When I was asked to run the Democratic Party after the
Russians hacked our emails, I stumbled onto a shocking truth about the Clinton
campaign.
Robyn
Beck/Getty Images
Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my
living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I
knew would be an emotional phone call.
I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the
Democratic National Committee after the convention 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. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month
or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might
have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.
So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at
a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant
debt. 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.
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.
By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I
had found my proof and it broke my heart.
***
The Saturday morning after the
convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of
Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was
broke and $2 million in debt.
“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and
they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no
problems.”
That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s
campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24
million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to
vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly.
Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for
America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising
vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in
2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.
If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that
none of the other officers knew about it, either. That
was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of
the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and
let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she
told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke
the news.
On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million
loan, which the campaign had arranged.
“No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take
out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”
“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked.
“I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described
the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to
confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life
support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the
campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house. Under FEC law,
an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential
campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties
and a party’s national committee.
Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution
limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the
Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two
states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and
$33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and
transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states
usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money
directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.
“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for
whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that
Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”
Gary said the campaign had to do it or the
party would collapse.
“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he
explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the
DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention,
and more to prepare for the election.”
“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do
we need every month to fund the party?”
The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he
said.
I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s
operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then
the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually
shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had
chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll,
and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.
When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this
mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management
of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that
kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just
be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going
to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if
Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand
the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.
Right around the time of the convention,
the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the
state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to
support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2,
2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the
states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from
the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will
happen.”
Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the
$82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s
campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in
August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially
… money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were
outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry
for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to
throw the nomination to Hillary.
I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance
reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not
want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to
show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they
raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.
When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I
at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising
Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.
The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former
CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified
that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would
control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign
had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and
it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required
to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data,
analytics, and mailings.
I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a
press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.
When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that
the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the
party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama
in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is
under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an
incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s
control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Gore’s
campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This
victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four
months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she
officially had the nomination.
I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal
corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the
primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the
staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct
for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none.
Then I found this agreement.
The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund
agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been
fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had
decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I
saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.
***
I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I
was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I
stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.
“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and
I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”
I discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the
candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff
ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I
described how Hillary’s campaign had taken it another step.
I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising
Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control
of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I
never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with
only weeks before the election.
Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express
outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were. The
polls were unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own
assessment?
I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls,
I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I found a
lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama
coalition and about millennials.
I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his
supporters into the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart and
hope he could muster. He might find some of her positions too centrist, and
her coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I knew
that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country
in peril. I knew he heard me. I knew he agreed with me, but I never in my life
had felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call.
When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not
out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to.
Donna Brazile is the former interim chair of
the Democratic National Committee. Excerpted from the book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that
Put Donald Trump in the White House to be published on November 7, 2017
by Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group.
