It didn't take long for the haters to come out for Donna Brazile.

You are aware that Wonkette is a humor commentary magazine, right?

I loved her on "The Good Wife."

Dear Donna has given us another opportunity to have an honest conversation about the 2016 primary and how we can do better in the future, for the 10,000th time...

Left-of-whatever, not everything, almost not anything, is supposed to be knee-jerk partisanship. Right, truth, responsibility, decency all should come first.

the neo-leftists just loved them some Donna.

No "scandal" here, no party falling apart, blah, blah.

Thanks ehrnst.

Hillary as a Democrat bailed out the DNC and somehow it's a bad thing. That makes as much sense as Hillary colluded with the Russians so she could lose the election. Maybe it's time for Brazile to retire.

KR

For about the millionth time.....

with righteous indignation, of course.

This is like Christmas for them.

Putin must pay really well.

I love(d?) Donna Brazile. What happened. I've not read the book but from what I've seen, she should have called Wonkette to fact check the draft.

and if dems and liberals and bernie supporters want a real democracy they better stop ignoring trumps best weapon

No doubt her continuing presence led to a loss of donations.

And poof goes another Hillary conspiracy meme.

Thumbs up to Wonkette for the piece and for making me laugh at the same time.

It's great to have the true, factual story and not one cut, pasted,falsely edited, and D'Souzaed by the you know whos.

Bravo Wonkette! Right on target as usual. Thanks for posting it, ehrnst.

HAPPY to see Wonkette tackling this MESSY situation with humor and FACTS.

Some folks don't like facts, but oh well

Link to tweet

Wonkette just took the air out of Brazile. Not that the regular media will do any fact checking on this nonsense. Whoever did the fact checking on Brazile’s books should fired.

Looks like Brazile may have not read the date on the "cancer" that she saw.... and mistook it for something signed in 2015.


https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/2/1712064/-Chasing-links-Brazile-book-excerpt-may-describe-Joint-Financing-Agreement-after-primary-was-won

Facts are facts, even if they don't "resonate" with your confirmation bias. Whoever gathered the dates and the news reports - including a link to the wikileaks released document HRC signed in 2015 (which doesn't have the control provisions that Brazile described) all make the case that Brazile was unaware she was reading the June 2016 update, and not the 2015 agreement.

Perhaps making assumptions about something you didn't read carefully "resonates" with you? Brazile herself makes the case she didn't understand what she was reading.

Brazile "wondering why I had to clear everything through Brooklyn" shows she didn't have a clue that the DNC turns over control of the party to the nominee when they win, like they did with Obama once he became the nominee in 2008. That's not "a guess." Those are her words.

"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."

Brazile came on in July - Clinton won the nomination in June. So all that "suspicious activity with HRC running things" is based on her ignorance of that second agreement, and when it was signed.

Perhaps if she had read Politico in June, she wouldn't have needed to "uncover" anything...

What Wonkette did in its disingenuous attempt to make the problem go away was what we've seen far too much of on DU today:

1. Raise a whole bunch of straw men and attack them. The Wonkette piece says that the primary wasn't rigged. That's different from denying what Brazile actually wrote -- about the gist of the agreement between the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

2. State falsely that this was publicly disclosed already, relying on this article from Politico in 2015. The linked Politico article talks about fundraising but says absolutely nothing about the extensive control over the DNC that was secretly ceded to the Clinton campaign.

3. Obfuscate the difference between agreements about money and agreements about control. The Wonkette author writes:

Last edited Fri Nov 3, 2017, 11:08 AM - Edit history (2)

because it was in the Politico article in August of 2015. (linked in the Wonkette article)

But he went ahead and signed the same agreement in November 2015 that she did - and he didn't follow through with his side of it.

Wikileaks released the document HRC signed in 2015, and it doesn't have the control provisions that Brazile describes - but the updated agreement signed in June 2016, after Clinton won the nomination, would.

Link to tweet

... who isn't enacting sanctions against a country who helped him get elected sits in the White House right now

... about the jist of this whole issue being a nothing burger.

She may actually have thought she was reading the 2015 financial agreement, and not the updated June 2016 paperwork signed after Clinton. But asking people about it at the time would have been the thing to do. If she had asked "why she had to run everything through Brooklyn" when she came on in July 2016, she would have been told that the campaign took control after the nominee cinches the nomination.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/16/politics/hillary-clinton-campaign-dnc/index.html

But like Comey's letter, the damage that lie does remains.

And I'm sure Brazile's publisher is making some phone calls as we speak.

Here's what we know at this point: Donna Brazile, a prominent person with a reputation to protect, and with no particular affiliation with the Sanders campaign or his supporters, reported on a subject of which she had personal knowledge.

Now, that doesn't prove it's correct. She could have fabricated the whole story or she could have misunderstood the date on a document. But her report certainly makes a strong prima facie case.

We also know that WikiLeaks released something that was, on its face, a draft, and was not the agreement that was actually signed. It has blanks to be filled in, for crying out loud. Based on what I learned in Contracts class in my first year of law school, that document, even if signed, would not be an enforceable agreement, because of the omission of so many essential terms. We can reasonably infer that the draft released by WikiLeaks was amended before it was signed.

As a side note, we also know that, when WikiLeaks released documents that were thought to reflect adversely on Hillary Clinton, the credibility of WikiLeaks was widely assailed on DU. My guess is that, if I went to the trouble of digging up old threads and comparing them with this week's threads, I would find a statistically significant positive correlation between "attacked WikiLeaks then" and "relies on WikiLeaks now" among posters.

Taking the WikiLeaks release to be an accurate copy of an email that was sent to or from Podesta (and I think it probably is accurate, given the actual record of credibility of WikiLeaks releases), it has given rise to the speculation that no significant changes were made in the draft, that this reflects the substance of what was signed in 2015, and that Brazile thought she was looking at the 2015 document but was actually looking at something else.

I call it "speculation" because, AFAIK, no one with first-hand knowledge of the subject has come forward to state that this hypothesis is true. The DNC may be preparing such a refutation even as we speak, but one would think that, with an explosive charge, publishing a refutation based on documents already in the DNC files wouldn't have taken even this long. Under current media conditions, political parties, even when operating between national campaigns, have to develop and maintain a "rapid response" capability. So maybe this speculation is wrong, or maybe the DNC is just inexplicably slow off the mark.

It's clearly confirmation bias for so many people to have jumped on this WikiLeaks release as conclusive proof of what they want to believe.

Incidentally, even on the speculative alternative, the propriety of the action is questionable. Clinton became the nominee at the Democratic National Convention, and not before.

Brazile reported that a similar agreement was entered into with the Gore campaign in June of 2000. Nevertheless, the practice makes me uneasy, to say the least. The difference between "presumptive nominee" and "nominee" may seem purely technical to some, but I disagree. There were still disputes about the platform, and there's always the remote possibility that something horrible will surface about a presumptive nominee before the convention, causing the presumption to go unfulfilled. There's no reason to delay joint fundraising, but the remarkable cession of control described by Brazile should wait until after the convention.

No matter if the losing candidate hasn't conceded, which usually happens. Even if you don't feel comfortable with that, it was that way with Obama. The fundraising starts then for the Convention as well.

A toast to Wonkette.