Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, has been in the headlines lately due to WikiLeaks releasing hacked emails that show Brazile colluding with the Hillary Clinton campaign. Brazile has been a longtime Democrat operative and commentator on cable news networks.
Here are seven things you need to know about Brazile.
1. Brazile appears to have conspired against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. The WikiLeaks emails revealed that Brazile did not seem to like Sanders and provided inside information to the Clinton campaign:
- In a March email, Brazile fed the Clinton campaign a question that was going to be asked at the next day’s CNN town hall about the death penalty. Clinton was prepared for that exact question as a result. Brazile was a CNN contributor at the time.
- A Clinton staffer wrote in an October 2015 email that “Donna Brazile – is super pissed about the VP comment and will raise it if possible tonight. Due to her contract she is on constantly and can push this tomorrow.” The “VP comment” was Sanders saying he would consider Clinton to be his vice-president.
- Brazile wrote in an email that she didn’t want to comment on a story involving Sanders’ complaints about the DNC being rigged against him because she would “cuss out the Sanders camp!”
The aforementioned emails would appear to undermine this tweet:
Yes, I’m neutral. And if you don’t like it, please just enjoy Easter. And continue to vote until June 14th. #PrayforPeace!
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) March 26, 2016
2. Brazile had a rather contentious interview with Megyn Kelly about the WikiLeaks revelations. Here is a partial transcript of the exchange, via RealClearPolitics:
MEGYN KELLY: You’re accused of receiving a debate question whether a CNN town hall where they partnered with TV One that you had this question on March 12th, that verbatim, verbatim was provided by Roland Martin to CNN the next day. How did you get that question, Donna?
DONNA BRAZILE: Well, Kelly, as I play straight up and with you, I did not receive any questions from CNN.
KELLY: Where did you get it.
BRAZILE: What information? Allow me to see what you’re talking about?
KELLY: You’ve got the Wikileaks showing you messaging the Clinton campaign at the March 13th CNN debate.
BRAZILE: As a Christian woman, I understand persecution. Your information is false. What you’re — well, for suggestive e-mails were stolen. You’re interested and you’re like a thief that wants to bring into the night the things that.
Kelly then brought the hammer down on Brazile, as the Fox News anchor pointed out that CNN’s Jake Tapper called the WikiLeaks revelations about Brazile “very upsetting and troubling.”
“Megyn, I’ll say it on the record,” Brazile said. “I’m not going to try to validate falsified information. I have my documents. I have my files. Thank God I have not had my personal e-mails ripped off from me and stolen and given to some criminals to come back altered. I have my records and files. And as I said repeatedly, CNN, I never received anything.”
3. Brazile pushed rumors about George H.W. Bush having an affair in the 1988 presidential campaign. Brazile, who was working for Democrat Michael Dukakis’s disastrous presidential campaign as the deputy national field director at the time, said: “George Bush owes it to the American people to fess up. The American people have every right to know if Barbara Bush will share that bed with him in the White House.”
According to the Daily Caller, “The Dukakis campaign disavowed them a day later and Brazile resigned from the campaign.” There was never any credible evidence to prove the rumor that Bush was having an affair.
4. Brazile has a penchant for race-baiting. Some of her statements include:
- Telling the Washington Post in 1999 that she will fight to prevent the “white boys” from winning, because the “white-boy attitude is ‘I must exclude, denigrate and leave behind.”” She was the campaign manager of Al Gore’s Democratic presidential campaign when she said this.
- Accusing Republicans in 2000 of using “Colin Powell and J.C. Watts because they have no program, no policy…. They’d rather take pictures with black children than feed them.”
- Smearing Republicans of opposing President Barack Obama because of “that old-school way of thinking about race and opportunity.”
Brazile fits in perfectly with the left’s race-baiting politics.
5. During the 2000 Florida election controversy, Brazile asserted that blacks were being disenfranchised. With George W. Bush’s win in Florida in 2000 being questioned, Brazile alleged that “in disproportionately black areas, people faced dogs, guns, and were required to have three forms of ID.”
Per usual, there was no evidence to substantiate Brazil’s claims, as columnist John Leo explained in 2000:
USA Today reported on Dec. 8: “Though many real problems occurred, some of the most widely reported incidents on Election Day have turned out on closer inspection to be unfounded (yet) the allegations have taken on a life of their own, repeated endlessly by politicians and the media.”
The newspaper reported that one allegedly intimidating “roadblock” near Tallahassee was a routine check for faulty auto equipment that stopped a total 150 drivers and gave 18 warnings or citations, six to minorities, 12 to whites. Another “roadblock” near Tampa turned out to be a police response to a burglary near a polling place in a black neighborhood. According to USA Today, one man was stopped for questioning, then sent on his way.
