SIO92: Was the DNC Rigged?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode number 92. I'm your host Thomas Smith, and today I'm going to be talking about the DNC. I want to once again thank my patrons over at patreon.com slash seriouspod. I did another poll to find out what topic people wanted me to cover, and I was a little bit surprised, I wasn't sure if people were kind of over the whole DNC thing, but that far and away had the most votes.

Someday we'll get to Red Pill Volume Two, don't worry, we'll get there, we got plenty of time. I do want to note though that, a, I really do appreciate everyone voting, gets got a lot of votes this time, it's a cool thing to get people's opinions on, but, be, also it's no guarantee that I'm going to do this every time or that that's always going to be the one I pick. I can, I can put up a poll, get some input, I also like comments, people leave comments and that's very helpful, helpful. So I just want to let you guys know, don't, you know, terms and restrictions apply, don't hold me to like a guarantee that if something gets the votes I'll definitely talk about it, but it does really help to gauge interest.

I mean, certainly if I put something up and it gets zero votes, then that tells me it's not worthwhile as a topic to my audience, and that's important, but so I just want leave a little, you know, wiggle room in there so it doesn't just become a podcast by committee or something. But that said, I actually personally really did want to look into the DNC thing myself, these claims by Donna Brazile. It is something I wanted to cover anyway.

0:02:00 Thomas: So I think in general, our interests, you know, listeners and I, patrons and I suppose, have been pretty in line because I have wanted to covered the things that end up getting the most votes. So that's good. I like that. So that is what I want to do today. I do a deep dive into the claims that the DNC was rigged for Hillary. I think it's one of those things where as much as we all want to stop litigating the past, unfortunately, the past has implications on the future and the future is critically important. So I actually think we can't really avoid it, especially when claims are being made that really impact one side or the other. We can't just ignore them. We need to know for the future, what happened? Is it going to happen again?

0:02:46 Thomas: I think it's important. So it is a topic that's worthwhile. I have done an immense amount of research on this, as I do for every topic that I try to cover. And also, I want to note that I really am doing my best, as best as humanly possible, to go into this question of whether the DNC was quote-unquote rigged, to go into it with an open mind. I promise you that. Bernie supporters to Clinton supporters, I do do pledge to you both that I have done my best to really get to the bottom of this and not worry about only trying to confirm something I might already think. Like I've tried to look for the sources for each side as much as I can, go in depth. And I will remind you guys that I did vote for Bernie in the primary. And it's been a year or more, actually.

0:03:32 Thomas: I guess it's been, wow, probably two years since we really got going with the primary, but I don't remember if, if I said it on the show, I think I did. I remember thinking that, you know, the DNC was a bit tilted toward Hillary at the time. So that is one leaning. But as you also know, of course, I lean very much toward Hillary having been the correct choice in the general, like by a landslide, no question, we all should have voted for her.

So, that has not changed. But I just bring it up to mention that I really did want to look into this and do my best to, you know, something that's really hard to do these days is to try to form, as much as I can, an objective view of of this situation with the DNC. It's not easy. I mean, it's it's so hard to find a good objective source.

To I mean, it's either extreme, extreme Bernie source, or or or the other side, or or by the way Republicans to, there's there are a lot of Republican sources that are seeking to make hay out of this, this situation, and exploit it to bash Democrats, to try to divide us further. That's something that they are doing. So that's another source. And then, of course, there are very pro-Clinton sources in there, too, that are apologizing, doing apologetics too far the other way, that are trying to make it as though there was no problem. So I'm going to take a look at all of it. We'll see where we come down.

But I want to start with some positive news that you likely have already heard. The elections. We had some good election news, Democrats. I think we can be, be really proud about this. Northam blew away the Republican Ed Gillespie in the Virginia governor race. He outperformed polling by a ton. He was the favorite, but not by as much as he won by.

