Donna Brazile Unloads on Hillary, and Gives SWP a Target Rich Environment!

Donna Brazile–a long time Democratic operative and DNC official–has a book coming out. And the excerpt in Politico is damning of the erstwhile leaders of the Democratic Party.

To me the most interesting reveal is that the Lightworker left the Democratic Party’s finances is an utter, absolute shambles:

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.

 

This fits with my image of Obama as Mr. Magoo, who cheerily drove along, always coming out ahead, while leaving carnage in his wake. We already knew about how Democratic officeholders at the state, local, and Congressional levels were scourged during the Obama administration: now we know he did the same to the Democratic Party’s finances.

This, in turn, left the DNC vulnerable to the Clinton mafia, who basically extended juice loans to the DNC. In return for financing the party to allow it to exist, Hillary’s campaign demanded, and received, control over its finances, and most of its key personnel choices. Hillary used this arrangement to launder campaign contributions in a way that clearly was intended to circumvent federal limits on donations to individual campaigns.

Oh, and “launder” isn’t my word choice: it’s Politico’s. Here’s how Brazile explains it:

“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 [i.e., Clinton campaign headquarters].

“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.”

The states’ take for being the front for this fundraising scheme? “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.”

Brazile claims that this was not illegal, merely unethical. I have no doubt that it was unethical. The legality is hardly obvious, given that it effectively allowed the Clinton campaign to blow through the $2,700 limit on individual contributions to campaigns. Blow through by a factor of 13. That’s all. No big deal, right?

Hillary, you might recall, claimed to be a stalwart supporter of campaign finance reform. But here she was playing a shell game that made a travesty of existing contribution limits.

And who is this “Gary”, you ask?

GiGi! That’s right. The Gary is none other than Gary Gensler. The Saint of the CFTC. Crusader for financial probity. Yet he was neck deep in a scheme that not only was a mockery of the campaign finance system, but which also effectively made the DNC the adjunct of the Clinton campaign during the primary season, when it was supposed to be non-partisan.

Ah, what ambition does to a man’s morals, eh there, Gar? Appalling. It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . .  but for the Secretary of the Treasury . . .

Brazile seems to cut Gensler some slack. After all, he didn’t negotiate the deal. He just counted the beans.

Like Al Capone’s accountant.

There’s one other terribly revealing thing about all this. No, not that Hillary is a grotesquely unethical and manipulative woman: that’s hardly news. What’s eye opening is that she was so insecure that she felt that she had to rig the Democratic primaries by suborning the DNC, and making it her creature.

Yet the woman who was so nervous about winning her own party’s nomination wants us to believe that the only way she wasn’t anointed as president must have been the nefarious doings of the likes of the Russians and Jim Comey.

And now that I mention the Russians, consider this. An alternative explanation for the release of the DNC emails is that it was the work of a disenchanted Bernie Bro, not a Russian hacker. I always thought this was plausible, and none other than stalwart Democratic operative Donna Brazile makes it eminently clear that Bernie supporters working in the DNC would have had every reason to be outraged, because their guy was getting shafted the way only the Clintons can.

So by going after Hillary, Donna Brazile has created a target rich environment for the likes of me. Not just Hillary, but Obama, Gary Gensler, and the Russians hacked the DNC conventional wisdom. And that was just an excerpt. I can hardly imagine what the whole book will bring.

I never thought I’d say this, but here it goes: Thanks, Donna!