Trump never really lies. He gets things slightly wrong sometimes but he is brutally honest. He can't keep a secret. He was "wiretapped" and Clinton IS a crook.
| What Brazile’s revelation is — and isn’t There’s been a lot of confusion about the significance of Brazile’s allegations since her story was published. Brazile did not allege, as CNN reported in this chyron, that the DNC “robbed” Sanders of the nomination. She also did not claim to have been shocked by the existence of a fundraising agreement between Clinton and the DNC, since that agreement has been public for at least two years. Instead, Brazile’s account is explosive for what it tells us — for the first time — about the nature of the fundraising agreement between Clinton and the DNC. What she charges is that the DNC, when starved for financial resources, agreed to trade a seemingly large part of its autonomy for Clinton’s help raising money — and that this agreement was inked in August 2015, long before voting in the 2016 Democratic primary had even begun. Now, this deal does not guarantee that Sanders would have won the nomination without the obstruction of the DNC, as his supporters have long alleged. But it does at least suggest that Clinton’s team had veto power over some of the DNC’s decisions during the primary. Brazile writes that she concluded this was “proof” that Democrats tipped the nomination against Sanders, and that she told him about the agreement in a phone call before the general election. (Brazile herself had been implicated in tipping the scales of the primary after it was revealed she had given Clinton parts of debate questions ahead of time.) “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,” Brazile wrote. After discovering the document, she said, “I had found my proof and it broke my heart.” A brief lesson in joint fundraising committees The key to understanding Brazile’s conclusion and the current controversy is to understand the unusual fundraising apparatus at its center: the joint fundraising committee. JFCs exist as a clever loophole to skirt existing campaign finance laws. Under current law, the most an individual donor can give to a presidential campaign committee is $2,700 per election. An individual donor can also give up to $33,400 to the DNC, and up to $10,000 to each state party committee. But by existing as a group, the "joint committee" can get a big fat check that would be far too large for it to legally receive if its members were fundraising alone, according to Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics. So a single donor could give around $353,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund, on the principle that money would go to the presidential committee, the DNC, and 32 state parties. Now, the JFCs aren’t loved by campaign finance or good-government experts, but they’re not entirely out of the ordinary. Before his grassroots fundraising juggernaut took off, for instance, Sanders also had an agreement for a joint fundraising committee with the DNC. Donald Trump has a joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee. They’re effective ways to tap donors who can give much more than $2,700. And when Clinton’s JFC began, it appeared that all three parties involved had a great deal of mutual interest: Clinton would bring her big-money donors to the table, giving groups like the Democratic Party of Utah access to George Clooney’s wallet that it would never otherwise get. In exchange, Clinton could broaden her fundraising pitch by saying — as she did on several occasions — that she was raising money not just for herself but for the benefit of the entire Democratic Party. But then it turned out that the money was not being shared between the three parties. Reporting by Politico showed that 99 percent of the money raised by the committee ended up going to the DNC or to Clinton's campaign directly. Some of the state party chairs objected — often anonymously, for fear of reprisal from national Democrats — but the DNC defended an agreement that appeared to starve it of resources and direct them almost entirely to Clinton’s team. At the time, both Sanders and campaign finance experts thought Clinton was avoiding the spirit if not the letter of the law. "It's a circumvention of the contribution limits on the national party," Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, told me at the time. "The victim here is anybody who thinks there's anything meaningful left to contribution limits." But the document revealed by Brazile adds a new dimension to this story, suggesting that the Clinton team had control over the DNC throughout this fundraising process that cut out the state parties. |
Atta boy, Trump!
He was a con man. Just like Trump is.