The Democratic Party and the FBI failed in their response to the revelations that emails belonging to Clinton campaign officials last year were hacked, the former acting head of the party revealed.
In her new book, Hacks, which tells the story of last year’s election campaign, Donna Brazile criticized then-Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whom she would succeed as acting chairperson, for only learning about the hacks through the press.
‘On June 14, Debbie invited the Democratic Party officers to a conference call to alert us that a story about hacking the DNC that would be published in the Washington Post the following day,’ Brazile writes in the book – excerpts of which were posted Tuesday on Fox News.
Former DNC interim chair Donna Brazile (left) writes in a new book that her predecessor, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (right), did not respond quickly enough to the hacking of emails
Brazile writes that Wasserman Schultz had a tone that was ‘so casual’ in response to the hacks.
‘That call was the first time we’d heard that there was a problem.’
Just before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last year, WikiLeaks dumped a massive cache of over 19,000 emails – some of which showed that Wasserman Schultz expressed a clear preference for Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders.
The embarrassment over the revelations resulted in Wasserman Schultz resigning and Brazile taking over as interim chair.
After senior Democratic Party officials were made aware of the hacks, Brazile says that both the party leadership and the FBI displayed ‘incompetence.’
Brazile writes that the Democratic Party’s IT contractor simply ‘let it go’ after being contacted by the FBI once it learned of the hacks.
She writes that it took seven months before Wasserman Schultz was made aware of the hacks.
‘By the time Debbie finally found out about the hack, the Russians had been in the system for almost a year without anyone noticing,’ Brazile writes.
She also criticizes the FBI for failing to directly notify Wasserman Schultz sooner about the hacks.
Brazile has written a scorching book about the Clinton camp’s virtual takeover of the party before she got the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton is seen above on November 1 in New York City
Instead, according to Brazile, the FBI made numerous calls to the DNC about alleged Russian hacking ‘but never got anyone to respond.’
Brazile writes that two senior Obama administration officials, then-Attorney General Eric Holder and former national security adviser Susan Rice, both told her that the DNC ‘took a long time’ to respond to the FBI.
The former interim DNC chairwoman caused a stir in recent days following the release of excerpts of her new book.
Her most explosive allegation is that Clinton’s campaign seized control of the DNC months before she won her party’s nomination, diverted resources away from struggling state parties, and allowed the national party to accumulate a mountain of debt.
Brazile’s book about the dysfunction and mismanagement she uncovered at the organization she was brought in to run after hacked emails revealed efforts by party insiders to tilt the scales toward Clinton.
Brazile, who was herself thrown into controversy when it was revealed she passed on debate questions to the Clinton camp before a televised debate with Sanders during the primary, unloads on her predecessor, Wasserman Schultz, and discloses a smoking gun document in the form of a fundraising agreement that sent resources to the Clinton camp.
Astonishingly, Elizabeth Warren – who campaigned with Clinton – said she believed Brazile.
Asked on CNN by Jake Tapper: ‘Do you agree with notion that it was rigged’ she answered simply: ‘Yes.’
‘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,’ Brazile writes in an essay in Politico magazine.
Brazile only learned of the party’s financial troubles in July after she was named interim chair after Wasserman Schultz stepped down, in a call with CFO Gary Gensler.
‘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,’ she writes that she told him.
One culprit was President Obama, who failed to refill party coffers after his 2012 win.
‘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,’ Brazile writes.
Clinton’s fundraising took care of the remaining debt – then put the DNC, which is supposed to be neutral until there is a nominee, on ‘an allowance.’
Gensler laid out the state of affairs in a phone call. ‘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,’ according to Brazile.
She says Wasserman Schultz ignored her board of directors, including on the bombshell development that Russia hacked the DNC’s emails.
‘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,’ she writes.
When the Hillary Victory Fund organized big donors fundraisers who cut checks that were to go to state parties, the funds came back to her Brooklyn headquarters.