Donna Brazile wants you to forget what she did last year.
The former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee is out today with a tell-all about how she “stumbled onto” the Clinton campaign’s “secret takeover” of the Democrats’ formal governing body.
Brazile’s story – which alleges the DNC agreed in 2015 to a fundraising scheme with the Clinton camp wherein the former secretary of state was supposedly awarded an overwhelming advantage in the primary – is full of remorse and expressions of regret. There is also a lot of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, and all of it directed at former DNC leadership and the Clinton camp.
Most notable about Brazile’s account, however, is what’s missing. There are no mentions, for example, of her attempts to tilt the Democratic primary in Clinton’s favor. There are no mentions of Brazile’s brazen lies after it was revealed she fed debate questions to the former secretary of state. The way she tells it, she was merely a witness to the Clintons’ and former DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s, D-Fla., unethical behavior.
Brazile’s election confession, which appeared this week in Politico, may seem like an act of coming clean. It may seem like a good-faith effort to explain what went wrong for the Democrats in 2016.
Don’t be fooled.
This is a patently obvious attempt by a long-time political operative to ensure she ends up on the winning side of the Democratic Party’s civil war. Now that the Clinton wing is on the wane, and party bosses seem eager to rid themselves finally of the deeply unpopular former secretary of state, Brazile is trying to make sure she doesn’t also disappear. She is trying to protect her future with the party by currying favor with emerging factions, including the one championed last year by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Throwing the Clintons and former DNC heads under the bus is one way to do it.
The woman who now writes, “I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the [DNC] … that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested,” is the same woman who claimed last year that she was being persecuted when she was questioned about emails that showed she operated on Clinton’s behalf during the primary.
Related: As a Democrat, I’m appalled by the (alleged) conduct of the DNC and the Clinton campaign
Brazile writes that she was distraught when she discovered the DNC had been financially gutted by the Obama administration. She writes that she was doubly distraught when she learned party chiefs, who had grown desperate after years of neglect and mismanagement, were comfortable with the Clintons’ fundraising scheme. Brazile also writes that she was distressed when she read a May 2, 2016, report alleging the Clinton campaign treated the DNC like a money laundering operation, eating up donations for itself and sending basically nothing down-ballot.
“I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie [to root out possible primary rigging] and did not want to disappoint him,” Brazile writes.
She also said she was sad when she called Sanders to tell him she believed the Clinton campaign had indeed acted unethically during the primary.
This is pretty rich considering the weeks Brazile spent last year lying about her efforts to secure Clinton the nomination. None of this is mentioned in her story, obviously, because this isn’t about telling the truth.
Brazile is not wrong when she alleges mismanagement and desperation at the DNC. The Clinton and Obama camps really do seem have done a number on their party’s own governing body. But let’s not take the bait. Her goal here is to whitewash her involvement in Clinton’s (second) failed presidential bid. Brazile’s goal here is to cover up her complicity in a system she now claims was rigged.
She bet on the wrong horse in 2016, and now she’s trying to rewrite history to ensure she survives the coming housecleaning. Going public with this “tell-all” is a face-saving, self-serving gesture of the most obvious sort.
Also, let’s not lose sight of the fact that we’re only now hearing about this supposed “secret takeover” because Brazile secured a book deal. Indeed, her story as it appeared this week in Politico is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House.” Brazile obviously has her reasons for not mentioning any of this during the election or in the 12 months that followed.
None of this should surprise us.
Brazile is as unethical a political trickster as they come (remember: She resigned from the Dukakis campaign in 1988 after she tried to spread a rumor alleging George H. W. Bush was involved in an extramarital affair). She is not above lying to advance her own goals.
Were Brazile a reliable source, some other notable takeaways from her story would include that Rep. Wasserman Schultz is a terrible manager and that the Democrats don’t understand budgeting.
But to believe any of these things, including that bit about the Clinton’s “secret takeover,” you’d first have to believe that Brazile is a trustworthy messenger.
Considering this is Brazile we’re talking about here, that’s a lot to ask.
