by Ben Rhodes
Just a few hours earlier, the director of the FBI—James Comey—had given a press conference in which he announced that he wouldn’t pursue charges against Clinton, but harshly criticized her use of a private email server. We’d gotten no heads-up that this announcement was coming. We were in a staff meeting in McDonough’s office when Comey came on television, and we watched in silence—nervous as he assailed her, then relieved when he said there’d be no charges. McDonough steered us back to the business at hand.
On the flight down to Charlotte, I had joined a lengthy conversation with Obama, Clinton, and Jake Sullivan about Syria policy. She sat and listened closely as Obama described the latest effort to negotiate some kind of cease-fire with the Russians—an effort that was likely to fail. I could see her turning the issue over in her head, absorbing the complexity of the different forces fighting on the ground, with the support of different foreign powers. The Middle East was going to be a difficult inheritance. But, as Obama liked to remind me, he’d be leaving his successor a healthy economy, an ISIL campaign on the road to success, and no American war in Syria.
While Obama launched into a ringing endorsement of Clinton in Charlotte, I was pacing backstage on a conference call with Jake and John Podesta about how the Democratic Party would handle the issue of trade generally, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) specifically, in the party platform. Clinton had tacked left because of Bernie in the primaries, disavowing an agreement she had helped to negotiate, but Obama wanted to get it through Congress. We agreed on a formula that welcomed differences of view in the party.
When the rally was over, our motorcade stopped off at a nearby barbecue joint. It was the kind of thing that Obama did at nearly every campaign stop in 2012—you do a rally, then you go to some local restaurant, order a bunch of food, and shake everyone’s hand. I sat in a black SUV outside the restaurant while Obama and Clinton went inside. A few minutes later, I saw Clinton come out and get into a car, and I figured we were leaving. Another thirty minutes or so went by before Obama came out. After we boarded the plane, he walked down the long hallway of Air Force One to where a few of us were clustered. “Did you guys see Hillary leave?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “she came out after a few minutes.”
His jacket was off and his sleeves rolled up; he had his campaign swagger, a looseness in his body language, like an athlete who’d just finished a game. “We went in, ordered some food, took pictures with the staff, and then she left,” he said. “I ended up shaking every hand in there. Most of the folks in these places have been watching Fox News and think I’m the Antichrist. But if you show up, shake their hand, and look them in the eye, it’s harder for them to turn you into a caricature. You might even pick up a few votes.”
We all stood there, not knowing what to say. Unspoken was the fact that everything was riding on this campaign, and yet he wasn’t the one running. Clinton had a lead, and she would have to make it stick. “Well,” he said, “go get some barbecue.” A pile of takeout bags awaited in the conference room.
A few weeks later, I flew up to Philadelphia with Obama for the Democratic convention. In 2008, I’d sat in the middle of a stadium of a hundred thousand people watching Obama speak; this time, I was standing on the stage as he spoke—running through the accomplishments of the last eight years, offering an endorsement of Clinton, and turning Trump’s slogan around: “America is already great. America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump.” I felt a tug of nostalgia. Obama was receding as a figure; soon he—and I—would exit the stage. At the end, Clinton walked out and the two of them stood there, arms around each other, an African American and a woman, waving to a roaring, diverse crowd. It was the opposite tableau from Trump’s angry and almost entirely white convention; it felt like a different country.
When they were done, I found myself in the small group of people backstage with them. After a few minutes of small talk, Obama left to go tape some ads, so I was left alone with Clinton in an empty hold room. Jake had asked me to give her some last-minute advice on her acceptance speech. “Remember,” I said, “that you’ll already have the audience in the room. They’re going to love whatever you say. That’s not who you’re talking to. You’re talking to the people at home.” She nodded, a smile on her face.
The conversation quickly turned to a recent trip I’d taken to Burma. She came alive, peppering me with questions. “How is Daw Suu?” she asked, using Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorific name. I gave a lengthy explanation of how she was adjusting to being a politician—balancing her quiet power struggle with the military, an ethnic reconciliation process, and a combustible situation in Rakhine State.
“She has to worry about the Chinese in all this, doesn’t she?” Clinton asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Especially with the Wa and the Kokang,” naming two obscure ethnic groups along the Chinese border. She nodded, intently. This was her greatest strength and her greatest challenge. Here we were, fifteen minutes after perhaps the high point of her political career, and she wanted to discuss the intricacies of Burma policy. She was kind, curious, and ready to be president, but she had less instinct for the mechanics of how to get there.
As the room slowly filled with people, I saw Obama and Bill Clinton off to the side, in an animated conversation about some recent political news. I felt a little awkward, monopolizing the most important person in the room. Obama shot me a few quizzical looks. Finally he came over and broke up the conversation. “What are you guys talking about?” he asked.
