Updated Sunday, March 19, 2017, 11:30 a.m. EDT: Donna Brazile, in an exclusive interview with Richard Prince, who pens the Journal-isms blog on The Root, flatly denies ever giving questions to the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential election.
However, based on Brazile’s own essay in Time magazine, this seems to some as if she is parsing her words.
Brazile told Prince via email, “At no time did I receive or participate in the drafting or dissemination of questions provided by CNN,” and then, “I’m not going to allow the lies to stand,” which would seem like a direct contradiction of her essay.
However, if you look at the wording of Brazile’s essay, she talks about sharing “potential topics” versus “questions,” which to some is inappropriate and to others understandable, since Brazile is a longtime Democratic Party strategist whose job is to advise candidates about what to look out for.
A reader of Prince’s column shared the actual hacked email from Brazile with the subject line, “One of the questions directed at HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash,” and refers to a woman from Flint, Mich., who asked Clinton about the beleaguered community there.
Jury’s out on this one.
Earlier:
Former Democratic National Committee interim chair and current Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile has acknowledged that she did, in fact, supply the Clinton campaign with town hall topics, a decision she now says she regrets.
In an essay penned for Time magazine, Brazile said that in her role as a Democratic operative and DNC vice chair, she shared potential town hall topics with the Clinton campaign and said that she would forever regret doing so.
Brazile wrote:
Then in October, a subsequent release of emails revealed that among the many things I did in my role as a Democratic operative and D.N.C. Vice Chair prior to assuming the interim D.N.C. Chair position was to share potential town hall topics with the Clinton campaign. I had been working behind the scenes to add more town hall events and debates to the primary calendar, and I helped ensure those events included diverse moderators and addressed topics vital to minority communities. My job was to make all our Democratic candidates look good, and I worked closely with both campaigns to make that happen. But sending those emails was a mistake I will forever regret.
Brazile’s essay discusses the Russian email hacks and interference in the 2016 elections. She says that the Russian’s plan played out exactly as they hoped.
“These malicious attacks were not a momentary cyber intrusion,” Brazile wrote. “The attacks were coordinated by a foreign adversary and executed for over a year with devastating results for those of us who were targeted, and ultimately for every American.”
Brazile enumerates all the ways in which members of the Trump administration have misled both Congress and the American people about whether or not there was contact between the Trump team and Russia during the campaign, and rightly notes that despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, “the White House continues to insist that ‘there’s no there there.’”
“In light of this, you would think Republican leaders in Congress would put their country before politics and call for an impartial investigation,” Brazile wrote. “Yet even now, the number of congressional Republicans who have come forward to demand a proper, independent investigation by a special prosecutor is embarrassingly small.”
Brazile points out that the DNC “was attacked by the Russians while the Republican nominee for president openly encouraged it.”
“Let me be clear,” Brazile wrote. “This is not just the price of politics. This is not normal. We cannot let this stand. Our democratic process itself was attacked and harmed, and all Americans should be concerned.”
Word, Donna. Word.
Read more of Brazile’s essay at Time.