Following Wednesday’s final presidential debate, DNC Chair Donna Brazile was grilled by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly regarding a recent WikiLeaks revelation suggesting that Brazile had colluded with the media to protect Hillary Clinton.
In the WikiLeaks release of hacked emails allegedly from the account of Clinton campaign chair, John Podesta, a March 12, 2016 email from Brazile titled “From time to time I get the questions in advance” includes a Clinton/Sanders debate question Brazile received ahead of the event that she says “worries” her for Clinton.
The question is as follows:
“19 states and the District of Columbia have banned the death penalty. 31 states, including Ohio, still have the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, since 1973, 156 people have been on death row and later set free. Since 1976, 1,414 people have been executed in the U.S. That’s 11% of Americans who were sentenced to die, but later exonerated and freed. Should Ohio and the 30 other states join the current list and abolish the death penalty?”
The next day, primary debate co-moderator Roland Martin sent an identical question to CNN.
As Daily Wire previously reported:
“Martin initially denied that he’d shared the question with anyone, but when Politico confronted him with an email stating otherwise, he suddenly recalled sending questions to CNN, but said he didn’t recall contacting Brazile. In the debate, which was held the very next day, March 13th, Clinton was asked about the death penalty.”
In her interview with Kelly, Brazile spun big time. After nearly four minutes of discussion, during which time she employed multiple excuses, Brazile finally claimed that the emails were “doctored.” That one stuck, and Kelly let Brazile off the hook.
Now, Errata Security’s Robert Graham is claiming that he has evidence that the email was not doctored. According to Fox News, he and other security experts ran the email through a program that verifies authenticity, and found that it was unaltered:
“DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a system employed by many email servers, including HillaryClinton.com, to verify emails to recipients and avoid spam filters. The system sends a DKIM ‘key’ to the receiver to verify the sender and confirm the email hasn’t been tampered with.”
What Graham found was that Brazile’s email is indeed authentic. In his blog post, he offered an open challenge to anyone who could prove otherwise, setting the stakes at $600:
“…if you can forge an email that validates correctly as I’ve shown, I’ll give you 1-bitcoin. It’s the easiest way of solving arguments whether this really validates the email–if somebody tells you this blogpost is invalid, then tell them they can earn about $600 (current value of BTC) proving it. Otherwise, no.”
Vice presidential candidate Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) has also questioned the validity of a particular email “that talked about the fact that there was some deal that I was gonna be VP a year in advance.” He told NBC political reporter Kailani Koenig that such an idea was “completely false…either the person sending that email didn’t know what he or she was talking about or the content of it was manipulated.”
The email to which Kaine seems to be referring was sent on July 15, 2015, by Erick Mullen, a managing director at Mercury PR firm. Mullen writes: “Won’t stop assuring Sens Brown and Heitkamp (at dinner now) that HRC has personally told Tim Kaine he’s the veep. A little unseemly.” He and John Podesta then trade a few jokes about the latter being Clinton’s veep.
Robert Graham ran the email through the DKIN verification program, and found that it had indeed been altered:
That being said, Graham told Daily Wire that “a large number of factors” can contribute to an email coming up as “modified,” including “Google changing its signing key.”
Despite the Kaine email having been modified in some way, the Donna Brazile email stands as verified. What excuse will Brazile come up with now?