implement) change.

But the key thing both Obama and Clinton missed was that responsible liberal governance connected to economic elites—the essence of their partnership—had simply faded from fashion. In their early, scrupulously civil debates, both Sanders and Clinton repeatedly emphasized how similar their stances on major issues were. But as he caught fire—and Clinton shifted on issues like Social Security, trade and Wall Street regulation to meet his challenge—Sanders shifted to a broader, more incendiary anti-establishment argument that focused on what Clinton represented as opposed to the positions she adopted.

And what really sustained him was his positive message of generational change, liberally borrowed from Obama’s 2008 campaign, and broadcast to his faithful through a series of iPhone-friendly videos. Sanders continued to emphasize policy disagreements, especially on foreign affairs, but what drew the 15,000-student crowds were his shout-himself-hoarse denunciations of Clinton’s connections to financial elites; his repeated attack on her six-figure Goldman Sachs speaking fees was the most effective attack line of the campaign, his advisers say.

“They are a historic pair, and they have a lot of power when they work together,” argues a top Sanders ally. “But if they want to motivate the party, if they want to beat Donald Trump, if they want to excite voters, they need to get into Bernie’s space—and fast.”

 

Still, it’s possible to over-learn the lessons of Sanders’ success. As senior Clinton advisers rightly point out—except for the February scare and an unexpected loss a month later in Michigan—Clinton won the overall primary season convincingly, with 55 percent of the vote, a bigger lead in pledged delegates than Obama ever enjoyed in ’08 and 3.5 million more votes than Sanders.

Besides, predictions that Sanders voters wouldn’t unite around Clinton haven’t, so far, proven any more accurate than predictions that Clinton voters wouldn’t vote for Obama. Ahead of the Philadelphia convention, only about 8 percent of Sanders supporters said they’d back Trump in the general election, according to a June Washington Post-ABC News poll—compared with 20 percent of Clinton supporters who planned to vote for Republican John McCain in 2008. By contrast, recent surveys have shown 70 percent of Ted Cruz voters have negative views of Trump.

Exit polls for the early 2016 primaries tell an even starker story about the relative health of the parties heading into the fall. A majority of Republicans said they felt “betrayed” by their party—the rage that fueled Trump’s candidacy—compared with less than a quarter of Democrats who shared that sentiment. “The biggest misnomer of the campaign is that everybody’s pissed off,” Clinton strategist Benenson told me in March. “The truth is that Republicans are way, way more angry than Democrats. And Democrats love Obama.”

***

The party does seem to be uniting, as Sanders’ awkward but emphatic enough endorsement of Clinton in early July proved. But the protracted, weeks-long three-way negotiations among Clinton’s, Obama’s and Sanders’ political teams over the Democratic Party’s platform showed something: that the Clinton-Obama table for two may need a new place setting.

Sanders, who took a long time to accept the reality of his primary defeat personally, squandered some of his leverage. But in the end, the Clinton camp was eager to give him almost everything he asked for in the Democratic platform by agreeing to embrace a new proposal to subsidize public college tuition, a public option for Obamacare and a break-up-the-banks plank.

The final hurdle to kumbaya was a deal that embittered, or at least annoyed, all three parties.

Obama, knowing Clinton and Sanders had bucked him on free trade, lobbied hard to shoot down an anti-Trans-Pacific Partnership provision in the platform during a series of party meetings in Orlando in early July. The uncompromising Vermont revolutionary would have to compromise—and he did—by accepting the pro-TPP plank debated during the Orlando meetings. When the deal was done, Sanders called his team from his house in Vermont and declared, in his matter-of-fact, ordering-at-a-diner voice, “Well, we just created the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.” And then he said goodbye and hung up.

Yet until the very last moment, Clinton’s jittery team couldn’t quite believe Sanders was really on board, seizing on a rumor that he was boarding a plane to Florida to blow up the final agreement.

