Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said Thursday that Sen. Bernie Sanders has every right to be upset about the 2016 Democratic primary.
“To see that the Hillary Clinton campaign was funding the DNC and in return demanded total control of the DNC before she was the nominee, shows how truly broken the DNC was,” Mrs. McDaniel said on Fox News, referring to the Democratic National Committee. “Donna Brazile has shed light on the total dysfunction of the DNC and how clearly they put their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton.”
Mrs. McDaniel was referring to Ms. Brazile’s piece in Thursday’s Politico, in which she described the state the party was in when she took over. The piece was an excerpt from her coming book “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that put Donald Trump in the White House,” out Nov. 7.
Ms. Brazile said in the piece she was angered by the revelation and the failure of leadership under Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who ran the DNC before Ms. Brazile took over as interim chair. Ms. Brazile said the party was bankrupt after Ms. Wasserman Schultz did not focus in fundraising efforts and was still paying off costs from the 2012 campaign. She said the only way the party survived was from the money Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was providing.
The party still carries a heavy debt load and has had minimal success in fundraising efforts so far this year.
In the excerpt, Ms. Brazile describes how the party was taken over by the Clinton machine in August of 2015, over a year before Mrs. Clinton was the official nominee. Parties typically do not give control over to a candidate in an open race until he or she wins the nomination. Only when the party incumbent is running does the party relinquish control at the start of the race.
• Sally Persons can be reached at spersons@washingtontimes.com.
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