CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — It’s not yet 9 a.m. on Tuesday, October 24, when Robby Mook stands up at the front of a lecture hall and finds roughly 90 pairs of bleary eyes staring back at him, ready to receive his wisdom about how to steer clear of getting hacked by a foreign power, what happens when your emails get spilled out to the world, and maybe how to avoid losing a presidential election to Donald Trump in the process.

The Harvard graduate students are studying cybersecurity, so they know the basics. They’re here at "Professor" Mook’s first guest lecture to get the inside story of what happened last year and to hear what, exactly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager proposes to do next.


Mook, who’s on an extended break from political campaigns for the first time since he graduated from college in 2002, is working on a new project. Exactly one year earlier, Trump was complaining about fake poll numbers after an ABC News survey showed Clinton up by 12 points, and the national media were buzzing over rumors that the Republican nominee’s team was laying the groundwork to launch “Trump TV” when their joyride was all over. James Comey’s infamous letter was still four days away, and the then-36-year-old Mook was on a rocket ship to real fame, even after campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails had been leaking out for two weeks, joining thousands of other once-private Democratic documents online for the world to see.

Instead, Mook has spent the past year fending off media requests to talk about What Went Wrong, and trying to pivot to Russia. He’s mostly ignored the sniping and second-guessing from Democratic operatives like Donna Brazile and Stan Greenberg, insisting he doesn’t even read the criticism. Even here in the Ivory Tower, though, 2016 is a subject he can’t avoid—and he’s presenting his past two years as a cautionary tale for a bunch of still-caffeinating 20- and 30-somethings.

“What you guys are doing here is way more important than any of our campaign tactics right now, because part of my experience from my campaigns was that all those tactical things we do in campaign management are about the margins, right? Like 1, 2, 3 points — something like that. Three points is amazing, actually, if we can achieve something like that. If our adversaries continue to be successful with what they’re trying to do, none of that matters anymore,” he tells the students, who fall silent for the first — but not the last — time this morning. They sense what’s coming from the guy whose new project is called “Defending Digital Democracy,” and which is hosted not only by the Institute of Politics, a traditional landing spot for former campaign operatives, but also by the university’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“We’re going to talk about 2016,” Mook continues. “But I’m not interested in, like, relitigating it. And in particular, there’s a question: Well, and we’ll run into this, how much did what Russia did matter? You know, how much did it — did Hillary lose because of it? All those sorts of questions. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on that in this particular class. Happy to talk about it if you want. But at the end of the day, we just don’t know, right? But what we do know is that what happened was very disruptive. And that’s what I want to spend my time trying to lean up against.”

Two hours later, sitting across the street in the corner of a dining hall teeming with undergraduates who also live in the dorm where Mook has a residence, he wants to, again, make clear how forward-looking his new project is. I note that there are different models of moving on after losing a campaign, and that it didn’t seem like he was preparing to run another one in 2020. At this point in 2013, he was in charge of Terry McAuliffe’s successful campaign for governor in Virginia, a clear precursor to his Clinton job.

Mook confirmed that he has no such plans. “And, in fact, my 2020 plan right now is to make sure that whoever’s running for president on both sides of the aisle, no matter how much I might revile them, that they’re going to have the tools at their disposal,” he says, taking time to punctuate his point.

So it doesn’t seem like you’ve been moping, I respond. “Yeah, I don’t know. I’m sure some psychoanalyst could have a ball with all of this. But I feel fulfilled today,” he insists.

Based on my experience watching him work atop Team Clinton since 2015, this seems true: Mook is not the kind of guy who allows himself time to wallow. Fresh off a job that required 24/7 attention for more than two years, he’s buried his nose in a new initiative, in which he can control the outcome completely (unlike a political campaign, where the voters have the final say). In the next few weeks, he’s aiming to publish an extensive playbook document for campaigns that will outline practical steps for staffers to take to protect themselves from hacks. Collaborating with a freakishly accomplished team that he helped assemble, he’s working on similar documents for state-level election staffers, and looking into how to build an information-sharing analysis center for states and campaigns so they can share threat information. He’s been running war-game-type exercises with local election officials to train them for how to respond to hacks, and, in his spare time, he’s hoping to assemble policy proposals that actually go somewhere, too.

