Bleeding Edge

After hearing of Hillary Clinton’s rigging of the primary elections against Bernie Sanders, by none other than Donna Brazile, the ex-chair of the DNC, who actually assisted in the “Rigging” and even “fed” Hillary the debate questions while she worked for CNN as a contributor to the debates.

Donna Brazile today threw Hillary under the proverbial bus, and she was swiftly followed by Elizabeth Warren, who did the same to her loser Siamese twin cat — the slightly crooked, Hillary Clinton.

Here are Donna Brazile’s own words, in excerpts from her new book:

“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.

“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.

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.”

After Donna Brazil, all the other women of the DNC and of the Democratic party try now to distance themselves from Hillary Clinton and her web of corruption, because they finally realize that being crooked and nasty is not exactly how they want to be remembered and they best fix their make-up and pretend complete ignorance…

Is it a coincidence now that the majority of all Democrats, have a favorable view of former president George W. Bush, instead of Hillary?

And is it any wonder that in the wake of the islamic terrorist truck attack against bicyclists pedaling along on a bike lane, in New York City — some inside the Democratic leadership are seized by the same curious nostalgia for Bush over Obama or Clinton?

“When terrorism has struck us in the past, presidents have brought us together,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted, along with a photo of Bush with a firefighter at Ground Zero, shortly after 9-11. “It’s a shame this president can’t.”

But it’s not a shame.

The only shame is that the Police, the FBI, and the Justice department have not yet caught up with Hillary Clinton…

What Democrats are really saying is that they hate Hillary Clinton now, but that they also hate President Trump so much, that even President Bush, who during his presidency was even compared to Hitler, elicits fond memories in their darkest nights…

Yet for us, this schizophrenic attitude, also brings up the disconnection between the fake rhetoric the Democratic lawmakers deploy, and the policies that they pursue.

Their attitude stands in stark relief with the reality of their slavish attitude all these years towards Hillary Clinton and her bought and owned DNC.

Yet even as the Democratic lawmakers stuck to the typical partisan script to attack Bush during his presidency, all the Democrats, starting with Hillary Clinton, supported such blatant policy failures as the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, all in obedience to the “Fake News” of weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam Husein in IRAQ — when none existed, and when the Democrats had an opportunity to stop Cheney’s bush from lying to them and to the World.

So whatever authentic momentary feelings of national unity post-9/11 that Bush might have stirred in people, they weren’t worth the terrible policy outcomes, of his and Cheney’s lies and conspiracies.

Of course Bush’s conciliatory rhetoric simply provided the cover for Democrats to support Cheney’s truly hateful & illiberal policies, in the name of “national security” while pretending to maintain a certain distance from him in their own rhetoric.

President Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t take that tack. He spent the aftermath of the NYC terror attack the same way he spends a lot of his time in the public eye, sniping at his perceived enemies and making bombastic statements that rile up his and the oppostition’s base.

Trump doesn’t try to mask his policy proposals in the flowery language of unity and higher purpose.

He simply says what he is going to do, and then he does what he said that he’ll do.

Simple as that.

But the Democrats have a long record of being held unaccountable, so they continue to lie through their teeth and to scheme wildly, like some resurrected Byzantine courtiers, of the Sublime Gate.

Contrast that with Trump’s openness, transparency and plain talk.

Trump’s unwillingness to dress up the “talk” is a positive development for all of us. And if he were even more adept at it, by leaving out the barbs against his opponents — he would have been able to help form the kind of bipartisan coalition if not consensus under which all of his policies would get broad approval without much, if any, substantive debate.

Because while Bush took care in his rhetoric not to blame all of Islam for 9/11 nor to stray from the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants, this was not reflected in many of the broadly supported policies unrolled in the aftermath of the islamic terrorist attacks against New York.

Counting on the sixteen years since 9/11, that both parties have supported an increasingly expansive war on terror that is waged in Muslim countries around the world and, through surveillance and other measures, is also waged against Americans themselves.

And as the Migration Policy Institute noted on the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the immigration landscape transformed dramatically in the decade since—policy was viewed primarily “through the lens of national security.” Stricter immigration controls of all kinds enjoyed broad bipartisan support.

At the same time, the consensus after the 9/11 attacks did not include any substantive interest in comprehensive immigration reform. It did, however, extend to mass surveillance and a constantly overheated global war on terror, much of which was solidified during the Obama presidency, and whose blowback we ‘enjoy” right now under newly elected President Trump.

As a matter of fact, eleven of the Democratic senators who voted for the PATRIOT Act in 2002 are still in office, including Schumer, the minority leader, who also voted in favor of the Iraq War and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Since 9/11, terrorist attacks have become decentralized—far less deadly, their mundane targets and tactics make them relatively more common. While the odds of an American being killed in a terror attack are still overwhelmingly long, the political class is just as susceptible to policy-making as emotional reaction as ever before.

Hillary Clinton, suggested on the campaign trail of 2016 before the elections that: “Closing the internet up in some way” in response to what she perceived to be radicalization of islamic terrorists online. Indeed there is bipartisan eagerness in imposing more controls on the internet, and internet companies, in the name of national security.

Trump can be a little tome deaf, or just playing to his base, because I cannot otherwise explain his unwillingness to tone his rhetoric down, in order to take advantage of that “eagerness” to advance his own agenda.

However, his trips abroad should be a welcome development to any skeptic of the policies wrought by the war on terror so far, because the President seems to become far more reconciliatory every day he spends outside of the US being exposed to other people and foreign cultures.

As Mark Twain said there is not a better education to be found than traveling overseas. Journeying far is a great learning experience for anyone of us, and it is a curative for all human frailties and fears…

Keep going Mr President — keep going.

Go travel far, and you’ll go far, back home as well.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

It is indeed strange AF.

Yet keep in mind that stranger things have happened…

And maybe this augurs a time that Hillary Clinton will have to face the music for her malfeasance…

This past week, must have been some kind of Halloween for Hillary.

Seems the wicked green witch is no longer infallible, and maybe even prone to prosecution.