A Former DNC Chair Provided Unimpeachable Proof That the Democrats Tried to Rig the Election for Hillary Clinton
Photo by Joe Raedle/GettyIt’s no secret that the Democratic Party is a fetid geriatric turd so incompetent that it couldn’t beat a meat-filled bottle of spray tanner in 2016, but a new story out today takes their bumbling lunacy to an entirely new level.
Donna Brazile is as partisan a Democrat as it gets. She gained prominence within the party while working on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, was a DNC superdelegate in 2008, and served as interim DNC chair in 2012 and 2016. E-mails dumped by Wikileaks prove that while working at CNN, Brazile tipped Hillary Clinton off about questions coming her way in the presidential debates. The pure fact of the matter is that Donna Brazile is a staunch DNC loyalist—and is pretty much the opposite of a so-called “Bernie Bro”—which is why her column in Politico detailing crystal clear collusion between the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton is so incredibly damning.
Per Brazile:
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.
Barack Obama left the Democratic Party $24 million in debt, and his campaign had been paying it off very slowly. They were not due to eliminate it until 2016, but Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (Hillary’s joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC), resolved 80% of the remaining debt. None of this was known to Brazile or many other prominent DNC folks, because that’s apparently how Debbie Wasserman Schultz ran the DNC. After discovering this, Brazile called Gary Gensler (the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign) the Saturday morning after the 2016 DNC convention, and she began to uncover the rot hidden within the Democratic Party. Gensler notified her that the Dems were $2 million in debt, and Brazile quoted their conversation as such:
“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.
“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.”
To recap: the interim chair of the Democratic Party was not notified of the desperate state of the party’s finances by the previous chair—who resigned in disgrace over leaked e-mails showing an all-too cozy relationship with the Clinton camp. In order to sustain the party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC struck up an agreement that granted one nominee near-total control over the party before she had won the nomination. As Brazile said, this is not a criminal act, but it sure as hell compromised the party’s integrity. It’s one thing to have people in the establishment pulling strings for the establishment candidate—that’s just politics—but it’s quite another to grant control over the levers of the party to a candidate before winning that party’s nomination. They effectively tried to usurp the primary.
The Democratic Party is not democratic. They are run by corrupt oligarchs who are determined to drive the party further into the arms of their donor class. They see the small window on the right that the Republican Party has opened during their complete and utter capitulation to their conspiracy wing, and the Democrats are trying to fill that vacuum. In a twist of cruel irony, the party of FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society has recently resembled something more like the Nixonian Republican Party, sans the overt appeals to racism. Power is awarded, not earned, in the modern Democratic Party—and that influence always seems to go to those already near the levers of power controlled by the Clintons and their allies. Under Clintonian “liberalism,” liberals are told to get in line or go pound sand.
Nancy Pelosi: “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is” https://t.co/LaK6293AbY#PelosiTownHallhttps://t.co/5CZHOqbod4
— CNN (@CNN) February 1, 2017
Any time someone to their left criticizes the party, the Nancy Pelosi’s of the world say, “what are you gonna do, vote for a Republican?” Well, in 2016, yeah, enough people did—or they stayed home. The party has failed on such a massive scale, that if five more state legislatures tilt Republican, the GOP can advance a constitutional amendment to congress without any Democratic input. The Dems are completely broke—burning through $3.5 to $4 million a month when Brazile took over—and they lost to Donald fucking Trump (who raised nearly double the amount of money the Dems did in the first six months of 2017). The arrogance displayed by the party is downright comical when compared to their electoral success. This gif pretty much sums up the entire Democratic Party leadership.
In 2015, Hillary Clinton said that she vowed “to rebuild our party from the ground up. When our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.” Brazile’s account proves that this was yet another two-faced lie from a candidate that very few people trust. Hillary overtook the DNC the same way Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital took over struggling firms—leveraging their financial might over a weakened group of people who couldn’t afford to say no to their takeover. She could have made good on her promise to “rebuild our party from the ground up,” but a Politico analysis of Federal Election Commission records last summer proved that less than one percent of the $82 million raised by that effort stayed in state coffers. Politico described this as “essentially money laundering,” to which the Clinton camp predictably expressed outrage. They never have any answers for the corruption charges brought against them, so their only play is to storm off in an indignant huff.
