Donna Brazile Needs to Back Up Her Self-Serving Claims - Josh Marshall
By JOSH MARSHALL Published NOVEMBER 3, 2017 12:15 PM
I have always had a great deal of respect for Donna Brazile. And I have tried to keep to a long time principle of not revising my view of a person simply because they do something I disagree with. I was stunned when I first read Brazile’s piece in Politico. But now having read it over a few times, I have a hard time not concluding that she’s done a serious disservice to the historical record and to all Democrats. Why this is the case, I truly don’t know. And there may be more facts to emerge that I’m not yet aware of. But here’s why I think this.
Brazile claims that the Clinton campaign and the DNC entered into a joint fundraising agreement in 2015 which gave her campaign control of the DNC long before she was nominee – ability to sign off on messaging, hiring etc. If that’s true, that is definitely not kosher. The party is supposed to be formally neutral while a presidential primary is going on.
Whether this is actually true is not really clear to me. The existence of this joint fundraising agreement was public at the time. As NBC’s Mark Murray notes here, Sanders also had such an agreement with the DNC. The key difference is that he didn’t end up raising money through it while Clinton did. There are lots of reasons why this may have been the case, all reasonable, all tied to different campaign strategies, different fundraising bases, etc.
(David Graham has a general look at Brazile’s story and questions it raises. I strongly recommend it.)
more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/donna-brazile-needs-to-back-up-her-self-serving-claims
= new reply since forum marked as read
