Hillary Clinton took control of the National Democratic Party and its money in August 2015, long before she secured the presidential nomination, said former party interim chair Donna Brazile, and used that power to deny Bernie Sanders any chance of defeating her in the primary.
In a Politico excerpt of her upcoming book on Thursday, the longtime Democratic operative said she discovered the secret Clinton-DNC agreement after she was left to investigate the national party when hacked emails suggested the fix was in for Clinton during the Democratic primary.
"… 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," Brazile said about the document that was signed four months before Clinton even announced her candidacy for president and year before securing the nomination.
Brazile said Clinton's campaign not only had financial control of the National Democratic Party, but then started raiding state parties, leaving little funds to support Democrats in down-ballot races, said the Politico except of "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House."
Brazile, who was Al Gore's presidential campaign manager in 2000, slammed not only the Clinton campaign, but her party chair predecessor Debbie Wasserman Schultz and President Barack Obama.
"… 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," Brazile wrote, according to Politico. "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.”
"Bernie's people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary,” Brazile wrote. “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.”
“How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks. By Sept. 7, the day I called Bernie (Sanders), I had found my proof and it broke my heart."
When a Politico story described the arrangement as “'essentially … money laundering' for the Clinton campaign, Hillary's people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady," Brazile wrote, per Politico.
In Clinton's book "What Happened," she blamed Sanders for inflicting "lasting damage" to her campaign during the Democratic primary season, opening the door for Trump for using the "Crooked Hillary" slogan in his campaign, CNN reported.
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