“Burma,” I said, and he looked at me as if I was crazy. He’d come to care a lot about Burma over the years, joining me in trying to prod that distant country in the right direction. A year later, when the Burmese military escalated a campaign to cleanse Rakhine State of the Rohingya, Hillary’s attention to the details of this distant land could have made a difference, but in this political moment, it didn’t. Ben, no one in Ohio cares about Burma.
* * *
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IT HARDLY CAME AS a surprise that the Russians hacked into the DNC. From my first day at work, I’d been told to assume that any unclassified email I sent, any nonsecure phone call I made, could be intercepted by the Russians. They’d already hacked into U.S. government servers. But just before the Democratic convention, Wikileaks dumped thousands of DNC emails into the public domain in an effort to sow discord within the Democratic Party. This was new, something of far greater scale and consequence than releasing intercepted phone calls in Ukraine. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had resigned as chair in the face of outrage from Bernie Sanders supporters who saw, in the emails, that she’d shown favoritism for the Clinton campaign.
The leaks continued throughout the summer, a steady release of the kind of gossipy emails designed to draw attention from the political press, popping up on platforms with names such as DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0. It was all painfully familiar, the same brand of disruption that the Russians pursued in Ukraine and across Europe. The Clinton campaign was already fingering the Russians, but when the White House and NSC press shops would ask what we could say about it publicly, we’d be given little running room by the intelligence community. It took us weeks to be authorized to say even that the FBI was investigating the DNC hack. On the subject of Russian complicity, we could only cite past statements by U.S. officials expressing concern about Russian hacking.
That summer, I noticed that Situation Room meetings were being held that weren’t marked on the calendar. It was the same pattern that prefaced the bin Laden raid—cabinet-level officials showing up for meetings that weren’t on the books. I knew enough not to ask questions. I hoped it was a sign of some special operation—maybe we were going to nab Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda, or Baghdadi, the leader of ISIL. Whatever it was, there was a premium being put on secrecy, and the group meeting was very small.
At the beginning of September, we flew to Ch
ina for the G20 summit, where Obama would have his final meeting with Putin before the election. They met in a large conference room. I sat on one side of the table with Obama, Susan Rice, and John Kerry. Putin sat on the other side, flanked by three stoic, fleshy men. There was always a charge when you were in the room with Obama and Putin, a sense that you were witnessing an exchange that the whole world would want to see. But whatever privileged access I might have felt was undercut by the difference in our positions. Obama would be gone in a few months, and I would disappear along with him. Putin wasn’t going anywhere.
The two of them debated the same topics that had driven us further apart over the past three years. On Ukraine, they had the same tense, legalistic debate that had characterized their every exchange since 2014. Implementation of a peace plan had stalled, and Putin blamed Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko. When Poroshenko opens his mouth, Putin said, he lies. On Syria, they discussed a cease-fire plan in which Russia would stop the bombardment of opposition areas and allow humanitarian access; in exchange, we’d separate out the opposition we supported from the al Qaeda affiliate, al Nusrah. Putin expressed support, but mocked the possibility of separating al Nusrah from the opposition. By trying to provide support to moderates without backing al Nusrah, he said smugly, we were trying to climb a spruce tree naked without scratching our ass.
Obama never lost his patience with Putin. As the meeting dragged on, I stared at him—a short man, with thin hair combed across his head, who always had the same half smirk and level gaze frozen on his face, whether he was telling a joke or getting angry. So many of the things that clouded our second term—Assad’s brutal war, the permanent crisis in Ukraine, Edward Snowden living in a Moscow apartment, relentless hacking—were tied directly to the decisions of this one man.
Rather than erupt in frustration, Obama piled up the logic. You should end the Syrian civil war, he told Putin, or else the jihadists are going to come after you, and you’re going to bleed more money and men in Syria. You should end the crisis in Ukraine and get out from under sanctions, because the next president is not going to be in a position to lift them. In response, Putin did what he’d done for years: He expressed an interest in cooperation, while his body language suggested no such interest. He’d priced out the consequences of his actions, and he didn’t care.
After about an hour, I was asked to leave the room, and Obama stayed behind with Susan Rice. Later, we all came together before Obama’s press conference, and went through the questions he was likely to get asked. Josh Earnest and I raised the issue of Russian hacking. Obama waved his Styrofoam teacup at us: “I know how I’m going to handle that,” he said. He and Susan looked at each other, and I realized this must have been one of the subjects that was covered when I was out of the room.
When he was asked about it in the press conference, Obama said, “I’m not going to comment on specific investigations that are still live and active. But I will tell you that we’ve had problems with cyber intrusions from Russia in the past, from other countries in the past. And, look, we’re moving into a new era here where a number of countries have significant capacities. And, frankly, we’ve got more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively.” The reference to offensive cyber capacity, I could tell, was a thinly veiled threat.
Shortly after we got back to Washington, I filed into the Oval Office for the regular morning briefing. Toward the end of his briefing, Jim Clapper said something about plans for a statement on Russia, and Obama encouraged him to move faster on it. Susan made eye contact with me, eyebrows arched, glasses down on her nose. After years, we’d learned to communicate with looks; this one meant that she wanted to talk with me after.
