Democrats are heading into their quadrennial political convention armed with information—and that’s not necessarily a good thing.
On Friday, WikiLeaks released 19,252 emails pertaining to the DNC. Guccifer 2.0 has claimed responsibility for the hack. The emails, which are part of WikiLeaks’ “Hillary Leaks” series, come from top officials, including DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. They span January 2015 to May 25 of this year.
Wasserman-Schultz’s correspondences reveal a woman incredibly annoyed with Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. Supporters of the Vermont senator as well as the candidate himself had long been suspicious that the Democratic party was biased against him. The dump of emails, readily available via wikileaks.org/dnc-emails, appears to confirm that.
In a series of exchanges with DNC staffer Kate Houghton and others, Wasserman-Schultz explicitly states she’s tired of the narrative being perpetuated that she dislikes Sanders, demanding to NBC journalist Chuck Todd that a colleague apologize to her. MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski had called for the Florida rep to step down over her bias against Sanders, which Wasserman-Schultz considered “outrageous.”
Given the revelations in the email dump, it’s hard not to see Brzezinski’s point. A Politico story about Sanders forwarded to the chairwoman yielded the response: “spoken like someone who has never been a member of the Democratic Party and has no understanding of what we do.” She later claimed that Sanders would never be president in another correspondence.
WikiLeaks
Additional emails reveal an alleged plot to question Sanders’ religion in an attempt to out him as an atheist.
“Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.”
Though Sanders’ name had been a hot topic of discussion in innumerable emails, the Vermont senator has yet to respond to the leak. It’s unclear if the DNC email dump will affect Sanders’ prior decision to endorse Clinton as presidential candidate for the Democratic party.
Save for her vice presidential announcement, the presumptive nominee has been similarly silent Friday night.