In an appearance on The View Tuesday, former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Donna Brazile attempted to walk back her book’s bombshell revelation that Clinton's team had control over the DNC long before she had secured the nomination and had rigged the primary. Brazile argued that she’d never used the word “rigged” in her book, a claim refuted by the excerpt of her book in Politico.
So @donnabrazile just flat-out lied on @theview when she said she didn't use the word "rigged" in her book. Of course, no one called her out pic.twitter.com/ycJn7NfBAG
— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) November 7, 2017
“So people are upset and you know, you understand,” the View’s Whoopi Goldberg told Brazile. “So explain why you didn’t realize people would take the idea of Hillary bailing out the party years before or whenever she did it as something that was bad and robbed Bernie of his ability to be president. I mean, that’s how, that’s the message that’s being put out in your name.”
Brazile responded, “First of all, I never used the word ‘rigged’ in my book. I said that — I used the word ‘cancer’ in that I was uncomfortable with the cancer that I found when I became chair.”
"When I learned that Hillary was bailing our party out, giving us $3.5 million a month to keep us floating, I appreciated that,” she added. “But I wanted control over, Whoopi, was that if I raised a $1, $1.50, I wanted to spend my money without asking permission."
But in the excerpt of Brazile’s book published in Politico last week Brazile uses the terms “rigged” and “rigging” and suggests she found proof that the process had been rigged for Clinton.
"I had 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," Brazile wrote.
"By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart," she concluded just a few paragraphs later.
She also later used the term “rigging” in reference to a search for more evidence where she concludes that “if the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead.”
“I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff,” she wrote. “I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.”
“The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical,” she concluded. “If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.”
Brazile confused many earlier Tuesday by telling CBS that she believed the DNC primary was a fair fight despite literally saying the opposite in her book.