Never mind that everyone on the Sanders campaign laughed it off. The calls from Brooklyn kept coming—“We’re hearing he’s on the plane right now!” —until one close aide to the senator bellowed into his phone, “Godammit, Bernie’s in Burlington, and he’s staying in Burlington!”

The senator was good to his word. The next time Clinton’s team saw Sanders, he was sharing a stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with his party’s presumptive nominee—and declaring himself a loyal Democrat in Clinton’s anti-Trump crusade.

 

 

 

 

Also Hacked, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Exclusive: FBI investigates hacking of Democratic congressional group – sources

 

Reuters: The FBI is investigating a cyber intrusion against a major Democratic Party congressional fundraising group, an attack that may be related to an earlier hack against the party apparatus, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The previously unreported incident at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, and its potential ties to Russian hackers are likely to sharpen concern, so far unproven, that Moscow is attempting to meddle in U.S. elections.

Hacking of the party’s emails has clouded this week’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia, where Hillary Clinton was scheduled to accept the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday evening.

The breach at the DCCC may have been intended to gather information about donors, rather than to steal money, the sources said on Thursday.

The DCCC raises money for Democrats running for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The intrusion at the group could have begun as recently as June, two of the sources told Reuters.

That was when a bogus website was registered with a name closely resembling that of a main donation site connected to the DCCC. For some time, internet traffic associated with donations that was supposed to go to a company that processes campaign donations instead went to the bogus site, two sources said.

The sources said the Internet Protocol address of the spurious site resembled one used by a Russian government-linked hacking group, one of two such groups suspected in a recently revealed breach of the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, the nationwide strategy-setting and money-raising body for the Democratic Party.

Cyber security experts and U.S. officials said on Monday there was evidence that Russia engineered the DNC hack to release sensitive party emails in order to influence the U.S. presidential election.

The release of the emails by activist group WikiLeaks on the weekend caused discord in the party because they appeared to show favoritism within the DNC for Clinton over U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran a close race for the nomination for the Nov. 8 election.

The DNC, targeted by hackers earlier this year, and the DCCC share the same office space on South Capitol Street in Washington.

The DCCC had no immediate comment on Thursday. Donation processing company ActBlue also had no immediate comment. CrowdStrike, the California-based cyber security firm that investigated the DNC breach, declined to comment.

GREAT CONCERN

Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist who once worked for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, said the possibility of the DCCC being hacked was cause for great concern.

“Until proven otherwise, I would suggest that everyone involved with the campaign committee operate under the assumption Russians have access to everything in their computer systems,” Manley said.

The FBI referred questions to a statement it made on Monday on the DNC hack:

“The FBI is investigating a cyber intrusion involving the DNC and are working to determine the nature and scope of the matter. A compromise of this nature is something we take very seriously, and the FBI will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace.”

The disclosure of the DCCC breach is likely to further stoke concerns among Democratic Party operatives, many of whom have acknowledged they fear further dumps of hacked files that could harm their candidates. WikiLeaks has said it has more material related to the U.S. election that it intends to release.

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned after the leaked emails last weekend showed party leaders favoring Clinton over Sanders. The committee is supposed to be neutral.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Thursday the U.S. intelligence community was not ready to “make the call on attribution” as to who was responsible for the DNC hack. The White House said earlier the FBI had not disclosed any information about who was behind the hack.

Clapper, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, acknowledged that “there’s just a few usual suspects out there” who might be responsible for the cyber intrusion, suggesting it was the work of a state actor rather than an independent hacking group.

Clapper said in May he was aware of attempted hacks on campaigns and related groups and he expected to see more as the November election neared. The last two U.S. presidential cycles in 2008 and 2012 witnessed a barrage of cyber attacks from a range of adversaries targeting President Barack Obama’s campaign and the campaigns of his Republican foes, officials have said.

Russian officials have dismissed the allegations of Moscow’s involvement in such hacks. “It is so absurd it borders on total stupidity,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, angered Democrats this week by inviting Russia to unearth tens of thousands of emails from rival Clinton’s tenure as U.S. secretary of state. Trump said on Thursday he was being sarcastic in his remarks.