Interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile sent information to a top Clinton campaign official about an upcoming a question she got “in advance” one day before a very similar question was asked at a CNN Town Hall, according to hacked emails published by WikiLeaks.
On March 12, Brazile — who at the time was DNC vice chair and a CNN and ABC contributor — wrote Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri an email reading “From time to time I get the questions in advance.”
“Here’s one that worries me about HRC,” Brazile wrote.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/wikileaks-email-hack-clinton-donna-brazile-229609
It turns out that Ms. Brazile, advisor to Bill Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 campaigns, was simply a fount of useful information.
… Brazile, when working as a DNC vice chair, forwarded to the Clinton campaign a January 2016 email obtained from the Bernie Sanders campaign, released by Sarah Ford, Sanders’ deputy national press secretary, announcing a [upcoming] Twitter storm from Sanders’ African-American outreach team. “FYI” Brazile wrote to the Clinton staff. “Thank you for the heads up on this Donna,” replied Clinton campaign spokesperson Adrienne Elrod.
So Donna was sending internal emails from the Sanders campaign to Clinton’s team. [emphasis added] How you explain this as anything other than collusion to help out Hillary is a mystery, so there seems to be pretty much zero difference between her behavior during the primary and that of the woman she replaced.
As I mentioned above, Brazile was a regular fixture on CNN all through the primary. (And for a long time before that as well.) I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I heard Donna opining on the Democrats’ primary battle and prefacing her remarks by saying that she didn’t have a dog in that fight or a horse in that race or whatever the slogan of the day might be. When the accusations of collusion between the DNC and Clinton originally began flying, Brazile was among the first to jump up and swat the stories down, saying that the allocation of resources, scheduling of debates and other committee functions were all designed to give the voters a fair and honest choice.
Turns out that she was doing pretty much the same thing as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz the entire time. I somehow doubt that this particular email was the only evidence of her support of Clinton over Sanders and we just happened to discover it. The fix was in at the DNC to lock Sanders out of the race from the beginning. The real question now is whether their voters will hold Brazile to the same standard and demand that she be replaced as well. Since they’re now in full general election mode that would give the appearance of trouble in paradise for Team Hillary so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for anything to be done.
One Clinton supporter who took umbrage at my framing of these revelations said that while Brazile’s actions might “technically be cheating”, it hardly mattered given how certain Clinton had been to win the primaries in any case.
Yes, the time has come again to debate what “is” is.
[UPDATE: October 13]
A new email obtained by POLITICO is shedding more light on the mystery of whether and how interim DNC chair Donna Brazile might have obtained the text of a proposed question from a town hall between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in advance, and possibly shared it with the Clinton campaign. …
The email obtained by POLITICO was written by town hall co-moderator Roland Martin on the day of the town hall to CNN producers. But it shows him using word for word the language of a question that Brazile appeared to have sent to the Clinton campaign a day earlier. …
The wording, spacing, capitalization are identical. [emphasis added]
The Clinton apologists who tried to say “What campaign wouldn’t have expected a question about the death penalty?” will have to try a little harder.