0:05:16 Thomas: But beyond the governor race, there are so many other races. And it was a big day for African Americans. So many African American candidates won. The number two man on Northam's ticket was was Justin Fairfax. He is now the lieutenant governor-elect. He is black. He has only the second African-American elected to statewide office in Virginia history. Sheila Oliver, the first elected African- American lieutenant governor of New Jersey. Let's see, V. Lyles, the first African-american female mayor in Charlotte, North Carolina. It goes on and on. A very good day for Democrats, a very good good day for historically underrepresented groups. And I guess that goes to show that when Republicans engage in white identity politics that, you know, they're going to lose elections to people of color.

0:06:06 Thomas: And by the way, trans people, this has got to be one of the most positive, uplifting stories of all of them. Danica Roem became the first openly transgender person to be elected to any state legislature. And what's more, She won her seat away from a historically bigoted person who has been in power for years. He actually wrote the anti-trans bathroom bill. Bob Marshall, Republican, Virginia, and he lost to Danica Rome. Rome, and Danica had the best possible quote about this. I read this and it was so funny and uplifting. So here it is. When asked about Bob Marshall, Danica Rome said, I don't attack my constituents. Bob is my constituent now.

0:07:00 Thomas: It's such a good response. Oh, she just won his seat away from him and he's now her constituent. It is so great. It s so perfect. So a good day, positivity for Democrats. And this is something we need to carry on, you know, because we vastly outperformed Democrats, vastly outper formed Republicans, but only barely might just barely gain control of this Virginia state house. And as you know if you listen to opening arguments, if you watch John Oliver, how does that work? Well, the reason that's true is because of gerrymandering. I mean, Democrats will have to overperform by a lot to gain control of these state houses. This is a problem in the U.S. House of Representatives as well, and we're going to have to deal with that in 2018, of course.

0:07:47 Thomas: But in these state houses, that's something that we don't normally notice. And it really flew under the radar. And Republicans, as you likely know, very shrewdly, in sort of an evil way, but very shrudely took advantage of us not really paying attention and they've gerrymandered the crap out of state houses. And this is the result of that. So the reason I bring that up is that we can't ever, ever be complacent. We cannot ever be. We had one good day, the first good day for Democrats in a long time. And we have to keep that energy going. We have to Keep getting involved. We Have to keep an eye on these local state elections, these elections we historically as Democrats have not cared about. We have to. It's vital. The next redrawing of district lines will be coming up soon and it will just get worse.

0:08:36 Thomas: It will get even worse. We can't rely on the Supreme Court to save us. Hopefully they do. I hope they would come up with a way to make it neutral for both parties. I would be totally happy with that right now. If there was some objective modeling they could use to make sure it doesn't favor either party, that would be a huge step up because honestly, Republicans caught Democrats napping on the job a bit on this and have really taken advantage. So positivity, this is a good day for Democrats. We have to keep it going. We'll have to Keep it going through 2018, 2019, 2020. We really will have to. So I wanted to start on a note of positivity before we get down into the merc that is this DNC stuff.

0:09:30 Thomas: This particular uproar began on November 2nd with a piece by Politico, and it was, I guess it was written by Donna Brazile. It involved a sort of some excerpts from her forthcoming book called Hacks, the inside story of the break-ins and break-downs that put Donald Trump in the White House. It was a special sneak peek. The book is now out. It Was scheduled for release, I think, on the year anniversary. So it just came out. The alleged bombshell is that Hillary had a secretive agreement that allowed her control of certain things within the DNC in exchange for fundraising. So at first blush, it sounds bad. Let's investigate further and see how bad it is.

0:10:17 Thomas: But I want to note that you should read this Politico piece. Of course, I'm going to link it as I always do. I have to say there are things about it that kind of, I don't know, set off my skeptic alarm a little bit. Sort of one of the first weird things is it's written as though the day she took over. So that was back right before the DNC convention when the emails had, WikiLeaks had released some emails that made Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a few others look not the best. Mind you, not really that bad all told. We'll get to that later. But definitely reason to worry about their objectivity and maybe their bias and the fact that they had said the thing about like, hey, can we use Bernie Sanders Or, allegedly, their story is one of Bernie Sanders' surrogates' atheism against them.

