TPM - Josh's take "The DNC/HFA Agreement & Donna Braziles Growing Pile of Nonsense" [View all]

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-dnchfa-agreement-donna-braziles-growing-pile-of-nonsense

By JOSH MARSHALL Published NOVEMBER 4, 2017 4:26 PM
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Last night NBC published the DNC/Clinton campaign memo that Donna Brazile was apparently referring to. It’s not actually the Joint Fundraising Agreement. It’s a side agreement. But that’s just a semantic distinction. Here’s my take on where this new revelation leaves the story.

Reviewing the document, I think it’s a fair read the the Clinton campaign wanted control over things during the general election. That’s fair and normal. But they also wanted control over the building of the what they expected to inherit for the general election once Clinton became the nominee. That’s not unreasonable in itself. But that also meant having a veto power over things that were happening during the primaries, particularly hiring of key staff. So while the document says explicitly that these agreements apply exclusively to the general election, the Clinton campaign was also getting veto rights over organizational decisions during the primaries, even if they weren’t about the primaries.

There are also lines in the agreement about the campaign’s rights to review emails that went out about any primary candidate. That might create more control. But it’s not clear to me what that amounted to in practice. Those parts aren’t entirely clear to me.

The upshot is that this is significantly different from what Donna Brazile claimed in the book excerpt published in Politico. But it also includes levels of control pre-general election that would have have as a surprise to many. It’s a surprise to me. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, there’s nothing here that remotely qualifies as “rigging” the election. That is inflammatory talk and frankly a smear. Just why Brazile went that route I do not know and don’t care to speculate. But she did everyone involved a grave disservice by being willfully misleading, deeply self-serving and inflaming already existing divisions in the party that will be hard to repair as it is.

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It is a genuine shame that someone like Donna Brazile, who has worked so hard and so consistently in Democratic politics for decades, has now chosen to make it all about herself.