Marked confidential, “Donald Trump Report” was a sprawling catalogue of Trump’s perceived political vulnerabilities, recounting his privileged upbringing, his lawsuits and bankruptcies, affairs and broken marriages, vacillating party affiliations, crass comments about women, fierce verbal attacks on Muslims, penchant for falsehoods, and alleged racism. “One thing is clear about Donald Trump,” read the file’s first sentence. “There is only one person he has ever looked out for and that’s himself.”
To Democrats, all of this added up to a portrait of an ideal opponent, someone who by any conventional standard had to be considered unelectable. But damning as it was, the material laid out in the document was, for the most part, already widely known. If Democrats were hoarding any bombshells, they weren’t listed in the pages of its “Donald Trump Report.”
Guccifer 2.0’s message labored to divert suspicion from Russia. “Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee,” it said. The writer offered a brief account of his or her exploit, explaining that it involved breaching “mail boxes of a number of Democrats” and then exploiting the information to get “into committee servers.” The hacker claimed to have been inside the DNC network for more than a year and stolen “thousands of files and mails.”
In reality, Guccifer 2.0 was a GRU creation, an online persona operated by the same hackers who had rampaged through the DNC and DCCC networks. On June 22, one week after Guccifer 2.0’s debut, the Russian hackers behind this online puppet got a message from an eager ally in their unfolding operation against Clinton: WikiLeaks. The organization, determined not to watch from the sidelines, urged Guccifer 2.0 to send “any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing.” Weeks later, WikiLeaks was pleading again for access to the trove, saying, “if you have anything Hillary related we want it,” noting that the Democratic convention was rapidly approaching and unless the digital saboteurs intervened “she will solidify Bernie supporters behind her.”
THE UNITED STATES AND WIKILEAKS HAD BEEN IN A STATE OF OPEN hostility since the group in 2010 published half a million military records from Afghanistan and Iraq and approximately 250,000 diplomatic cables. That release triggered a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and indirectly led its Australian founder, Julian Assange, to seek asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London. Assange had been accused of sexual assault in Sweden and said he feared that if he was extradited there to face charges, he would be ultimately transferred to the United States, regardless of the outcome of any court proceeding in Sweden.
Yet while WikiLeaks professed to be concerned only with demolishing the wall of secrecy maintained by the powerful, its publication of confidential information—couched as a moral imperative—has been consistently amoral, with no concern for how such revelations might damage those whose names turned up in the material. Without notable regret they have publicly released a wealth of personal data belonging to people who have little to do with their larger political causes, including credit card numbers, medical records, and Social Security numbers.
Assange, who has hosted a talk show on RT, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, has made no effort to hide his own disdain for the United States or his relish at the prospect of its downfall. With “a faint smile,” he told The New Yorker in 2017 that the American empire might finally be collapsing. Although Assange denied that Russia was his source for the DNC emails, he has never much cared how he obtains what he publishes. “If it’s true information, we don’t care where it comes from,” he once said. “Let people fight with the truth, and when the bodies are cleared there will be bullets of truth everywhere.”[4] That disregard for sources was matched by an increasing affection for authoritarian leadership (including his own of WikiLeaks) that would eventually place him firmly in the pro-Trump camp.
After a series of failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents to WikiLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 sent the organization an email with an attachment—“wk dnc link1.txt.gpg.” It arrived on July 14 with instructions on how to unzip the trove. Four days later, WikiLeaks responded that it had accessed “the 1 Gb or so archive” and would begin publishing “this week.”
AVOIDING THE MAIN LOBBY AS A SECURITY PRECAUTION, DONALD Trump was escorted through a loading dock, into a freight elevator, and up to The Washington Post publisher’s suite on the ninth floor. As he made his way into a March 2016 meeting with the paper’s editorial board, the Republican candidate walked past historic plates of the Post’s front pages lining the walls. On them were headlines that marked Hitler’s rise to power, America’s plunge into World War II, and the U.S. blockade of Cuba as the Soviet Union sought to install nuclear weapons a hundred miles off the coast of the United States.
Trump had from the beginning faced profound doubts about his qualifications to handle such harrowing events. Even within his own party, there was concern that his disposition and ideas—backing torture, praising Putin, criticizing European allies—were themselves threats to international stability. As Trump took a seat in the Post conference room, overlooking Franklin Square Park in downtown Washington, he had two objectives: to quiet these doubts and introduce a credible foreign policy team.
The paper’s opinion writers had been told in advance by the campaign that if asked about foreign policy advisers, Trump would make news. When the question came at the outset of the interview, Trump feigned ignorance about this bit of stagecraft.
“Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names,” he said, turning to a piece of paper for this purpose. He proceeded to read a list that raised not a glimmer of recognition among the writers, some of whom had covered foreign policy for decades. Several participants would say later that Trump himself seemed unfamiliar with the individuals he introduced.
Of the five names that Trump listed, only one would actually end up working in his administration: retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, who had commanded the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and held a senior job with the Coalition Provisional Authority in postwar Iraq, would end up chief of staff on the National Security Council. Two others had fleeting associations with the campaign and résumés that raised eyebrows: Walid Phares had ties dating to the 1980s to militant Christian groups in Lebanon and anti-Islamic views; Joseph Schmitz had resigned as inspector general at the Pentagon amid allegations of obstructing investigations of political appointees.
The final names on Trump’s list were virtual unknowns.
“Carter Page, PhD,” Trump said, glancing at his list. “George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy.”
In fact, Page was a familiar figure to only one corner of the national security establishment in Washington: the FBI agents in charge of investigating Russian espionage.
THAT TRUMP FELT COMPELLED TO PRESENT THIS ROSTER WAS A reflection of the pressure brought by his surging candidacy but also the extraordinary isolation of his campaign. By March, Trump could no longer be dismissed as a long shot or a joke. He had stockpiled delegates with convincing victories in a string of primaries, and vanquished all but two opponents in the Republican field: U.S. senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas.
Both senators seemed incredulous to find themselves losing to a reality television star. “I will do whatever it takes, I will campaign as hard as it takes, I will stay in this race as long as it takes,” Rubio told a crowd of seven thousand supporters in Atlanta on February 27, 2016. “A con artist will never get control of this party.” Two weeks later, after Trump claimed a massive haul of delegates on Super Tuesday and captured Rubio’s home state of Florida, the chastened senator was done. Cruz soon bowed in defeat as well.
Yet many in Washington were not so ready to acquiesce. Candidates with momentum like Trump’s ordinarily exert a gravitational