Hacks : the inside story of the break-ins and breakdowns that put Donald Trump in the White House

Title:

Author:

Brazile, Donna, 1959- author.

ISBN:

9780316478519

Edition:

1st ed.

Physical Description:

xx, 268 pages ; 24 cm

General Note:

"November 2017"--Title page verso.

Includes index.

Contents:

The phone call -- Storm clouds -- From the back of the bus to center stage -- The Russians, the Russians, the Russians -- Picking the apples -- Trouble comes to the White House -- Gentlemen, let's put our dicks on the table -- Meeting at the FBI -- The duck and the spook -- The smell of a loss -- Bernie, I found the cancer but I won't kill the patient -- The collapse -- I am not Patsey the slave -- Hacker house -- October surprise -- The terror comes home -- State of denial -- Firefighters -- Comey's 18-wheeler -- Election night -- Grief and regret -- Epilogue : Choose hope, choose action -- Timeline of the hacking.

Personal Subject:

Brazile, Donna, 1959-

Clinton, Hillary Rodham.

Trump, Donald, 1946-

Corporate Subject:

Democratic National Committee (U.S.).

Subject Term:

Presidents -- United States -- Election -- 2016.

Elections -- Corrupt practices -- United States.

Computer crimes -- Russia (Federation).

Political campaigns -- United States -- History -- 21st century.

Summary:

"In June 2016, the Washington Post first reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee. Barely a month later, these cyber criminals--which the U.S. government later confirmed as Russian intelligence operatives--posted thousands of damaging emails online. These documents seemed to confirm Bernie Sanders supporters' belief that the DNC had become a tool of the Clinton campaign well before the convention. The hacking's fallout was swift and devastating, and the attack wasn't even over. As chaos threatened to consume the party, Democrats turned to a familiar figure to right the ship: Donna Brazile. Known to millions from her frequent TV appearances, Brazile was no stranger to high stakes and dirty opponents. The longtime Democratic strategist had a reputation in Washington as a one-stop shop for fixing sticky problems. What Brazile found at the DNC, however, was unlike anything she had experienced before--and much worse than is commonly known. The party was beset by infighting, scandal, and hubris, while reeling from a brazen and wholly unprecedented attempt by a foreign power to influence the presidential election. Plus, its nominee, Hillary Clinton, faced an opponent who broke every rule in the political playbook. Packed with never-before-reported revelations about what went down in 2016, Hacks is a campaign thriller with vital lessons for anyone who cares about free and fair elections. Only by laying bare the missteps, miscalculations, and crimes of 2016, Brazile contends, will Americans be able to salvage their democracy."--Dust jacket.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	324.9730932 BRA	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

In the fallout of the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was made to step down. To right the ship, the DNC turned to a legendary democratic hand: Donna Brazile. As chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 campaign, Brazile had a front-row seat to the wildest, craziest, and most disturbing presidential race in American history. She was called to take over a party riven by scandal and allegations of corruption, and then thrust into the international spotlight after the DNC email system was hacked by the Russians, a brazen and wholly unprecedented attempt by a foreign power to influence a presidential election.

Seeking to balance the interest of a bitterly divided party while waging war against the Trump Republicans, Brazile was often a lonely warrior. Equal parts campaign thriller, political memoir, and vision for the future of the Democratic Party, Brazile's book will be the first to take readers inside the inner workings 2016 election from someone who saw calamity befall her party - and the nation - first hand.

Among the book's many revelations:

· THE REPLACEMENT. After Hillary Clinton shocking fainting episode at the 9/11 commemoration and her subsequent effort to downplay serious health issues, Brazile came up with a plan to replace her with a "dream team" ticket.

· BERNIE PARANOIA WAS RIGHT. Bernie and his team were correct in their longstanding criticism of the DNC under Debbie Wasserman Schultz: the Clinton team had stacked the deck against them by staffing the DNC with Clinton loyalists.

· DRAMA OBAMA. Brazile was constantly stunned by the President's and his team's unwillingness to go all-in for HRC.

