Hacks, chaos and doubt: Lessons from the 2016 election revisited

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The Washington Post

News, True Crime, Politics

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🗓️ 28 February 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2016, as the Democratic Party officially selected its nominee, then-candidate Donald Trump saw an opportunity to deepen the schisms that had emerged among Democrats.

Four years later, President Trump seems to be embracing a similar opportunity.

In tweets, at rallies and in interactions with the press, Trump has suggested that this year’s Democratic primary is rigged against Bernie Sanders.

Trump’s assertions about a flawed Democratic primary are just a piece of the story. He’s stoking divisions based in part on information Russia weaponized to highlight those divisions in the first place. And as we confront another election year, recent reports show Russia hopes to interfere again.

So, how is Trump strategizing for 2020 in light of recent news? And how are things different this time around, when a president with sizable power over intelligence and election security is seeking to win reelection himself?

In this episode of the “Can He Do That?” podcast, Washington Post campaign reporter Sean Sullivan and Laura Rosenberger, who leads the Alliance for Securing Democracy, reexamine what election interference looked like in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, and how the ghosts of that experience are reappearing today.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In late July of 2016, I was in Philadelphia.
0:03.8	I was there working with the Post's team at the Democratic National Convention,
0:07.6	where the Democratic Party would officially nominate Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.
0:12.8	Hillary Clinton has secured the number of delegates needed to win the Democratic Party nomination for President LeClaim.
0:20.3	Now, just before I arrived, major news broke.
0:23.3	On the eve of the Convention, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails from the DNC
0:27.9	appearing to show favoritism towards Hillary Clinton.
0:30.8	So the big question, could this create chaos on the Convention floor among Bernie Sanders supporters?
0:36.1	WikiLeaks released a trove of nearly 20,000 documents and emails from the Democratic National Committee.
0:42.2	Those materials were allegedly obtained by Russia as part of a larger effort to interfere in the US election.
0:47.5	Going into this, you already have a suspicion among a lot of supporters of Bernie Sanders.
0:54.5	The DNC and much of the party establishment in 2016 was not playing things fair.
1:00.5	Sanders had been picking up momentum later in the race,
1:03.5	and his supporters were concerned that a reluctance toward Sanders from the Democratic Party establishment
1:08.7	might somehow mean the primary would be rigged against him.
1:12.0	And then we see these emails.
1:14.4	Those emails and documents reveal the pretty embarrassing look inside the Democratic Party operations.
1:19.9	Though the emails didn't show evidence of a rigged process,
1:22.8	they did show moments of perceived reluctance from party leadership around Sanders momentum.
1:27.6	I mean, there was a whole bunch of material that was taken in the hacks.
1:32.6	Some of that material was more highlighted in the weaponized release through WikiLeaks than others.
1:39.1	And the kinds of things that were really highlighted were documents that were intended to create the impression
	...

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