General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Inside Hillary Clintons Secret Takeover of the DNC (By DONNA BRAZILE November 02, 2017) [View all]Tom Rinaldo
(22,918 posts)You can call that a shrewd business arrangement in the political realm or you can call it making a mockery of the stated position of neutrality in regards to candidates that the DNC publicly claimed to uphold.
The DNC was in fiscal distress, and Hillary drove a hard bargain to bail it out. It made sense to her at the time. Even in August of 2015 she already presumed she would be the Democratic Party nominee for President. So she was just taking control of the DNC a little earlier than she otherwise expected to. But in return for the bridge financing she was able to arrange for the DNC, she took effective control of it's operations. That would have been standard procedures if she had waited for the nomination to be in hand. She thought it was, but in reality, as it turned out, it wasn't. The only problem is that the Democratic Party represented to the world, ito t's members, and all of its donors, big and small, that it was an honest broker, and that the Democratic Nomination for President for the 2016 campaign was not pre-determined but would be decided through the primary process with all candidates receiving fair treatment with no favorites being given behind the scenes advantages.
"The agreementsigned by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Eliasspecified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the partys 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."
...When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidates control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Gores 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."
Earlier in Donna's piece she revealed:
"Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillarys 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, Hillarys people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady...."
So Hillary got to handle over 81 million and the states less than 1 million, from a pool that in the past was set aside for both the states and the eventual winner of the nomination. In return for that, and also for full operational control of the DNC throughout the entire nominating process, the DNC was fronted twnety million by Hillary's people:
"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.
We can disagree on whether or not Hillary's campaign did anything "wrong" in the process.