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Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC


Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. 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.

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

***

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

“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 clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“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.”

“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”

The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.

I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.

When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.

***

Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. 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.

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 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.

I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.

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.

***

I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.

“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”

I discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I described how Hillary’s campaign had taken it another step.

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I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.

Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were. The polls were unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own assessment?

I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I found a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials.

I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart and hope he could muster. He might find some of her positions too centrist, and her coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country in peril. I knew he heard me. I knew he agreed with me, but I never in my life had felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call.

When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to.


Donna Brazile is the former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee. Excerpted from the book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House to be published on November 7, 2017 by Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright 2017 Donna Brazile.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774

Not much that Bernie supporters did not suspect or know already.

bernie bro's still salty, i see.

the majority of liberals did not want bernie. get over it. she won the popular vote in the primaries and it wasn't close.

wait, aint she the chick that screwed Bernie and gave hill the ?s to the debate.......im confused.

Man you sound like a Trump supporter now. Donna B. is a Hillary supporter just telling it like it was and how it happened. She cheated. She funneled money through states to her campaign. She controlled the DNC throughout the primaries!

But go ahead and support her losing act, people like you are why we are where we are now.

They did Bernie a huge favor. The Russians would have had a field day with Bernie. No way he would have won with that. And it would have jeopardized his upcoming 2020 bid.

This isn't about Bernie's bros being salty or who the DNC wanted.. it is further validation that Hillary is no different than those you claim to hate.. she is as slimy and cut throat as any politician that has ever lived. She would beg, borrow, or steal.. or step on the throat of her own grandmother for another percent and a half in the polls.

That's just who she is, that's who she has always been.. this isn't about Bernie, it's not about Trump, it's about Hillary... and her insatiable desire for her own power and the ruthless means she was willing to go to, to get it.

So you can deal with that or keep deflecting.. totally up to you.

Bernie would've got murdered against Trump. The only thing worse than Hillary to conservatives would've been a socialist jew.

you thought the alt-right came out and voted for Trump last year? it would've been 1-x worse if bernie was on the ticket.

she is and will be shady as all hell, especially what she did with the delegates.

but she didn't manipulate the popular vote. people voted for her all on her own.

people like you is why we are currently in our situation. you didn't even show up.

you bernie bro's told all those conservatives "hey, i'm not gonna show up, so ill let you decide the direction of the country, but i'm going to complain about it either way".

you understand that, right? when you don't show up, you are telling the rest of the country to decide the direction for you.

well the direction has been decided. suck it up.

who's deflecting? and besides i can answer however i see fit.

how can you claim this isn't about bernie when his DAMN NAME IS ALL OVER THE ARTICLE?

it's about hillary and bernie. learn to read.

She used the DNC fund raising to gain an edge in the primaries! Think about it. She was unpopular even among her own "she's not Trump" supporters. And I can't believe you are this high this early in the day!

lol i'm not baked *yet*

look at how much she won the popular vote in the primaries.

look at how much she won the popular vote in the generals.

she wasn't the best candidate. she was trash. no matter how much DC and other try to claim that i dont understand that shes the same politician that i always trash, the FACT remains that i have always called her a snake, witch, shady, corrupt, and sleazy all the time on this board.

the way she handled the delegates and DNC is no different. how many chairs did they go through in one election season? 2? the one that helped her rig the delegates, and the other asshat who fed her debate questions.

the DNC is shattered because of it, and rightfully so. She lost, so as far as i'm concerned, you bernie bro's got your retribution for what she did to bernie with regards to the system vote.

but she still smashed him in the popular vote, which she DIDN'T rig.

bernie would've got his ass destroyed in the generals. when the only good thing the majority of the country has to say about you is that you're "honest", thats actually a diss. that was the only thing, you realize that right? that was the only quality that kept getting repeated.

that's how garbage his actual policies were.

1. Pretty sure I specifically said you were free to take whichever tact you want.

2. Stop with the "learn to read" crap.. save it for your foes who enjoy arguing on a middle school level.

3. You are deflecting. If this was a screenplay, Bernie is an insignificant character... the article is about a woman near the top of the DNC investigating what happened to the DNC and how it impacted Bernie.. turns out Hillary screwed him twice and raked him over the coals, just like she has done with many many people she has left in her wake.. and just like she did with the rest of the DNC.

You voted for a gut wrenchingly evil, back-stabbing, power hungry person for President.....

This is a popular fallacy when people honestly believe that the two parties aren't alike and when they feel that party insiders don't use power and leverage to gain an advantage. Most of the time it works.

Somehow many believe moving even further left is a positive. It's not. Actually the Dems need to move a little further to the right. You will never gain the votes of every day workers when they feel abandoned. And they already do. If you want to win elections move a little further to the right. Actually represent some of the principals working Americans agree with and quit listening to those who whine the loudest.

We saw what happens when you listen to them. If they don't get their way they just stomp their feet, throw a tantrum and won't show up at the poles anyway. They're not gracious losers nor will they support anything if they don't get their way 100%.

Well there were two of them to choose from. lol

Again repeating something I have already said as much.

We got a Nostradamus over here.

There's an article I read yesterday that explains why Bernie just doesn't get it, and why he lost the nomination.

I'll post it later.

1) This explains why the margin is what it is

2) He's the most popular American politician in a landslide. Not even close, and he taps crazy demographics. He pulls 43+% in rural. She's the second least popular politician in American history.

