“This is my truth,” says Donna Brazile, the two-time DNC chairwoman of her self-contradictory bestseller.
On the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving, more than 200 people packed into Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., to hear her tell that truth. It’s the hometown leg of the blue-haired Louisianan’s book tour for Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.
“This is my truth,” she tells us, and suggests each of us buy a copy or two, “and I had the audacity to tell it.” Indeed she’s been talking so long that “at any moment I’m going to break into song,” she warns. Already tonight Brazile has talked to Chris Matthews on Hardball and Sean Hannity on his program, the latter appearance earning a shake of her head and an eye roll—followed by a flutter of sarcastic applause from the audience.
“I became chair for the second time on July 24. It wasn’t a job that I wanted,” she explains, but she “answered the call to serve.” (Debbie Wasserman Schultz had just resigned in the wake of the release by hackers of emails making it appear that the committee favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.)
Then she quotes Maya Angelou, “There’s no greater agony than the burden of an untold story inside of you.” The hacking of the DNC, she feared, would be her untold burden thanks to a non-disclosure agreement she signed during the campaigns.
She also wanted to steer the story: “I was afraid everyone would focus on the discord. My emails were leaked!”
“This is my story,” she insists. “I wasn’t paid by Hillary Clinton, and I’ve been very insulted by some of the quote-on-quote things that were said about my intentions.” Some of the misleading and contradictory characterizations of Brazile’s actions and motivations, however, come from her own account.
She writes in the book, for instance, that she now can’t recall ever having emailed Hillary Clinton a debate question in advance—which Wikileaks revealed and Brazile apologized for last October. In the book, she waffles about whether the DNC rigged the 2016 primary in Hillary’s favor—the explosive claim at the crux of a splashy excerpt, published under the headline “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC.”
Her truth’s got a little something for everyone: Clinton fans, resentful Sanders supporters, DNC dumpster-fire watchers, anyone who wants a break from the drama that did manage to make its way to the White House. Whatever your bias, “There are many ways to read my book,” she tells us.
The book, which is dedicated to Seth Rich, even toys with conspiracy theories about his cause of death. “With all that I knew about the Russians’ hacking, I could not help but wonder if they had played some part in his unsolved murder,” she writes.
Elsewhere, the story conflicts with her prior statements—and it even contradicts its own account of whether the primary was rigged. As in the excerpted passage published in Politico, on page 95 in Hacks, she writes of taking over the party machine and seeking answers as to “whether or not Hillary’s team had rigged the party process in her favor.” She writes, “I had found my proof, and it broke my heart.” Later, in a chapter tensely titled “The Terror Comes Home,” she doubles down, writing that Bernie Sanders “had legitimate reasons to complain about the actions of handful of people at the DNC, and I had been totally forthcoming to him about that.”
But a half-hour into her talk at Politics and Prose, Brazile offers a different account: “I told Bernie what I knew to be true,” she says, “that it was not rigged.”
What was actually true, one wonders: Was there another truth she didn’t tell him?
“Overall,” whatever that means, apparently not. In the book, she pans the outsider ethos and self-righteousness of the prototypical “Bernie Bro,” and suggests Sanders should have been more grateful for the party’s embrace, writing, “Overall the game was not rigged against him. He knew this.”
Armed with these seeming contradictions—and some quotes from her talk about the power of truth-telling—I stand in the line for book signings that snakes all the way around the store. When it finally comes down to me and another reporter, a woman from the Washington Post who’s also been hanging back waiting to ask a question, I jump in, thinking I’ve got her stumped for sure:
How could you both have found heartbreaking proof the DNC rigged the Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders—and yet now say definitively that it was not rigged in Hillary’s favor?
“Think about it. It’s an easy explanation. Who sets the D.C. primary date? The D.C. government. Same with Maryland. When you say the word rig, how do you rig a primary when the dates are set by the state parties?” I thought about it. “There was no proof,” she says, and signs my book.
She may have written on page 95 that she found proof—but, “I said I found the cancer,” she counters. “The cancer was the joint fundraising agreement that allowed her campaign to run three divisions of the DNC.”
Brazile describes Hillary Clinton’s grip on the Democratic party as a cancer, but can no longer truly say the race was rigged in her favor because Hillary herself didn’t write the calendar. Donna Brazile’s truth—whatever that actually is—just must be more sophisticated than mine. It contains multitudes.
