The Plot to Hack America

The storm of outrage among Sander’s supporters exploded on the starting day of the Democratic Convention. The revelation of damaging emails happened just in time fr the first news of the morning. It appeared that their release would cause a massive split and tear Sander’s passionate voters away from not only Clinton, but the Democratic party. To quell the danger Chairwoman Debbie Wassermann-Schultz announced her resignation. Senator Sanders had been preparing to endorse Clinton and his supporters were begging him to walk out of the convention and run as a third party candidate. Such an event would split the ticket and catapult a flailing Trump directly into the White House. In the end, common sense prevailed and Clinton did end up receiving Sanders’s endorsement, but he seemed very cold during the convention. Pro-Bernie delegates often interrupting the speeches of prominent Democratic key speakers, chanting his name, including House Democratic Whip, Representative Steny Hoyer, Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leon Panetta, Representative Elijah Cummings, Senator Al Franken and comedian Sara Silverman, and even their own economic heroine Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The outrage was so hot in the convention hall that committee CEO Amy Dacey, Communications Director Luis Miranda, and CFO Brad Marshall and other supporting staffers also left their posts at the DNC in an effort to stem the split.²¹ Some Sanders delegates staged a walk-out and went directly to the Press tent to complain about how the system was rigged –exactly as Donald Trump kept saying. Outside the venue in the nearby Roosevelt Park more than a thousand Sanders supporters took to the scalding streets of Philadelphia to vent their frustration. Many Sanders supporters shouted against Mrs. Clinton with the same taunting chant from the previous week’s Republican convention: “Lock her up!” Other protesters gathered outside the downtown Ritz-Carlton, where many major donors to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign were staying, and attacked her use of a “super PAC” and her reliance on big fundraising events.²² Some claimed that they were actually planning to vote for Trump. Initial reactions were much less focused on the hack itself, rather they were focused on reiterating the Republican nominee’s claim that the Democratic primaries and the resulting nomination process was illegitimate.

Julian Assange said that WikiLeaks actually timed the release of the leak to coincide with the start of the convention. “That’s when we knew there would be maximum interest by readers, but also, we have a responsibility to,” Assange told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “If we published after, you can just imagine how outraged the Democratic voting population would have been. It had to had to have been before.”²³ The Assange friendly media joined in on the disinformation campaign against Clinton too. News articles abounded such as the Guardian’s headline “WikiLeaks Proves Primary Was Rigged: DNC Undermined Democracy.”²⁴

Around the same time, Assange, with the help of Russia Today also brought another prominent conspiracy theory to promenence when he suggested a DNC staffer who had been murdered in July might have been an informant killed for leaking information to WikiLeaks. “Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks,” Assange said in an interview on a Dutch television program, discovered by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski. “There’s a 27-year-old who works for the DNC and who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the streets in Washington.”²⁵ When asked if he was suggesting Rich might be a WikiLeaks source, Assange replied that they do not comment on their sources. Then, WikiLeaks announced on Twitter it was offering a $20,000 reward “for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.” Jeremy Stahl, a senior editor at Slate wrote, “Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks organization appear to be actively encouraging a conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee staffer was murdered for nefarious political purposes, perhaps by Hillary Clinton.”²⁶ He noted however, that there was “zero evidence” to support these conspiracy theories, and that the fact checking website, Snopes had debunked many of them.²⁷