2016 Democratic National Committee email leak

The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak is a collection of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails leaked to and subsequently published by WikiLeaks in July 2016. The collection included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the DNC, the governing body of the United States' Democratic Party. The leak includes emails from seven key DNC staff members, and date from January 2015 to May 2016. The leak prompted the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. According to reports in the Washington Post, Wasserman Schultz strongly resisted suggestions she resign, requiring a phone call from President Barack Obama to finally force her resignation.

WikiLeaks has not revealed its source. A hacker going by the handle "Guccifer 2.0" claims to be the source of the leaks. However, cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant, SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, have concluded the leak was part of the a series of cyberattacks on the DNC committed by two Russian intelligence groups. U.S. intelligence agencies agree, concluding with "high confidence" that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the DNC. The Russian government has denied involvement in the theft and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claimed that there was "no proof" that Russia was behind the attack.

On July 25, 2016, the FBI announced that it would investigate the hack. The same day, the DNC issued a formal apology to Bernie Sanders and his supporters, stating, "On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email," and that the emails did not reflect the DNC's "steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process."

Contents

The leak revealed information about the DNC's interactions with the media, Hillary and Bernie Sanders' campaigns, and financial contributions. It also includes personal information about the donors of the Democratic Party, including credit card and Social Security numbers, which could facilitate identity theft. In a tweet, WikiLeaks stated "Just to be clear. It isn't an error.".

Media

The emails include DNC staff's "off-the-record" correspondence with media personalities, including the reporters at CNN, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Bernie Sanders' campaign

In the emails, DNC staffers derided the Sanders campaign. The Washington Post reported: "Many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Basically all of these examples came late in the primary—after Hillary Clinton was clearly headed for victory—but they belie the national party committee's stated neutrality in the race even at that late stage."

In a May 2016 email chain, the DNC chief financial officer (CFO) Brad Marshall told the DNC chief executive officer, Amy Dacy, that someone should ask Sanders if he is an atheist. In another email, Wasserman Schultz said of Bernie Sanders, "He isn't going to be president."

In another email chain from May 2016, the DNC National Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach discussed a controversy that ensued in December 2016 when a Sanders staffer accessed the Clinton campaign's voter information on the NGP VAN database. (The party accused Sanders' campaign of impropriety, and briefly limited Sanders' campaign access to the database. The Sanders campaign at the time filed a suit against the DNC as a result but then immediately dropped it after an agreement was reached). Paustenbach suggested that the furor could be used to promote a "narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess." Paustenbach said that this could be advanced as one reason why Sanders' campaign failed: "It's not a DNC conspiracy, it's because they never had their act together." The Washington Post reported: "Paustenbach's suggestion, in that way, could be read as a defense of the committee rather than pushing negative information about Sanders. But this is still the committee pushing negative information about one of its candidates."

Debbie Wasserman Schultz's emails

One email chain from May 2016 indicates that the website RealClearPolitics changed the headline of one of its articles after objections were raised by DNC officials, with Wasserman Schultz writing that the "headline needs to be changed." The chain also includes emails in which Debbie Wasserman Schultz called Jeff Weaver, manager of Bernie Sanders' campaign, a "Damn liar," "an ASS," and "scummy."

In May 2016, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski called on Debbie Wasserman Schultz to step down over the DNC's bias against the Bernie Sanders campaign. Schultz was upset at the negative coverage of her actions in the media, and she emailed Chuck Todd that such coverage of her "must stop". Describing the coverage as the "LAST straw", she ordered the DNC's communications director to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski.

Financial and donor information

The New York Times wrote that the cache included "thousands of emails exchanged by Democratic officials and party fund-raisers, revealing in rarely seen detail the elaborate, ingratiating and often bluntly transactional exchanges necessary to harvest hundreds of millions of dollars from the party’s wealthy donor class. The emails capture a world where seating charts are arranged with dollar totals in mind, where a White House celebration of gay pride is a thinly disguised occasion for rewarding wealthy donors and where physical proximity to the president is the most precious of currencies." As is common in national politics, large party donors "were the subject of entire dossiers, as fund-raisers tried to gauge their interests, annoyances and passions."

