The biggest story in the election’s final weekend isn’t the whipsawing of swing states between red and blue at FiveThirtyEight. Not by a longshot. We may be seeing some dirty tricks at essentially the 59th minute of the eleventh hour. Late Friday afternoon, Mother Jones reported that the Democratic National Committee suspects that someone bugged its Washington headquarters–a potential replay of the Watergate break-in.
A DNC official told Mother Jones that interim DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile ordered an electronic sweep of the headquarters complex on South Capitol Street SE in late October. Brazile was on edge after right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe rolled out a number of hidden-camera videos suggesting that Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” quote had been obtained via a covert DNC operations. While that claim was quickly debunked, Brazile didn’t want to take a chance that O’Keefe had somehow burrowed his way into the DNC.
Technicians detected a radio signal near the DNC chair’s office that, in the words of the DNC operative, was “a strong indication” that a bug had been planted outside the office–one that “could pick up calls from cellphones.” While no listening device was found, DNC officials were nervous enough to send a report to the FBI, complete with technical details. Reportedly, the report has been handed off to another agency.
A second DNC official who was told about the suspected bugging probably spoke for everyone else who knew about this when he said that this was something that has to be taken “incredibly seriously.” No doubt a lot of people thought back to the “third-rate burglary” in which several of Nixon’s goons bugged the DNC’s headquarters, then located in the Watergate complex. Additionally, the DNC has been on edge since learning that Russian hackers broke into their email system–a hack that has since been linked to the Kremlin itself.
For obvious reasons, neither the FBI nor the DNC are willing to comment on the record about this. However, this is disturbing, to put it extremely mildly. And it would be hair-raising even if this didn’t come only three days before Election Day. This is nothing less than an attack on one of the very foundations of our democracy.
Hopefully the FBI can chase this down as quickly as possible–and preferably without leaking everything under the sun.