Brazile’s account has her searching all over the DNC for answers, and running into “shuffling of feet and looking the other way.” This is completely insane. She was brought on to run an operation that Hillary’s people had completely overtaken, and no one was telling her this was the case. After digging through mountains of DNC dirt, Brazile found the smoking gun: an agreement between the Clinton camp and the Democratic Party.
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 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.
The leaders of the Democratic Party care more about the Clinton camp than the Democratic Party. It’s all a game to these folks. Bernie Sanders didn’t come in and steal part of the Democratic Party, he simply picked up the banner of economic populism that Barack Obama carried past Hillary in 2008. If the Democrats want to complain about Bernie not being a Democrat, then maybe they should find some Democrats who can recruit the Democratic voters that flocked to Sanders. His success speaks volumes about the failures of the Democratic Party.
The truth of the matter is that the Democrats are not a liberal party. Their only consistent belief is supporting handouts to big business—like Wall Street and the insurance oligopoly. They are no different from the GOP in this vein. They repeatedly tell their left flank that big changes like Medicare for All are not possible—despite the fact that they have never even tried to pass these big things (and the two most popular members of their party ran for president on the premise of big changes). This is a party so tone deaf that they inherited the biggest financial mess since the Great Depression, and they used all of their political capital on a half-assed plan that pushed a small slice of people into the arms of insurance companies and sold it as a major breakthrough—despite knowing that their central promise of “if you like your doctor, you can keep it” was a blatant lie.
The way they sold this giveaway to our corporate overlords was that they were giving poor people health care (and that is the premise of the ACA), but this was a half-measure that did not get at the root of the problem: that all health care costs too much in this country. If it were more affordable, you wouldn’t need a federal mandate to force poor people to buy subsidized insurance. Given how the party reacted to the 2008 financial crisis, the only conclusion that one can arrive at is the DNC prioritized their donor class first, and then pursued policies which gave the impression they were working on behalf of the common man.
In the wake of 2008, the Democrats showed their true colors. We had a chance to completely rewrite the script of the past century, and actually punish powerful people in this country. Volumes of words have been written about the obvious fraud perpetrated by the highest levels of Wall Street in packaging underwater mortgages and selling them as AAA-rated securities. We pretty much know who did what and when. All it takes is the political will to punish bad actors, and the near-liquidation of the global economy in 2008 provided a perfect opportunity to shift course. Instead, the Democratic Party issued a federal mandate written by insurance lobbyists that pushed more people into the arms of insurance companies, passed a watered-down finance bill that really didn’t do much to stop the fraud that has become business as usual on Wall Street, and then when they faced an uprising in 2016 over their failures to make good on Obama’s promises, they literally handed the entire party to Hillary Clinton—who was running against a man continuing Obama’s message of economic fairness.
The Clintons have essentially created a shadow party that controls the DNC. It’s filled to the brim with neoliberal sellouts whose principles are solely dictated by which direction the dollars are flowing. They don’t care one iota about yours or my concerns—and new DNC Chair Tom Perez purging longtime liberals within the party is proof that this effort still continues past the 2016 election. The Clinton establishment has such a vice grip on the Democrats that eternal allies like Donna Brazile are so shocked that they feel the need to speak out. At this rate, if Hillary Clinton and her cronies have it their way, there will be no more Democratic Party—just a hollowed-out husk taking “donations” to funnel towards various Clinton efforts, while state-level Democrats are left to fend for themselves against the Trumpian hellscape enabled by the complete and utter incompetence of Hillary Clinton and the DNC. Burn this party to the ground. It’ll be more useful as ash than whatever the hell it is right now.
Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.