Donna Brazile, Whistleblower

The former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee has just thrown erstwhile pal Hillary Clinton right under the proverbial bus. Like so many other "woke" elites popping up like acne all over the face of the media-political-entertainment complex, Donna Brazile is rushing to cash in on her own disingenuous newfound awareness. It is suddenly so cool to admit that there is graft and corruption and fraud and abuse going on all over the place. You get instant good press whenever you screw up your courage to let the public in on all the "open secrets" of the high and mighty.

 Donna Brazile is the first, but hopefully not the last, high-ranking elite Democrat to finally screw up enough courage to share the dirt on Hillary. You might say she is the Ashley Judd of the political wing of the political-media-entertainment complex, except that in no way can she be considered the "victim" of a predator. She was more in the enabler class, such as those who knew about Harvey Weinstein for decades and still kept silent.

 The problem is that after awhile, belated celebrity regrets from high places can get to sound hypocritical, especially when the only price the revealed culprits ever seem to pay is some luxury therapy, or a non-disclosure agreement, or a get-out-of jail wrist-slap involving a civil fine.

And Donna Brazile is more preposterous than most of the Johnnie-come-lately's, especially when she claims that she did all this supposed "muckraking" for her new BFF, Bernie Sanders. He was cheated out of the nomination, and Donna Brazile is here to vindicate him by finally - finally! -  telling the truth as she knows it. Of course, it's not anywhere near the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Brazile is not about to destroy her own already-shaky reputation in the process of selling her "tell-all" potboiler of a book.

Brazile, savvy operator that she is, is unabashedly slathering herself with protective Bernie Sanders ointment and importuning him in the process. She knows which way the political wind is blowing. She knows that Bernie is now the most popular politician in the country.

 So in pleading total and unbelievable ignorance of the money-laundering operation at the very heart of her organization, Brazile is like the pathetic getaway driver in a bank heist. "It wasn't me, officer! All those bags full of marked cash exploding into a purple cloud as I drove? They not only blinded me, they gagged me!  I thought we wuz driving to the annual charity bazaar!"

More than a year after the heist, Donna Brazile is suddenly remembering a thing or three. So in exchange for a lighter sentence in the annals of revisionist history and for a generous publishing advance, she's turning informer and singing like a bird.

The big money scam at the center of the Clinton/DNC operation allowed deep-pocketed but maxed-out donors to give another $353,450 to an entity called the "Hillary Victory Fund," which then sent the money in $10,000 increments to some 30 state parties for ostensible use in their own local campaigns. The catch was that the "non-battleground" states were only allowed to keep a very tiny portion of this money. The rest was funneled right back to Hillary's Brooklyn headquarters.

Although the existence of this laundered slush fund became common knowledge in April 2016, when Margot Kidder broke the story on CounterPunch and other outlets soon followed up, Donna Brazile proclaims herself absolutely flabbergasted when she read about it the following July, in some of the leaked emails.The most shocking reality to Brazile was that Hillary Clinton was a grasping authoritarian, personally bailing out and imperiously controlling the DNC with wads of that ill-gotten cash - long before securing the nomination.

Brazile said and did nothing at the time. And while she now pats herself on the back for vindicating Bernie Sanders, she also passive-aggressively throws him under the bus by claiming that when he learned the details of the graft, he kept quiet about it too. Defeating Trump, even at the cost of their own moral values, was the only thing that really mattered to both of them.

Despite her firing from CNN last year for sneaking a question to Hillary Clinton prior to a debate with Sanders on that cable channel, Brazile now hilariously pretends to have entered a recovery program for enablers - but only after she'd eagerly helped Clinton to get away with it.

I'd promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

 So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

It's getting to be very crowded under the Donna Bus. Can't you just picture  neglectful, narcissistic Barack curled up beside lackadaisical flunky Debbie as both of them fight for air and space in the pages of Brazile's truthy confessions? Since Brazile unquestioningly accepts the notion that the theft of the DNC emails was a Russian hacking operation and not an inside job, you also have to wonder whether the imputation of mere neglect and stupidity to two powerful Democratic politicians isn't also a useful cover for their own unethical, if not criminal, complicity.

While Brazile calls her book "Hacks," she sadly isn't talking about herself and other party operatives and factotums and corporate media pundits. She's talking about the Russians. If it weren't for the Russians and the leaked emails, she implies, she wouldn't be having to cry all these crocodile tears in her incipient best-seller.

Meanwhile, her complaint that Obama selfishly left the Democratic Party high and dry and $24 million in debt after his 2012 run rings absolutely true. He created a vacuum absolutely ripe for Clintonian graft and control. The fact that nearly a thousand Democratic seats in state and congressional elections disappeared during his eight-year tenure does point to one man sucking up all the money for his own political gratification at everyone else's expense.

Although a power broker in the Democratic Party for decades, Brazile asserts it wasn't until taking over as interim chair after the 2016 convention that her ingenue eyes were opened by Gary Gensler, the former Goldman Sachs banker and Obama financial watchdog who went on to head Clinton's campaign finance division.

...I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.

Weeks? It's starting to sound as though Brazile was in a state of self-serving and party-serving denial, or at worst, cynically "running out the clock" until Election Day.

If she isn't careful, Brazile even threatens to overtake Hillary herself in the Blame Game Steeplechase, not to mention topping her on the Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists:

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

That, right there, is the big tell. Donna Brazile was not worried enough to cancel her annual vacation in Martha's Vineyard, the playground of the rich and famous and well-connected. In her new career as an elite whistle-blower, she wants you to know that she's still got a lot more clout and leisure time than most people.

 The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and (Clinton campaign manager) Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s 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.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

Donald Trump is going to have a field day with this. And sad to say, he'll be perfectly justified in using it as a deflection and distraction from his own campaign's indicted money-laundering operators. 

Think of Donna Brazile's book as a preemptive unofficial plea deal. After all, if Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta can get caught up in the special prosecutor's net, none of them should be considered immune.

Meanwhile, the real distraction of these palace intrigues is that they divert media attention from such bipartisan plots as cutting social programs in order to pay for more tax cuts for the wealthy.

So many scams, so little time.