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 pull on the powerful in their parties, attracting donors and would-be advisers eager to position themselves for influence with, or jobs in, a new administration. With Trump, however, the inverse was happening: the closer he got to securing the nomination, the more determined many of the most experienced and respected policymakers affiliated with his party were to reject him.
On March 2, as the dust from Super Tuesday was still settling, a collection of 122 self-described GOP national security leaders published a letter online vowing “to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.” The missive was signed by a roster of Republican loyalists, some of whom had held senior positions in government, others regarded as influential advisers and columnists. The petition was drafted by Eliot Cohen, who had served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the George W. Bush administration. Other signatories included Michael Chertoff, former head of Homeland Security, and Dov Zakheim, who had held senior positions at the Pentagon.
The letter excoriated Trump, saying that his views were so “unmoored” that he veered from “isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.” His support for resuming the use of torture on terror suspects was “inexcusable,” and his “hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric” needlessly inflamed tensions across the world. The letter noted that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.” It concluded with a stab at his supposed business acumen. “Not all lethal conflicts can be resolved as a real estate deal might,” the letter said. “There is no recourse to bankruptcy court in international affairs.”
The next day, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, gave a scathing speech opposing Trump’s candidacy, declaring that his foreign policy was “alarming allies and fueling the enmity of our enemies.” Trump, Romney said, was a “phony, a fraud,” a candidate “playing the American people for suckers.” Two weeks later, party insiders gathered at the Army and Navy Club in downtown Washington to devise plans to block Trump’s nomination and potentially launch a third-party bid. The “never Trump” movement would intensify in the coming months, ultimately to no avail.
Trump’s decision to announce his team of foreign policy advisers on March 21 at the Post was meant to arrest the intraparty revolt.
