Former DNC chair finds proof 2016 race was rigged against Bernie

Donna Brazile

It’s long been the most open of secrets that the 2016 Democratic race was rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton, even though polls showed Bernie Sanders outperformed her against Trump by a vast margin. But now the smoking gun has been found, and by none other than the former interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, Donna Brazile:

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.

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 Al 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.

[…]

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.

It wasn’t illegal, but it undermined voters by deciding a year ahead of time that the Clinton camp would be running things long before she’d won the nomination and even as the Sanders campaign was just getting off the ground. The rest of the article isn’t any better; she describes the sorry state of the DNC’s finances left in the wake of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It’s a portrait of greed and recklessness at every level.

Always remember: Bernie would’ve won. Instead, the Democrats chose an uninspiring candidate who represents everything wrong with Washington and, in doing so, handed the country over to their loudly anti-Washington opponent. And there’s zero reason to believe they’ve learned a single lesson since, hence why they’re still suffering in the polls, even under a Trump-Pence presidency.

(via @tnyCloseRead; RT: @ggreenwald)