Donna Brazile's Bombshell Isn't That Hillary Clinton Rigged the Race... - Joy Ann Reid [View all]

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Donna Brazile’s Bombshell Isn’t That Hillary Clinton Rigged the Race, But That the Democratic Party Blew It

The Democratic Party has no discernible message, no recognizable plan and no real response to Donald Trump’s serial rending of basic decency and honor.


JOY-ANN REID
11.04.17 11:39 AM ET

Donna Brazile may be burning the village in order to save it.

What else to take away from the former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and longtime party operative in dropping the bombshell news this week about a fundraising agreement between Hillary Clinton and the DNC? It’s part of a larger story that focuses on the Russian hacking of the Democratic campaign and the threat to the democratic process, but it’s the “Clinton takeover of the DNC” that took over the narrative this week.

Brazile’s revelation: that Hillary Clinton in September of 2015 entered into a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC that allowed the candidate to pay down the party’s considerable debt in exchange for exercising control of some hiring decisions was seized upon by some supporters of Bernie Sanders as proof that the primary was indeed “rigged” against him. Predictably, Donald Trump joined in, tweeting in much the same way he — in tandem with Russian bot farms — did during the campaign, that the system is shot through with Clintonian criminality against which Bernie never stood a chance.

Caution has rarely been the watchword when it comes to any story containing the magic words: Hillary Clinton. The “Clinton rules” dictate that a presumption of scandal and wrongdoing must infuse every tale in which she is a character. But Brazile’s bombshell was a much greater indictment of a Clinton loyalist, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was at the helm of the DNC before she was felled in the Wikileaks avalanche at the start of last year’s Democratic National Convention.

As Brazile tells it, the DNC was dead broke by the time Clinton cut the deal to retire the organization’s debts in 2015. Indeed, in the excerpt from her book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House, Brazile writes that by the time Clinton set the party’s finances right and “put it on a starvation diet,” the DNC “had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”

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