Democrats: We’re Just As Shocked, Shocked As Brazile On Hillary Corruption Of DNC

Ed Morrissey:

Come on, man. The party that spent sixteen years plotting the Clinton Restoration finds itself horrified by the fact that the DNC became a subsidiary of Bill and Hillary Inc? That’s what leading Democrats tried slinging to the Washington Post’s reporters yesterday after Donna Brazile’s attempt to combine Captain Louis Renault and Nancy Drewinto a narrative where she singlehandedly discovers that the DNC sold out to Hillary.

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Many Democrats expressed outrage Thursday at allegations from a former party chairwoman that an agreement with the Democratic National Committee gave the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton some day-to-day control over the party early in the 2016 campaign. …

Some Democrats now say the arrangement is evidence that the concerns were valid. Ray Buckley, the chairman of New Hampshire’s Democratic Party, said that he first learned of the agreement while serving as DNC vice chair in 2016. “The day that Donna discovered this, she called me and I almost passed out,” Buckley said. “We were blatantly misled.”

Let’s stop here for a moment, and reflect on history. Democrats had no problem with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton running for a Senate seat in 2000 by carpetbagging into New York. They then raised no issues at all when it became clear that Hillary was running for re-election in 2006 as a means to launch a presidential campaign. Most of the establishment threw in with Hillary in the 2008 primary, only to watch her get outfought by Barack Obama (which should have sent up warning flares about the Clinton Restoration project in general). The establishment then pressed Obama to find a role for Hillary in his administration, landing at State in an obvious (and ultimately futile) attempt to boost her foreign-policy cred.

Then, four years after her tenure at State followed later by a book-tour disaster, Hillary launched her second presidential campaign. Mysteriously, no significant Democratic challenger emerged to oppose her, despite it being a wide-open primary at the end of Obama’s two terms. And no one at all suspected that the Clintons may have coopted the Democratic Party? Come on, man.

A few people may have legit gripes about this corruption, but they weren’t the ones working on Democratic campaigns:

“The idea that the DNC was willing to take a position that helped a candidate in the midst of a primary is outrageous, and there is no justification for it,” said Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign. “It gets back to the fundamental way that Bernie Sanders was running his campaign, which was to break the stranglehold of big money on politics.”

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager, said in an interview that their campaign was led to believe it had the same joint fundraising agreement as Clinton.

“We were not offered veto power on staff at the DNC, I can tell you that,” said Weaver. “This was a laundering operation. They’d go to fundraisers, they’d get a $350,000 check from donors which was supposed to be divvied up. Instead of disbursing that money, they’d turn around and run a small-dollar fundraising to generate small contributions that went to the Clinton campaign.”

Sanders and his team certainly have room to complain. Anyone within the Democratic Party over the last quarter-century cannot possiblyhope that people will buy the idea that they had no idea that the Clintons hadn’t controlled the party over that period of time.

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