Within a few days, both Brazile and Warren walked their statements all the way back. Brazile now says she found “no evidence” the primary was rigged. Warren now says that though there was “some bias” within the DNC, “the overall 2016 primary process was fair.”
I have spent much of the past week trying to untangle this story, interviewing people on all sides of the primary and in a variety of positions at the DNC. The core facts are straightforward: As Barack Obama’s presidency drew to a close, the DNC was deep in debt. In return for a bailout, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz gave Hillary Clinton’s campaign more potential control over its operations and hiring decisions than was either ethical or wise. But those operations were mostly irrelevant to the primary and couldn’t have been used to rig the process even if anyone had wanted to use them that way; the primary schedule, debate schedule, and rules were set well in advance of these agreements. “I found nothing to say they were gaming the primary system,” Brazile told me. And while that contradicts the more sensational language she used in her book, it fits the facts she laid out both in her original piece and since.
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The irony is that Sanders was a prime beneficiary of this bias, not a victim of it. The losers were potential candidates like Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Warren, or Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper — and, thus, Democratic primary voters, who ended up with few choices in 2016. To the extent Democratic primary voters feel like they were denied a broad range of candidates in 2016, and that party officials tried to clear the field to coronate Clinton, well, they’re right.
