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"A Shocking Truth": Donna Brazile Accuses Clinton Campaign Of "Rigging" Primary
3
November, 2017
Authored
by Donna Brazille, former interim chair of the Democratic National
Committee, originally
published in Politico.
*
* *
"When
I was asked to run the Democratic Party after the Russians hacked our
emails, I
stumbled onto a shocking truth about the Clinton campaign."
Inside
Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC
Before
I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on
some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be
an emotional phone call.
I
had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National
Committee after the convention that I
would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had
rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian
hackers and posted online had suggested.
I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the
DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew
if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof,
and so did Bernie.
So
I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time
when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in
significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she
resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had
become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected
to wield control of its operations.
Debbie
was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in
controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn
do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers
how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how
long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last
few weeks.
By
September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it
broke my heart.
***
The
Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler,
the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no
words.
He
told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.
“What?”
I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been
telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no
problems.”
That
wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken
a look at the DNC’s books.
Obama
left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and
more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had
been paying that off very slowly.
Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016.
Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its
joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent
of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the
party on an allowance.
If
I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers
knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience
she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel.
She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last
minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about
the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.
On
the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which
the campaign had arranged.
“No!
That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan
without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”
“Gary,
how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t
know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described
the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which
seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had
the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its
basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a
fund-raising clearing house. Under FEC law, an individual can
contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign.
But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and
a party’s national committee.
Individuals
who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign
could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory
Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two
states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund
agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be
deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly
after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that
state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the
DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.
“Wait,”
I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the
nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary
has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”
Gary
said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.
“That
was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained,
referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the
DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the
convention, and more to prepare for the election.”
“What’s
the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every
month to fund the party?”
The
burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.
I
gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after
having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the
monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair
usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns,
but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of
consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being
financed by the DNC, too.
When
we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had
inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management
of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would
not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did
they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and
rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I
could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this.
It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial
shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.
***
Right
around the time of the convention the leaked emails revealed
Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for
its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support
down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016,
described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the
states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the
party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we
win. That’s what will happen.”
Yet
the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they
had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign
was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in
August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as
“essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign,
Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something
shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying
this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to
Hillary.
I
wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of
her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want
to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff
to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the
money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and
looking the other way.
When
I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard I at last found the
document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement
between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.
The
agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby
Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for
raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the
party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign
had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications
director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff.
The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all
other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
I
had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release
without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.
When
the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s
team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has
an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama
in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party
already is under the control of the president. When you have an open
contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party
comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is
certain. When I was manager of Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started
inserting our people into the DNC in June.
This
victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just
four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year
before she officially had the nomination.
I
had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption
that would show
that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary,
but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I
had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct
for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had
found none. Then I found this agreement.
The
funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not
illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If
the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the
party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to
lead.
This
was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s
integrity.
***
I
had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him.
Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that
I valued as a woman and as a public servant.
“Hello,
senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the
cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”
I
discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had
signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it.
They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I
described how Hillary’s campaign had taken it another step.
I
told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I
explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of
the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I
never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we
were with only weeks before the election.
Bernie
took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he
asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were. The polls were
unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own
assessment?
I
had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told
him I had visited states around the country and I found a lack of
enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama
coalition and about millennials.
I
urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into
the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart and hope he
could muster. He might find some of her positions too centrist, and
her coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I
knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future
of the country in peril. I knew he heard me. I knew he agreed with
me, but I never in my life had felt so tiny and powerless as I did
making that call.
When
I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but
out of anger. We would go forward. We had to.
CLINTON GAINED CONTROL OF DNC BEFORE ELECTION: Donna Brazile Betrays Hillary Clinton and DWS
H. A. Goodman
Elizabeth Warren: "Yes" The Democratic Primary Was Rigged For Clinton
3
November, 2017
First
it was Donna
Brazile;
now none other than the woman widely expected to be the Democratic
presidential candidate in 2020 - Elizabeth Warren - has thrown
Hillary Clinton under the bus.
During
an interview on Thursday afternoon on CNN, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was
asked if she believed the Democratic National Committee was rigged to
favor the presidential nomination of Hillary Clinton.
"Very
quickly senator, do you agree with the notion that it was
rigged?" CNN's
Jake Tapper asked.
"Yes," Warren
responded
Do you agree with the notion that the DNC was rigged in Hillary Clinton's favor?
Elizabeth Warren: Yes cnn.it/2A0NZkj
Published
in Politico Magazine on Thursday, Brazile’s
explosive excerpt from
her upcoming book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and
Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” revealed the
existence of what she described as an “unethical” agreement
between Clinton and the DNC, in which the candidate’s campaign
traded funding for increased control of the platform.
According
to Brazile, by
financing the DNC early on and keeping it financially afloat during
the latter stages of the campaign, Clinton’s campaign gained
substantial control of the committee throughout the election process,
a claim that was repeatedly echoed on the campaign trail by Sanders
himself.
"The
funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not
illegal, but it sure looked unethical,” Brazile wrote, referring to
the Hillary for America presidential campaign committee.
“If
the fight had been fair,” Brazile added, “one campaign would not
have control of the party before the voters had decided which one
they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it
compromised the party's integrity.”
Brazile
cited the agreement as proof that, as she suspected prior to
joining, “Hillary
Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process.”
Appearing
on CNN on Thursday, Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, called
Brazile’s revelations “a real problem.” Pressed by anchor Jake
Tapper on whether she believed the Democratic primary had been
“rigged” in Clinton's favor, Warren replied simply: “Yes.”
Ironically,
the banker-bashing senator and leader of the progressive wing of the
Democratic Party and certain 2020 presidential contender, came
out in favor of Clinton over Sanders during the 2016 primaries, a
move that frustrated Sanders supporters and further boosted the
front-running Clinton’s bid for the nomination.
Also
ironically, this is prima
facie collusion
and, well, rigging. Only because it doesn't involve "ze
Russians", it has yet to make primetime news.
Meanwhile
as of this afternoon, young, easily impressionable minds everywhere
are bashing their heads into the wall, unable to pick a side between
their two "progressive" paragons of virtue.
And
now if only some less easily impressionable, and more informed minds
could tell us if as some have asked, Hillary's rigging at the DNC
pushed Biden out of the race, and more importantly - just what huge
revelation is coming this way for the entire Democratic Party to
suddenly throw Hillary Clinton under the bus - we would be grateful.
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