Mook has kept himself insanely busy, in other words, though he’s OK with talking about 2016, he’ll have you know. (He promises!) In fact, he’s doing just fine, thank you very much (thanks for asking!), and please don’t waste everyone’s time by having him argue over 2016’s tactical messes. He just really wishes you’d pay attention to the big Russian bear in the room that’s been trying to break into your Gmail while you’ve been reading this.

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Back in the lecture hall, he launches into an organized presentation that he frequently lets skip the rails in crosstalk with the students. He presents a quick tutorial on the patchwork system that governs election mechanics around the country, pressing the point that there’s no unified chain of command or even coordination system in the case of a campaign or government hack. He grows animated when one student suggests the Obama administration should have warned the public earlier about Russian meddling, and stuns the students into silence by telling them that secretaries of state only found out their systems were breached because of news reports.

Mook draws out nervous chuckles when he rolls out a mock German accent to imitate Angela Merkel typing “please print,” a reference to Clinton’s frequent email instruction, and he gets a deeper laugh from the crowd when he deadpans: “I think John Podesta heard from the FBI the day after his emails were released. And they’re like, ‘Sir, your emails were released.’ He’s like, ‘Thank you.’”

It’s the kind of gallows humor that simply has to be painful for a man who had the White House, and lifetime consultant glory, ripped away from him less than a year earlier.

At one point, he pulls up a pair of word clouds reflecting Gallup’s September 2016 findings about what voters had heard about Trump and Clinton.

“We’re not relitigating 2016,” he says for the second time this morning. “This is for academic purposes only: These are the things that Hillary Clinton talked about on the campaign trail,” he tells the class, pointing to the smaller words in the Clinton cloud, to another round of titters.

He’s teed them up, and the students can see where he’s going. Nodding to the projection, he lists off: “Jobs, Economy, Work, all that good stuff.” Then, still pointing to the cloud, which features “Email” front-and-center, he continues. “This is what happened. Now, if I got up to you and said that’s because of the Russians, would I be right? Would that be fair, somewhat?”

He pauses.

“Why not, like, ‘Yeah, Robby, you got totally screwed, you did a great job’?”

They laugh. He keeps going.



***

Mook has been living at Harvard since the semester began in September, but his small office at the Kennedy School of Government remains essentially untouched except for a few pictures of John F. Kennedy on the walls. He spends much of his time in meetings around the building, which is the kind of place that’s lined with posters promoting lectures from Washington luminaries of every stripe. When Mook lectures on that Tuesday, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham had just visited to discuss cybersecurity, and the students working with him are preparing for an upcoming meeting with Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate’s Intelligence Committee. Many of the advertised talks are still about how to reckon with the result of 2016’s election, though, making the topic even more inescapable than it already is nearly a year after the election. The rotunda where I’m set to meet up with Mook before his class that morning is the exact space where he and Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper for their first (and only) joint post-campaign interview in December, and seconds before I stand to greet Mook, Jason Chaffetz—the now-retired Utah congressman who spent his past few years in office making Clinton’s life difficult from his perch atop the House Oversight Committee—strolls by with a big grin.

Mook now cuts the profile of an attentive assistant professor rather than the man in charge of a billion-dollar, thousand-employee enterprise to elect the leader of the free world. He looks much the same as he did throughout the campaign—still thin, with his glasses, blue blazer, khakis, checkered shirt—but the hum of nervous energy that accompanied him everywhere since at least 2015 has faded. He’s no longer glued to his phone like he was during the campaign, or like he almost certainly would have been in the senior White House or Democratic National Committee job he’d have been in a position to demand had Clinton won.

Mook’s mission now is a far more sophisticated version of the alarm-ringing he unsuccessfully tried to do in July 2016, after Trump publicly urged Russia to “find thirty thousand [Clinton] emails that are missing.” Then, he went on television repeatedly to try and get the public to pay attention to Russia’s intervention—but the campaign’s entreaties were largely ignored.

He landed at Harvard. Shortly after the campaign, when he was trying to figure out what to do with himself, Mook grew concerned that the daily discussion—dominated by a tsunami of Trump transition news—had strayed too far from the issue of a foreign actor swooping in to disrupt an American election. In January, he flew to Silicon Valley to meet with tech experts to hear their thoughts, while keeping in touch with the small clique of other former campaign chiefs, including John McCain’s 2008 strategist Steve Schmidt and George W. Bush’s reelection manager, Ken Mehlman.

