Donna Brazile changes tone on Hillary Clinton’s control of DNC in 2016

Former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile seemed to take a different tone Tuesday with her description of what happened inside the Democratic Party in 2016.

“Hillary Clinton did something for the party that everyone should understand,” Ms. Brazile said on CBS News. “The party was broke, and she gave the party a lifeline of resources in order for us to compete and that’s what she did for the general election.”

Ms. Brazile was explaining her take of what happened when she took over as interim party chair last summer after Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned. Mrs. Schultz was revealed to have a bias against Sen. Bernard Sanders’ campaign in favor of Mrs. Clinton in internal email exchanges that were hacked and released to the public, prompting her resignation.

“I’m a member of the Democratic establishment in terms of I’m on the rules committee,” Ms. Brazile pushed back. “It is a fair fight. We don’t set primary dates. They’re set by the states.”

But that seemed to go against the excerpt of her book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” released last week, in which she detailed how the Clinton campaign funded the DNC and exerted control over the party.

Ms. Brazile said in the excerpt, released by Politico, she was angered by the failure of leadership under Mrs. Schultz arguing the former DNC chair did not focus on fundraising efforts, and was still paying off costs from the 2012 campaign.

Ms. Brazile describes how the party was taken over by the Clinton machine in August 2015 — more than a year before Mrs. Clinton was the official nominee — due to her campaign’s contributions to the party.

“As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations,” Ms. Brazile writes in the excerpt.

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.