In a series of email exchanges in April and May 2016, DNC fundraising staff discussed and compiled a list of people (mainly donors) who might be appointed to federal boards and commissions. Center for Responsive Politics senior fellow Bob Biersack noted that this is a longstanding practice in the United States: "Big donors have always risen to the top of lists for appointment to plum ambassadorships and other boards and commissions around the federal landscape." The White House denied that financial support for the party was connected to board appointments, saying: "Being a donor does not get you a role in this administration, nor does it preclude you from getting one. We’ve said this for many years now and there's nothing in the emails that have been released that contradicts that."

Tim Canova

Among the emails leaked, around 80 contained information on Tim Canova, Debbie Wasserman Schultz's primary election opponent. The emails tracked Canova's campaign movements, flagged positive news reports about his campaign, asked RealClearPolitics to remove Canova's name from a headline, and asked the head of the Alaska Democratic Party to do "some digging" on a pro-Bernie Sanders event in the state that Canova took part in. After the leak, Canova announced that his lawyers were filing a Federal Election Commission complaint against Wasserman Schultz for her possible violation of campaign finance laws, due to the DNC allegedly acting as an arm of Wasserman Schultz's campaign, and for improperly using DNC funds and resources.

Reactions

On July 18, 2016, an article by Fox News about hacker "Guccifer 2.0" reported that Russian press secretary Dmitry Peskov "denied Russian government involvement in the DNC hacking incident." Peskov called it "paranoid" and "absurd", saying: "We are again seeing these maniacal attempts to exploit the Russian theme in the US election campaign."

On July 24, 2016, Sanders urged Wasserman Schultz to resign following the leak and stated that he was "disappointed" by the leak, but that he was "not shocked." Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders' campaign manager, called for greater accountability in the DNC, calling Wasserman Schultz "a figure of disunity" within the Democratic Party. Later the same day, Wasserman Schultz resigned from her position as DNC Chairman, effective as of the end of the nominating convention. After Wasserman Schultz resigned, Sanders said that she had "made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party." On the following day, the DNC apologized to Bernie Sanders, his supporters, and the Democratic Party "for inexcusable remarks made over email."

In an interview with NPR, former DNC Chair and current Governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe said "... that the chair's job should be "to remain neutral." "I sat in that chair in 2004 trying to navigate all the different candidates we had. But if you had people in there who were trashing one of the candidates, I can tell you this, if I were still chairman they wouldn't be working there. I mean, that is just totally unacceptable behavior."

Anthony Zurcher, North America reporter for the BBC, commented that "the revelation that those in the heart of the Democratic establishment sought to undermine the anti-establishment Sanders is roughly on a par with [Casablanca character] police Capt Renault's professed shock that gambling was taking place in the Casablanca club he was raiding, as a waiter hands him his winnings."

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said that "Today's events show really what an uphill climb the Democrats are facing this week in unifying their party. Starting out the week by losing your party chairman over longstanding bitterness between factions is no way to keep something together."

Media coverage and public perception

The New York Times reported that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated in an interview on British ITV on 12 June 2016, that he hoped that the publication of the emails would "... harm Hillary Clinton's chances to win the presidency..." and that he had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention. In an interview with CNN, Assange would neither confirm nor deny who WikiLeaks' sources were; he claimed that his website "... might release "a lot more material" relevant to the US electoral campaign..."

Following the publication of the stolen emails, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden criticized WikiLeaks for its wholesale leakage of data, writing that "their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake." The Washington Post contrasted the difference between WikiLeaks' practices and Snowden's disclosure of information about NSA: while Snowden worked with journalists to vet documents (withholding some where it would endanger national security), WikiLeaks' "more radical" approach involves the dumping of "massive, searchable caches online with few—if any—apparent efforts to remove sensitive personal information."

On July 25, 2016, Anne Applebaum, columnist for the Washington Post, writes that “… with the exception of a few people on Twitter and a handful of print journalists, most of those covering this story, especially on television, are not interested in the nature of the hackers, and they are not asking why the Russians apparently chose to pass the emails on to WikiLeaks at this particular moment, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. They are focusing instead on the content of what were meant to be private emails …” She goes on to describe in detail other Russian destabilization campaigns in Eastern European countries.

"It is almost impossible to know for sure whether or not Russia is behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee's servers", says Russian security expert and investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov. According to him, the Russian government considers Clinton "a hater of Russia": "There is this mentality in Russia of being besieged; that it is always under attack from the United States. ... They are trying to interfere in our internal affairs so why not try to do the same thing to them?"

See also

• Democratic National Committee cyber attacks
• Hacker (computer security)