I followed her down the hall to her office, and she asked me to close the door. I sat down at the wooden table I’d sat at hundreds—if not thousands—of times over the last eight years. “Look, we’ve had a small group of principals meeting on Russia,” she said, referring to the kind of high-level working group that focuses on a particularly sensitive issue. “Denis didn’t want you to be involved because you are the one authorized to talk with Jake. For your own protection. And ours.” I stared hard at the books on her shelves. She went on to explain that we were trying to get Congress to put out a bipartisan statement on Russian meddling in the election, and then the intelligence community would put out its own.
“Do you want me to draft it?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “This is going to be an IC process. But we’ll need you to think through the questions we’ll get asked after.”
I walked downstairs to my office and sank into my chair. For eight years, I’d worked my way up to the place where I thought I’d always be in the room, and now I was being kept out of the most important conversation of all. My mind raced with a mix of self-pity and self-blame. Sure, the explanation Susan gave made sense, but my contacts with Jake Sullivan had all been authorized and limited to a few calls about TPP. I couldn’t help thinking that it was something else. Benghazi, maybe, or the New York Times Magazine debacle. Damaged goods—an easy Republican target. Someone who my closest colleagues had determined needed to be kept out of meetings about the thing we could all see playing out with our own eyes.
I went to each of our lead communications people to get help preparing the questions that we anticipated would come up after the intelligence community put out their statement. Jen Psaki, herself a target of Russian meddling. Josh Earnest, who’d gamely fielded questions on the issue for weeks. Ned Price, my deputy. The Q&A we prepared anticipated the questions we were going to get, and also reflected our own frustration at being on the outside of the process. Why didn’t you tell us earlier? Is Russia trying to help Trump win? What are you going to do in response?
The statement got held up for a couple of weeks for two reasons. First, an effort to secure a strong, bipartisan statement against Russian meddling from the congressional leadership met resistance from the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who pointedly refused to sign on. Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff—the ranking members on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees—were alarmed and incensed, and they put out their own statement on September 22: “Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election….We hope all Americans will stand together and reject the Russian effort.”
McConnell’s refusal was staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic in its disregard for a foreign adversary undermining our democracy. But the sad truth is that it wasn’t surprising in the context of the Republican Party of 2016, which had spent eight years disbanding norms and had circled the wagons behind a demagogue. Obama reflected this sense of exhaustion. “What else did you expect from McConnell?” he said. “He won’t even give us a hearing on Merrick Garland.” He was, after eight years, worn down by Republican obstructionism.
Second, there was a debate about who would sign the intelligence community statement. Not all of the leaders of the intelligence community wanted to be named, particularly Comey, which struck us as ironic, considering how talkative he’d been about the Clinton email investigation. Ultimately, Clapper stepped up and agreed to put it in his name, as the leader of the intelligence community. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, would attach his name as well, since he was responsible for defending the architecture of the U.S. election from cyberattack.
On October 7, the statement was finally ready for release. It was the most consequential public statement made on national security in my eight years of government that I had no role in preparing. Referring to the release of hacked documents, the statement said that the “thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process…only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” It was a Friday. Josh, Jen, and I asked Denis and Susan if anyone would be doing Sunday shows. The answer was
no—the statement would speak for itself. After Benghazi, there were rarely any volunteers to go on the shows. As with McConnell’s obstructionism, Republican attacks had worn people down and—perhaps—intimidated them.
The statement went out from the DNI. Ned was prepared to respond to incoming inquiries, working from talking points that hewed closely to the text of the statement. When asked about our response, we’d just say we had a variety of ways to impose consequences on Russia. Feeling like a supporting actor in this drama, I left at a reasonable hour that evening. As the gate of the White House clanged closed behind me, I looked down at my BlackBerry and saw a breaking news clip that there was a new Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. Our statement wouldn’t be the biggest news story of the day after all.
* * *
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ONE AFTERNOON THAT FALL, I went to the Brookings Institution to meet with a group that could qualify as the heart of the American foreign policy establishment. It was a regular session hosted by Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative. Around the table were columnists like Tom Friedman and David Ignatius, along with a host of experts. When we all sat down, they gave me a gift: a movie poster for The Blob, embracing the derisive moniker that I’d used in The New York Times Magazine. I chuckled gamely and rolled it up, settling in for a bruising hour.
One after the other, they launched into criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy, laying the blame for Ukraine, the catastrophe in Syria, Brexit, and the rise of China at his feet. This reached a crescendo when Leon Wieseltier, an editor at The New Republic and self-appointed moralist, launched into a diatribe in which he declared that Obama was the first American president in history to betray American values. I sat there seething. Wieseltier had been a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and did as much as anyone to offer an impression that the liberal intelligentsia supported the war in Iraq, a moral catastrophe that had betrayed American values. Iraq, a place where our bombs, not someone else’s, had killed children.
