Donna Brazile Says Clinton Campaign Took Over The DNC

The former interim DNC chair writes that she "followed the money" to find a "shocking truth."
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Donna Brazile, former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, opened up about the financial chaos within the DNC and said that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign gained control of the committee well before Clinton was the party’s nominee.

Politico featured an excerpt from Brazile’s book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House, which comes out Nov. 7. In it, Brazile describes finding out that the Clinton campaign was keeping the DNC financially afloat, “for which [Clinton] expected to wield control of its operations,” Brazile writes.

Brazile says she was in the dark about the committee’s financial situation when she took over as interim chair. She writes that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the previous chair, “hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party.”

Brazile said Wasserman Schultz had allowed the DNC’s spending to get out of control before striking a deal with Clinton’s campaign “to sustain the DNC,” in the words of the Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer, Gary Gensler.

The excerpt concludes with Brazile’s phone call to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Clinton’s Democratic opponent in 2016, during which Brazile tells Sanders that Clinton’s campaign had taken power over the DNC’s finances long before Clinton defeated him.

“When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger,” Brazile writes. “We would go forward. We had to.”

Brazile has spoken about her displeasure with the DNC before, saying she “knew things were amiss” when she stepped in as interim chair.

Brazile resigned as a CNN contributor in late Oct. 2016 after WikiLeaks released an email showing that she’d received advance questions before a town hall event and gave them to Clinton’s campaign. Brazile later called that move “a mistake I will forever regret.”

Representatives for Clinton, Sanders, Wasserman Schultz and former President Barack Obama did not immediately reply to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Read Brazile’s story at Politico.

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