The party is over: Time for Democrats to clean house

The recent revelations by Donna Brazile that Hillary Clinton rigged the 2016 Democratic primaries through corrupt financing come as no surprise to me, especially as someone who before the election said he could not, despite longstanding ties to the Clintons, support Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

In October 2016, I said that there would be a constitutional crisis if she were to be elected. Given the news from Brazile about rigging the primaries, the report from John Solomon of The Hill that U.S. uranium tied to an Obama era deal may actually have reached Europe, and ongoing questions about who paid for the infamous Steele dossier, there may well be a constitutional crisis even without Clinton in the Oval Office.

{mosads}Let’s start with the primaries. Brazile was much closer to the corruption than I was and, as her recent revelations reveal, upon taking control of the Democratic National Committee from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she discovered that the DNC was $24 million in debt. Brazile was told that Clinton’s campaign, in conjunction with the Hillary Victory Fund, the campaign’s joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC, “had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016” and had “placed the party on an allowance.”

Brazile goes on to say how Democratic Party was “fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign,” and how 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 fundraising clearinghouse.” Further, Brazile details her conversation with Gary Gensler, a chief financial officer of the Clinton campaign, who told her that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook struck a deal with Wasserman Schultz to sustain the DNC, whereby the Clinton campaign “sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

Brazile writes that the joint fundraising agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America set out the terms that Hillary Clinton would control the Democratic party’s finances, strategy, staffing, data and analytics — essentially, the entire party — in exchange for raising money for the DNC.

Though Brazile’s revelations solidify Bernie Sanders’s longstanding assertion that the primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton, Sanders was no more honest. The Sanders campaign wrote a memo to the DNC just two days before California saying he would not contest at the convention, effectively conceding the nomination before California, provided that Sanders received a private plane and staff to be paid for by the DNC for fall campaigning in order to keep his democratic socialism movement alive.

Though it is certainly important that Brazile offered these revelations about Hillary Clinton, she herself is no pillar of honesty, as previously leaked Clinton emails revealed that Brazile provided Hillary’s campaign with debate questions prior to the Democratic primary debates, which Brazile subsequently lied about when asked on television.

Above all and unequivocally so, this comportment is obscene, dishonest, and represents a level of malfeasance we have not seen before. Today, I remain a Democrat. I am a centrist and I am committed to free market capitalism. I remain proud of my service to the Clinton White House between 1994 and 2000.

I believe that Democrats need to pull together at a time of unprecedented vulnerability of the Republican Party. There needs to be a complete and total housecleaning of the infrastructure of the Democratic Party. Ultimately, Hillary Clinton needs to go away, Bernie Sanders needs to go away, Donna Brazile needs to go away. They are all complicit. We desperately need a renewed understanding of ethics in politics. I am truly sickened by what I see today, but not just because of individual behavior, though the behavior of former Secretary of State Clinton is becoming increasingly egregious.

I am sickened by the behavior of the entire party establishment led by a former chairman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who uses dismissive ignorance as a defense of everything: “I know nothing, I know nothing, I know nothing.” Well, I know something. The body stinks from the head down, and the core itself is rotten too.

Douglas E. Schoen (@DouglasESchoen) served as a pollster for President Clinton. A longtime political consultant, he is also a Fox News contributor and the author of 11 books, including “Putin’s Master Plan: To Destroy Europe, Divide NATO, and Restore Russian Power and Global Influence.”