The O’Toole Chronicle: Your Campaign is Leaking

There are no secrets in this business

I have found that whether it is running a district office, or collaborating with a county executive, large city mayor or a governor’s office, chances are that strategies, plots, traps laid, or other secret details always manage to find themselves outside of the intended audience.

While we can debate which governmental or political leaders have the best ability to plan and execute under the cloak of darkness and secrecy; we can all agree that Governor Chris Christie’s superior discipline was often cited as the best in recent memory by Trenton insiders.

Why are secrets so hard to keep?  Human Nature I suppose.

I truly believe that politics attracts a certain type of individual. The very nature of politics tends to be very gossipy, where people like to read into things, make predictions, try to get an inside track on things, so they can be around the periphery of some dynamite move or have the seedlings of a blockbuster announcement. I have some news for the viewing public — most of the gossip and so-called rumors circling around State Street are totally false, have almost no facts, or at best, have a kernel of truth that has ballooned to a staggering proportion.

The truth of the matter is that these rumor starters are not necessarily malicious people — in most cases they want to be seen as in the know, important, or have access to the powerful. Not everyone can be in charge so they want to show that they at least have access to those in charge.

How do these things usually get started: if you have ever sat in on an 8 hour committee hearing, loitered around on a voting session day, or waited around as the state budget was debated in both houses, you will invariably find lobbyists, staffers, reporters and certain legislators making the rounds throughout the State House.  Inevitably, these meandering souls start to traffic in bits of information or gossip that soon mushroom into political stories. Trying to unravel the story to get to the source was the original “contact tracing.”

I long ago concluded that 90% of these items eventually die off and the body politic moves on to feed onto the next rumor or gossip.

I started this column talking about leaks and then morphed somehow into a side show of rumor mongering — case in point of how these things carry a life of their own.

Veering back on track; allow me to tell you a story about leaks and how we found the leaker.

Author’s Note: Ladies and gentlemen: the story you’re about to hear is true. Only some of the names have been changed so as to protect ONLY the innocent.

I was managing the campaign of a county executive in 1998 and we were tracking to spend nearly $3 million dollars. We would have weekly work sessions with top campaign staff only and still printed hard copy memos. After someone in that supposedly tight-knit group leaked details of our campaign strategy we knew we had to ferret out the leak. In those days we didn’t contemplate requiring NDA’s or water-marking documents. We had to do it the old-fashioned way. A plan was devised. We decided to say a poll had been commissioned and we disseminated certain portions of this poll to a select group – the ones we thought might by the leaker among us. We called in the two people we suspected of being double agents – individually.

The information we gave was specific yet different. One of the individuals was given three top issues where our candidate was most vulnerable along with the corresponding numbers for each of these issues. We briefed the larger group on totally different topics.

The meeting broke and we waited…and waited…

Within 24 hours our candidate ran into a senior party official from the opposition, wouldn’t you know that within seconds our candidate was being fed back the phony polling data and percentages right down to the percentage point.

Bait…hook…swallow.

You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to how this material made it to the other side. Whether it was sheer treachery, trying to show off that they had access, were a player, or some other nefarious reason, the insider soon revealed himself as the leaker.

The pressing question now was what to do next. Do we incinerate or expose the leaker? No, we reigned in our emotions and did the next best thing. Knowing who the leaker was now, we continued to feed them with information – except it was the information we wanted leaked. This misdirection played a critical role. We went on to win that race and a new term was born – The WAYNO!

Experiences learned:

• When passing out sensitive date or information, use a special water mark on certain of the documents;
• Change a letter or number on one page so when it is duplicated and sent on, you can trace it back to who had that particular copy;
• Literally tell one specific and different fact to each of the suspects;
• Tell a very specific personal issue – you are resigning, your job is transferring you out of your district, or some other preposterous tale that can’t be resisted and see where it travels; and
• Follow the metadata to track who is forwarding information.

Leaks are part of politics – usually the built-in cost of doing business. Keeping your circle tight helps, but doesn’t always work. The successful ones in this business control the leaks or use the leakers to their advantage.

Which will you be? Either way, don’t be THE WAYNO!