The mainstream media have not come up with hard evidence to support charges of a conspiracy against black voters. Yes, there was confusion, and the poorer counties tended to have the most outmoded voting equipment and the most voter errors.
The Washington Post reported that “one reason for the high rate of invalidated votes this election was the NAACP’s massive get-out-the-vote effort in Florida, which brought many inexperienced or first-time voters to the polls.” If an effort was under way to suppress the black vote, it clearly failed: 900,000 blacks voted in Florida, up 65 percent over the 1996 presidential election. That unexpectedly high total clearly strained the system, put pressure on officials and voters to move along quickly, and kept phone lines clogged when voter verification calls were needed.
Additionally, Florida’s attorney general didn’t find any evidence of disenfranchisement, reported Newsmax at the time.
6. Brazile is a far-left radical.
We need a new constitution: Here’s how we save American democracy from charlatans, loudmouths and the 1 percent https://t.co/klyPA1pMl0
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 28, 2014
The link in her tweet no longer works, but it reportedly linked to a Salon piece that called for the following, per Discover The Networks:
-advocates the funding of national political campaigns “exclusively” with tax dollars;
-proposes that “equality of education” can be achieved by pouring massive sums of money into public schools located in “underprivileged areas”;
-suggests that more money be spent on bringing additional “counselors and school psychologists to our school systems”;
-calls for the use of government intervention and resources to “mak[e] college affordable”;
-advises lawmakers to “institute a two-year national service commitment, allowing students to obtain college admission at the end of high school—deferred acceptance”;
-urges the government to “tax those who will never hurt, who will never feel the loss of a few percentage points in their accrued wealth”;
-calls for the imposition of “huge fines” on “industries actively engaged in destroying the planet” from an environmental standpoint;
-says that “instead of rewarding oil and coal interests with government subsidies,” government should “accord them the same treatment [it] has given to Big Tobacco for a whole generation, which has dramatically reduced the percentage of Americans who smoke”; and
-advocates the adoption of former President Franklin Roosevelt’s suggestions for modernizing the Bill of Rights. Specifically, as Burstein notes, Roosevelt sought to guarantee everyone “the right to a useful and remunerative job”; “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation”; “the right of every family to a decent home”; “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”; “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment”; and “the right to a good education.”
Mark Levin points out in his book Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America that Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights is “eerily similar in certain significant respects to the former Soviet Union’s list of Fundamental Rights, set fort in Chapter X of its 1936 Constitution.” These “Fundamental Rights” included “the right to work,” “the right to rest and leisure,” “the right to maintenance in old age” through “extensive development of social insurance,” and “the right to education”–all of which line up with policies outlined in Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. Brazile indirectly endorsed the aforementioned “rights” by tweeting out the Salon link.
It only follows then that Brazile has contempt for the Constitution, which would explain this tweet:
.@BarackObama. Enjoy #PresidentsDay. With Congress on recess, this is action day! Let’s move America forward.
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) February 17, 2014
In that tweet, Brazile signaled she has no problem with Obama spurning Congress in favor of executive fiat through his pen and phone–an authoritarian mindset.
7. Brazile called working for Rev. Jesse Jackson “the best years of my life.” “I worked with the reverend for many years,” Brazile told the UK Guardian in 1999. “They were the best years of my life. He was my mentor and my teacher, but I would never do it again. He’ll be in a television studio or on a radio show and he’ll say we’re going to march in Philadelphia or Boston, and we’d know nothing about it. When you work with the reverend you have to be two days ahead of him and two days behind him all at once.”
Brazile also gushed to the Post about working Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, saying: “I will go to my grave remembering that run in 1984. It was not a campaign, it was a movement. . . . Jesse Jackson gave me my soul for this.”
This would be the same Jesse Jackson who has done the following:
- Called Jews “Hymie” and referring to New York City as “Hymie-town.” “Hymie” is an anti-Semitic slur aimed at Jewish males.
- Said Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert had “the mentality of a runaway slave” for being upset when LeBron James left Cleveland for the Miami Heat.
- Accused Obama of “acting like he’s white” for not getting involved when six black teenagers were arrested under charges of beating up a white student and faced charges that some felt were too severe.
- Produced an illegitimate child with a mistress.
- Shouted in 1984: “Viva Fidel!” and “Viva Che!” while he was in Cuba. Castro himself said that Jackson is “a brilliant man” whose “main characteristic is honesty.” Jackson did get numerous political prisoners released from the Castro regime, but one of the freed prisoners slammed Jackson for his nice words for Castro in saying: “I cannot be here and allow the idea that Fidel Castro is human. Behind all this is another theme, another malicious meaning.”
Based on Brazile’s affinity for far-left views and race-baiting, it only makes sense that she would gush about Jackson.