Few have noticed that Donna Brazile's "damning" document -- the agreement between the Clinton campaign and the DNC -- is not online. We have to rely purely on her word that the thing exists and that it reads the way she says it reads.

This absence is suspicious. Why no link to a pdf?

The same thought may have occurred to you that occurred to me: If this document is real, then why didn't we see it when the Russians hacked the DNC? This morning, Josh Marshall published a fascinating find...

There is what at least appears to be a draft of the agreement in the Wikileaks Podesta cache of all places and from what I can tell it doesn’t include any of this.

By "this," Marshall refers to the parts of the agreement that are not "kosher." We know about these parts only from Brazile; we have no other evidence that this material exists. Everything in the document we have is, in fact, perfectly "kosher" and innocent.

Marshall goes on to offer these caveats:

Again, that version is just a draft. The final copy could definitely have included other codicils or side agreements. It’s possible I’m misinterpreting the document. I’d ask campaign types to take a look.

You can find the Wikileaks version of the agreement here. It's a Word document. It doesn't look like a draft to me. Absolutely nothing about it indicates a draft. It's very detailed and well-formatted, with a codicil and spaces for signatures.

Moreover: The file is not labeled "DRAFT." It is labeled "FINAL."

It seems obvious that either the Russians or stateside Trump supporters found this FINAL agreement in the DNC cache and decided to use a falsified version to whip up some Hillary-hate just when things were looking bleak for Trump. By washing the falsifications through Brazile, they don't have to show an actual document. She can function as the fall guy if and when the whole thing is shown to be bogus.

I've signed a few agreements in my time. I have never seen a draft agreement labeled "FINAL" -- and neither, I'm pretty sure, have you. Lawyers are very careful about such things.

Let us suppose, hypothetically, that the Wikileaks document really did bear the label "DRAFT." Have you ever seen so drastic a rewrite between the draft and the final version? Offhand, I cannot recall reading about a legal agreement which was drafted to say one thing and then massively re-worded to say something extremely different.

Why did Brazile go along with the plan? I don't know, but I suspect that she had an encounter with some James-Spader-as-Raymond-Reddington type. I don't know the carrot and I don't know the stick, but I do know that nearly everyone can be manipulated and pressured.