Just then, back east, Eric Rosenbach was settling into his new role leading the Belfer Center after a career in the Pentagon that culminated in a 1½-year stint as Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s chief of staff. Rosenbach caught wind of Mook’s interest, and the two soon met up for coffee on Capitol Hill. Mook had considered launching an independent group to offer concrete advice to campaigns and election officials, he says, but, wary of being lumped in with the anti-Trump resistance, he wanted the effort to be bipartisan, to convey the seriousness of its substantive proposals. The pair agreed that the problems facing both campaign pros and election workers was far larger than either side realized.

“Nowadays you have to accept—no matter what kind of organization you are, private or individual—that you are going to get hacked. And if it does happen, that you know how to respond to it,” says Rosenbach. “Talking to state election officials or campaign folks, [I am] not sure they really appreciate the degree to which they are absolutely targeted by high-end nation-state actors. That’s all I’ve been doing the last seven years, is watching the bad guys go after you, or our cyber infrastructure, in various sectors. So it’s very clear to me they’re doing that, they’re very good at it, they’re very sophisticated, and they’ll definitely do it again.”

Mook pitched Rosenbach on bringing on Matt Rhoades, who was Mitt Romney’s campaign manager in 2012. They would be an odd pair: the Clinton loyalist and the former George W. Bush White House aide whose post-Romney project was the launch of America Rising, the GOP opposition research firm that went after Clinton for years. But Rhoades had spoken about being targeted by Chinese actors in 2012, and he soon agreed to join. They recruited advisers and collaborators including Google’s director of information security and privacy, a former director of the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate, a former undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Facebook’s chief security officer, roughly 35 graduate students, and both parties’ top election lawyers. (The emphasis on bipartisanship was deliberate, to the point of being overwhelming: The group went out of its way to make sure it had an even amount of Democrats and Republicans on the initial news release announcing the project, and Colin Reed—a former senior Romney and Chris Christie aide who ran America Rising in 2016—has been helping out, shepherding me around Harvard when I visited and working with Mook, creating the bizarre scene of one of Clinton’s most consistent critics sitting in on an interview with her former campaign manager.)

“I don’t think we’re talking enough about how we have, as Americans, a shared threat, and that threat thrives amid discord. It creates discord, and it’s a downward spiral. And, again, I think what we spend time doing is arguing about whether there should be a Russia investigation, and whether the right people are being subpoenaed. And that investigation must happen—I believe that more strongly than anybody else on this planet, maybe save Hillary Clinton,” Mook says, betraying some frustration for the first time in our conversation. “But we have to save time and bandwidth for these other conversations, too, because those are going to determine how strong we are as a country moving forward, and how strong our democracy is.”

That’s been a tough turn to make, largely because of how his last job ended. Mook never reached the inner sanctums of Clinton’s tightest circles of friends and advisers, who—along with the candidate herself—continue to blame Vladimir Putin and Russian hackers for the outcome of the election. But some close Hillary friends are icier toward Mook in private, and the expansive outer rungs of Clinton world have been vocal about placing the blame for Clinton’s loss on his shoulders, with some insisting they tried (and failed) to get him fired during the course of the campaign. That’s made it more difficult for Mook to break through to them with his new pitch. The complaints have been unsparing: that he and his trusted core of fellow young aides were far too insular to see the big picture, that they relied too much on flawed analytics instead of traditional polling and that they refused to adjust course when both the Bernie Sanders and Trump threats emerged. As a result, Mook has a distant relationship now with some fellow campaign veterans—when I asked Donna Brazile, the former interim DNC chair who also managed Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, about Mook, given that they’re both in Cambridge these days, her emailed answer was, simply: “He’s up here at Harvard and I’ve only run into him once.” (She goes after him repeatedly in her new book, however, along with what she calls the “cult of Robby Mook” that she says resisted her advice.)

