Via the WaPo. It will be fun to watch the Democrats continue to melt down.
Many Democrats expressed outrage Thursday at allegations from a former party chairwoman that an agreement with the Democratic National Committee gave the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton some day-to-day control over the party early in the 2016 campaign.
Donna Brazile, a former interim chairwoman of the party, says in a forthcoming book that an August 2015 agreement gave the Clinton campaign a measure of direct influence over the party’s finances and strategy, along with a say over staff decisions and consultation rights over issues like mailings, budgets and analytics.
The control was given in exchange for a joint fundraising pledge by the Clinton campaign that helped fund the DNC through the election year, Brazile says.
“This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity,” she wrote in a book scheduled for publication next week, a portion of which was excerpted Thursday in Politico.
Throughout the campaign, the DNC and its then-chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, fiercely denied any suggestion that the party was helping Clinton over other candidates. The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had criticized Wasserman Schultz for limiting the early primary debate schedule, allowing party money to be used for Clinton fundraising, and briefly cutting off Sanders’s access to the party voter file shortly before the New Hampshire primary after a Sanders staffer inappropriately accessed information.
Some Democrats now say the arrangement is evidence that the concerns were valid. Ray Buckley, the chairman of New Hampshire’s Democratic Party, said that he first learned of the agreement while serving as DNC vice chair in 2016. “The day that Donna discovered this, she called me and I almost passed out,” Buckley said. “We were blatantly misled.”
In response to the report Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said in a CNN interview that she believed the primary contest between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders had been rigged. “This is a real problem,” she said. “We have to hold this party accountable.”
President Donald Trump also jumped on the controversy with a tweet on Thursday night that suggested the Justice Department should investigate the “real collusion and dishonesty,” even though Brazile and the Sanders campaign have not alleged criminal activity.
“Donna Brazile just stated the DNC RIGGED the system to illegally steal the Primary from Bernie Sanders,” he wrote.