· CNN'S POLITICS-AS-ENTERTAINMENT WORLDVIEW. Inside the real story of Brazile's departure from CNN and Jeff Zucker's attempt to get her to lie in order to keep her job.

INSIDE THE CAMPAIGN DEBACLE: Clinton had the votes, but not the strategy to win. Brazile will explain how we had a candidate with a ghost haunting her that could not be shaken: her history as a presidential loser.

Author Notes

Donna Brazile has been a political operative since the age of nine, when she worked to elect a City Council candidate in her home town of New Orleans who had promised to build a playground in her neighborhood. The candidate won, the swing set was installed, and a lifelong passion for political progress was ignited. Since then, Ms. Brazile worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2000, culminating as Al Gore's campaign manager and becoming the first African-American ever to manage a presidential race. Apart from campaign work, she has been active at the highest levels of Democratic party leadership, previously serving as Vice Chair for Civic Engagement and Voter Participation at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and chair of the DNC's Voting Rights Institute. Ms. Brazile has received frequent recognition for her work throughout her public life. In August 2009, O, The Oprah Magazine chose Ms. Brazile as one of its 20 "remarkable visionaries" for the magazine's first-ever O Power List. In addition, she was named among the 100 Most Powerful Women by Washingtonian magazine, Top 50 Women in America by Essence magazine, and received the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's highest award for political achievement.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Former Democratic National Committee chair Brazile (Cooking with Grease) refuses to concede that, during her time at CNN, she aided Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign by leaking a question in advance of a town hall with Bernie Sanders; this omission tarnishes her self-serving insider account of the campaign. Although elsewhere Brazile has publicly stated she made a mistake, here she resists that being an admission of guilt and resorts to equivocation ("I still didn't recall sharing questions with Hillary's campaign"). That lack of transparency will lead to skepticism about some of her dramatic revelations-especially her assertion that she nearly chose someone else to replace Clinton as the party's candidate for president. Those surprised that the DNC chair holds such unilateral power will find their reaction validated when Brazile later states that she would have needed to consult with party leaders before making such a drastic decision. Her account of what happened after Clinton nearly fainted during a 9/11 memorial service amounts to a few hours of her internal debate, making clear that the entire episode has been overhyped. Odd sentences ("Women of Hillary's era, like Eleanor Holmes Norton, are thinkers") and inconsistencies only further diminish the value of what could have been a warts-and-all postmortem of one of the greatest political upsets in American history. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

The inside story of the 2016 presidential campaign, told by a once-powerful political operative pushed to the fringes of her own party.Brazile (Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics, 2004), the former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, is angry, and she wants everybody to know it. Ultimately, this supposedly fiery book, a tell-all chronicle of the election that gave us President Donald Trump, is more a tale of simmering resentment than a full-on bridge-burner. There aren't that many bombshells to be had, and they're often couched in rationales that don't always add up. Brazile inherited her role from Debbie Wasserman Schultz in an organization bleeding cash and failing to recognize its own dysfunction. "As I saw it, these three titanic egosBarack, Hillary and Debbiehad stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes," she writes. The author has plenty of targets, and she begins by slinging bile at Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and liaison Brandon Davis. Brazile's core argument is that the Clinton campaign exerted an unethical influence over campaign funds, pointing to an obscure fundraising agreement, but her case is thin. Less persuasive are her waffling explanations and a nonapology apology for those controversial debate questions. The author also displays disturbing naivet, particularly regarding WikiLeaks and the much-publicized Russian hacking of the DNCalthough the author does make a solid case for fighting back against this unprecedented interference. An undercurrent of paranoia, however valid, also undercuts the narrative as Brazile ponders the murder of Seth Rich and gets advice from an intelligence operative she only identifies as "The Spook." This is a portrait of a professional political operative marginalized and still suffering from wounds that have yet to heal. In a memoir replete with profanity, Brazile's post-election mindset might boil down to this: "You know, fuck 'em."A messy, self-serving rationalization of one of the biggest debacles in recent American political history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

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