The authors of the campaign book Shattered described Mook as guarding “information jealously to maintain his own power,” and former Bill Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg went on an extended rant against him in a September article for The American Prospect, accusing the campaign of stopping polling shortly before voting began (in truth, it suspended the traditional message polling but maintained its analytics surveys), while accusing Mook of keeping figures to himself in a way that “reinforced his mystique as a data wizard. But that lack of transparency was malpractice.” In a particularly cutting insult, Greenberg also compared him to Dick Morris, the disgraced former Bill Clinton adviser who now writes a column for the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer. One Democratic strategist who’s been on the periphery of Clinton world for decades told me that the hacks themselves qualified Mook for the title of “worst campaign manager in modern political history, with no nearby peer.”

Most of Mook’s former colleagues think those criticisms are ridiculous, and Mook has gone out of his way to avoid responding to any of these criticisms—including in our interview. He’s been spending less time ripping on Trump and Republicans on CNN, where he’s a contributor, than he once did. Recently, when he and Rhoades appeared on CBS’ “This Morning” to discuss their joint effort, the anchors repeatedly asked him about excerpts of Clinton’s book that had begun circulating, and he—repeatedly and awkwardly—pivoted back to the topic of hacking.

“I hope people have heard me when I said we didn’t do everything right on the campaign; that’s obvious,” he says when I ask him to respond to the common criticism that his new project is partly an effort to exonerate himself. His self-effacement during the lecture made clear that the frequent criticisms hadn’t totally bounced off him. But he turns the question right back to Russia. “You know what’s funny about when someone says that? I think it’s ignoring how real this threat is to our democracy.”

Mook grows expansive when I ask about the reactions he gets when talking to election pros out in the country. “I think too often in our politics nowadays, things turn to snarkiness and finger-pointing, in general,” he says. “Social media breeds that. I think on cybersecurity we’re way too inclined to blame the victim and point fingers, rather than ask if the rest of us have done enough to help people.”



***

“You always get blamed, in addition to your own regret and frustration that you didn’t win.”

That’s how Bob Shrum — lead strategist for both Gore and John Kerry — describes what happens after you lose a campaign.

“It’s important that you move forward. I certainly did,” offers Rhoades. “Robby is a young guy who has a bright future in politics, if he wants to have one.”

“You go on with your life,” Shrum says.

Mook has been trying. Asked whether he ever anticipated spending 2017 this way, he shakes his head.

“No. No. No,” he says. “I’m a very mission-oriented person, and the mission was clear to me a few weeks after the election: there was this big hole, and it needed to be filled. So, to me, it’s felt very natural doing it. But yes, if you pulled me aside two years ago and said, ‘You’re going to do this,’ I would’ve thought you were nuts.”

So does he miss the daily political scrum? That morning, Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker had yet again gone off on Trump, and that afternoon, his Arizona colleague Jeff Flake would announce his retirement with a scathing anti-Trump speech on the Senate floor. Mook pauses for a full six seconds.

“At heart, I am someone who likes to organize and mobilize and create things, and when you’re in the back-and-forth, your opportunities to create are much more limited. So I’m very happy, I’m getting my fix of creating and building right now: I’m fulfilled,” he says slowly, appearing to turn wistful for a second before returning to his signature relentless positivity, which Clinton herself singled out in her post-campaign book, What Happened. “But I like being partisan, you know. But I feel like, in fact, I have been deliberately cutting back on opportunities to speak out and echo the resistance so that I can focus on this. And sometimes I wish I spent more time on that.”

“But I am making the right choice,” he tells me, and maybe himself.

Yet escaping from the shadow of 2016 is, sometimes, just as difficult as it sounds for a political celebrity whose face spent a year regularly plastered all over cable TV. As we speak in the corner of the dining hall, undergraduates passing us as they head toward the lunch buffet, including one wearing a gray T-shirt with Clinton’s “H” campaign logo, repeatedly turn to stare at him. Mook measures his words when I ask how he maneuvers around the constant questions second-guessing the outcome of the election—by focusing on practical solutions to 2016’s problems, he answers—and whether he wishes people would focus less on his own role in the result, and how he feels now.

“We have to find out what happened in 2016, and Bob Mueller has been tasked with doing that. And I don’t have any special ability to investigate,” he says.

I try again, another way: It doesn’t feel like this Harvard effort is anything like your version of What Happened, I suggest.

“No. And what I’m saying is, I can’t do anything about that. But what I can do is try to help organize resources and people and get them connected with the folks who need help, whether they’re campaign aides or election officials,” he responds.

“And to be honest with you, it’s been really fulfilling. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism. But you feel good at the end of the day.”