Bernie had a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC too.

[Jim Lane]

46. What you link to doesn't undercut Brazile's revelations

You say that Wikileaks release "the" joint fundraising agreement. But what you link to is quite obviously not the final agreement; it's unsigned and has numerous blanks to be filled in. Assuming the accuracy of the Wikileaks disclosure -- an assumption that many people here were unwilling to make when what Wikileaks disclosed was not to their liking -- I conclude that this document was circulated at one point, but it's clearly not the final agreement. Therefore, there's no basis for saying that this leak "doesn't square with Donna's telling of the tale."

You write, "The party was not under HRC's control during the primaries and the general. The party was under President Obama's control." That's typical of the excessive defensiveness we've seen on so many of the posts on this subject. The main point is that the Democratic Party secretly entered into an unfair agreement that violated its own charter. I'm not inclined to blame Obama -- I very much doubt that he knew about it. Principal culpability would be with the DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, although other DNC officers obviously knew of it as well.

Evaluating the Clinton campaign's action is murkier. On the one hand, the campaign obviously had no obligation of neutrality, as the DNC had. A campaign is free to, indeed is expected to, pursue the interests of its candidate. On the other hand, the campaign knew or should have known that the agreement was, at best, ethically dubious on the DNC's part, and that it would cause harm to the Democratic Party if it ever became public knowledge.

Anyway, the Clinton campaign is over. There's not much point in trying to decide how much criticism, if any, the campaign deserves. It's the conduct of the other party to the agreement, the DNC, that should be the focus now.