When President Barack Obama won re-election to the Presidency in 2012, he won over 65 million votes representing 51.1 percent of American voters. The management team for that electoral success was the DNC. They not only represent the candidates, but once the candidates are selected the DNC is the principle agency for the grooming, funding, and support to meet the goals of the party. Now, all of their internal secrets were stolen.
The general understanding at the time was that the DNC could contain the damage resulting from the hack, and the DNC claimed that nothing had been pilfered.1
The general inner workings were relatively tame so long as they were not in the public domain. In June 2016, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz stated that,
The security of our system is critical to our operation and to the confidence of the campaigns and state parties we work with… When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is and reached out to CrowdStrike immediately. Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network.2
After the April hack had been discovered, the analytical study of what was stolen was compiled. Crowdstrike and DNC officials figured out very quickly that the attack was broad and that the hackers had access for as long as ninety or more days where they entered and exited the servers and reviewed and took what they pleased. However, there was an early indicator of the intent of the intrusion.
If an advocate of the Republican Party, a citizen hacktivist, or a malicious “Black Hat” hacker anarchist had perpetrated the intrusion, it would have been a much sloppier operation. Additionally, the perpetrators would likely have taken or destroyed the dossiers of every Republican Party candidate in a cyber version of a bonfire. Hacktivists love the anarchy of letting systems administrators know that they have been violated. On the other hand “White Hat” hackers, internet security specialists who often win contracts by illegally entering systems usually leave notes so they can be contacted and help fix security flaws. They generally let the administrators know by leaving “I told you that you were vulnerable” messages in high-value files. All of this would have been old hat for the DNC computer administrators and CrowdStrike protection analysts, but the target of this second hacking was peculiar. It ignored everything and everyone except one set of files: The opposition research folders on New York City billionaire Donald J. Trump. This 2016 intrusion could arguably be called Watergate 2.0, but unlike the original Watergate, this time the materials would be used in a political process to damaging effect.
Trump’s Revenge: Erasing Obama’s Presidency
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an annual spring event hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association. Sometimes referred to as “nerd prom,” the dinner brings journalists, politicians, and celebrities to the same room and is often criticized for fostering a cozy relationship between the media and the very people they are supposed to cover. The President usually delivers a humorous monologue that is then followed by a performance by a comedian. Donald Trump was a guest of The Washington Post at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
It was just a month before the dinner that Trump had become a leading voice in the so-called “birther movement,” raising the preposterous charge that President Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii as he claimed, but rather in Kenya. Trump publically and repeatedly called on President Obama to release his birth certificate. The New York Times wrote, “The more Mr. Trump questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Obama’s presidency, the better he performed in the early polls of the 2012 Republican field, springing from fifth place to a virtual tie for first.”3 Trump’s notoriety as a blustering TV showman using blunt, racially-tinged conspiracy theories was making him a rising star in conservative circles. These insults were not lost on the President, so Obama dedicated a notable portion of his 19-minute speech to making jabs at the New York businessman:
Donald Trump is here tonight. Now I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier—no one is prouder—to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter: Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac? But all kidding aside, obviously we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example—no seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around, but you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership, and so ultimately you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf, you fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled. Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House.4
After Obama’s remarks, comedian Seth Meyers didn’t let Trump off the hook. Many journalists noted Trump did not seem amused throughout the performance, particularly at Obama’s and Meyers’ insults. Roxanne Roberts, who sat next to Trump at the dinner, wrote in The Washington Post that Trump “didn’t crack a smile” at Meyers’ jabs. Meyers joked, “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican—which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.” He continued poking fun at Trump, as Roberts noted, “lobbing jokes like grenades.”5 Roberts wrote, “In retrospect, Trump broke the classic rule of political humor that says that the only response to a joke about you is to laugh harder than anyone else in the room. Whatever he was thinking, Trump looked unhappy and gave pundits a reason to pounce.”6 Trump only fueled the fire when he didn’t attend any after parties, and instead headed directly to his jet from the dinner.
The following day, Trump told Fox News that he “really understood what I was getting into” saying, “I didn’t know that I’d be virtually the sole focus. I guess when you’re leading in the polls that sort of thing tends to happen. But I was certainly in a certain way having a good time listening.”7
If he was listening, what he heard did not appear to please him the slightest. He attacked Meyers directly. “Seth Meyers has no talent,” Trump said in an interview with Michael Barbaro of The New York Times the day after the dinner. “He fell totally flat. In fact, I thought Seth’s delivery was so bad that he hurt himself.”8 He told Barbaro the evening was “like a roast of Donald Trump.” Still, Barbaro described him as “clearly reveling in the attention, if not the content.”9
In retrospect, the events of the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner may have at least partially motivated Trump to run in 2016. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns wrote, “That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world. And it captured the degree to which Mr. Trump’s campaign is driven by a deep yearning sometimes obscured by his bluster and bragging: a desire to be taken seriously.”10
Clearly stung by the dinner jokes, it would be natural to see how Trump might relish revenge. Harnessing the power of the conservative poll numbers running for President in 2016 would give him the power of dismantling Obama’s legacy himself.