Bernie v. Trump, and we have a government stalemate rather than a mentally ill rapist with all branches of government behind him.

far right vs far left candidate.

he's the most popular NOW maybe. but the numbers said you're wrong during the actual election season.

if it was a due over, i still wouldn't vote for him in the primaries because i was not a supporter of his policies, specifically that tax plan.

Can I ask - honest question - which of Hillary's policies you supported?

During election season he carried the same high numbers with conservatives. I can attest to it antecdotally.

The most popular politician in America over long stretches of polling, who pulls cross tabs of regular non or opposition voters vs. "I think America is already great! Right, Katy Perry?".

They actively went for the latter and lost to a moron game show host in a lay up election.

one of the big ones i supported her position on is 2 year college funded for students. i don't really support making all 4 years free, although i admit i lean either way sometimes. her policy on making tuition free school for students whose parents made less than 125k is something i would've been ok with.

i support her tax policy which increased the taxes on the ultra wealthy while not raising middle class taxes.

oh, and her infrastructure plan over a 5 year period.

hillary running her campaign like a drunken moron doesn't change that she was a popular candidate.

again, winning the popular vote by over 3 million in both the primaries and general is my factual evidence, not anecdotal.

if you want to argue about how she ran her campaign, then the discussion will end quickly because i will agree with just about anything most people will say. it was an utter joke that she allowed herself to lose to Trump.

but if we're sticking to the topic of actual popularity, then the hard numbers are on my side in this discussion.

the actual fun topic would be a hypothetical trump vs bernie. i would love to have that discussion just to tick off bernie bros.

You can't lose to a guy like trump and then say you were popular. That makes zero sense.

you can if you win the popular vote but lose the electoral college.

Gore was more popular than Bush(barely), but bush was president because of the electoral college.

And, the electoral college IS how the president is determined. And I know you know that.

I would say she was more popular in la and ny......

obviously, but we are discussing popularity as a whole.

She absolutely was not. Every single possible available metric proves this.



She won 3 million more votes than a slug-brained racist who can't form coherent sentences. That is not an accomplishment, dude.



Ball don't lie.



http://news.gallup.com/poll/197231/trump-clinton-finish-historically-poor-images.aspx

Less popular than Goldwater.

So we went from “popular” to “favorable” percentages.

Either you moved the goal post in order to spin the hard numbers, or we are on two completely different wave lengths.

The entire time I’m talking about votes and you’re talking about how people feel.

If the goal posts were moved, they were in your favor.

She's not popular. She wasn't even favorable, even when placed in contrast to a drooling rapist game show host.

If you want to talk votes - she didn't get enough of them because she wasn't popular. She only got the numbers she did because her opponent was Trump. With Trump as an opponent, one would expect a landslide with the most votes in history.

It was a lay up. 65 million is embarrassing.

That was her own fault for a moronic campaign she ran.

I wouldn't say it's embarrassing.. she got almost exactly the same number of votes Obama got 4 years before and he was extremely popular.. difference is that Trump got over 2 million MORE votes than Romney got...

But I agree with your premise, Romney was a dork but he wasn't decidedly "unlikeable".. Trump was very unlikeable.. so in hindsight, she should have received MORE of the moderate votes..

But she is also quite unlikeable..

Donna Brazile?

Isn't she the scum bag that was working for CNN as a commentator as she fed upcoming Debate questions to Hillary?

I agree, but she was a terrible bet from the get-go. Her favorables had been underwater for years, and she was under FBI investigation. But the DNC had more or less decided it was "her turn".

Also, I think it was clear early on that this was an election of "outsiders" - both parties have more or less screwed large pockets of the country over. A candidate was needed to say 'I'm different' rather than 'look how well we've done for you'.

Do you believe it was a good thing this election was a season of “outsiders”?

Sometimes I feel people allow nostalgia to guide their beliefs on how the government should operate, instead of understanding what it is now and what it will be in the future.

I also think people don’t have the necessary perspective to understand that in order to remain the title/label/fairytale/belief of being the #1 country in the world, the ability to adapt and progress must be priority. But instead we have people refusing to change from whatever they use to believe America was, is, or stood for.

I also feel like this election divided us even more to the point where the world has serious reservations on our ability to lead and have taken actions to move on without the US.

I understand Hillary is a scumbag and every adjective in the dictionary not a synonym of “good”. However, I will still vote for Hillary 10/10 over Trump based on my beliefs.

It could've been. I certainly don't think it went the right way, obviously.

But the mold has to be broken. We've gotten to the point where the GOP is just a bunch of reactionary snake handlers, and the Democrats are pretty much just running the GOP government of the late 80's and early 90's.

That model can't sustain itself.



I think we earned those reservations a long time ago, depending on what one means by "world".

But having a mentally ill moron ranting through his hissy fits on a daily basis doesn't really inspire confidence.



I agree, but she was a bad play. That was evident not only in hindsight.

Yes. She was fired by CNN, then made interim head of the DNC by HRC/DNC when Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to step down. Schultz went to work for the Clinton campaign. But there is nothing to see here, just Bernie Bros whining.

I beg to differ. I believe rigging an election as we have been told over the last year is criminal, and needs investigated by special counsel.

Trump won the popular vote in 30 States

I saw Elisabeth Warren tell a CNN reporter when asked if the Democrat Primary was rigged reply, Yes, Yes it certainly was!

honest question that no one can answer with all of this.

Lets say Jr. meeting with that lawyer for dirt on Clinton was collusion and illegal.

does that not mean Hillary obtaining that dossier form Russia was illegal as well?

now we are hearing about funds being taken from local and state races to fund her directly.....how is that not theft? seems like one party wants to have a separate set of rules for each side of the aisle.