0:11:10 Thomas: They never ended up doing that. But there was that. The emails you heard about, like that one, and then I think there's one other about a story that they tried to get the New York Times to not write about the Hillary Victory Fund, that kind of thing. Those ones you heard About, I mean, that was it. For having hacked all their emails, it's kind of amazing to me, first off, that if the DNC was so in the hand of Hillary, was so in the Hillary camp and so anti-Bernie, that all they found was just a couple of things that I'm not saying they are good. I'm nicht sagen es ist richtig. Don't get me wrong, but they could have been a whole lot worse. So anyway, the way this is written, this article by Donna Brazile, is that once she went into power there, once she became the interim chair of the DNC, that all of a sudden she promised Bernie she was going to get to the bottom of all this stuff.

0:12:08 Thomas: Well, that's kind of weird to me because she was already the interim chair of The DNC in 2012. And then after that, she returned to her post as vice chair. So she has been at the top of this organization for actually quite a long time. So it's weird to me that she has this, the attitude of the piece. And again, I encourage you to read it. It's like, well, I'm finally going to get to the bottom of this. I think she's suggesting that Wasserman Schultz was secretive or something, but really as the vice chair, as essentially the number two in the DNC, you had no idea of any of this that was going on until now, until after, you know, Hillary was the nominee, you took over, and then you were going to get to the bottom of it?

0:12:54 Thomas: It's a little weird in that way to me. Here, let me read a small part of it. The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary's campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt. What? I screamed, I'm an officer of the party and they've been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems. That wasn't true, he said. Officials from Hillary's camp had taken a look at the DNC's books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt, $15 million in bank debt, and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama's campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America, the campaign, and the Hillary Victory Fund, its joint fundraising vehicle, the DNC, had taken care of 80% of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

0:13:44 Thomas: If I didn't know about this, she says, I assume that none of the other officers knew about it either. That was just Debbie's way. In my experience, she didn't come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the story. It just seems convenient to me that you're the number two, essentially, and then you take over and you're like, whoa, what's all this mess? I didn't know anything about all this stuff going on. Maybe it's true, but if it is, that means you weren't doing anything as the number two position, and it's possible. So maybe that's a structural problem with the DNC, but doesn't it seem a little convenient? There's just a few other things that I found a little self-serving in this.

0:14:30 Thomas: So she goes on to describe that she searched everywhere supposedly for proof of corruption or whatever, and she didn't find anything. And she only found this fundraising agreement was the only problem that she found. And so here's how she describes telling Bernie Sanders this. She says, I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant. Hello, Senator. I've completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer, but I will not kill the patient. I discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I described how Hillary's campaign had taken it another step. I told Bernie that I had found Hillary's joint fundraising agreement.

0:15:18 Thomas: I explained that the cancer was that she exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position. But here we were with only weeks before the election. So pulling out of that. Now, this is bizarre because she's saying she uncovered that, you know, some secret document that she never would've accepted this position had she known. Well, this was public. Public. I can link you a story in Politico from 2015. So, Politico, the same website that is hosting this bit of what I think is kind of misinformation, also in 2015 had reported on Clinton, the headline right here, Clinton puts tight grip on DNC wallet. And it reports about this joint fundraising agreement.

0:16:05 Thomas: Now, granted, they didn't have the literal text of the agreement. So it's not as though they had that leaked, but they had sources who told them what it was about, and they knew about all of the stuff that Donna Brazile is saying. So Donna Braizile, as the vice chair, should have already, I would think, known about this. But let's say she didn't. Well, this was also public. So somehow she didn't even know something that was public that was reported on the same website that also is now publishing this piece that she's written. That just seems weird to me. It seems very weird because this was all out there. And she's saying as though she wouldn't have even accepted the position had she known. And not only that, lest we all forget, Donna Brazile was fired from CNN for leaking a question or two to Hillary Clinton.

0:16:59 Thomas: So I just find this highly questionable. Now, again, by no means am I just going to dismiss the story by pointing to these questionable things. I think there's still a lot to talk about. I have a bajillion more things to say, but this is kind of what I was thinking as I was reading this. She's playing really innocent in a way when we already know she was fired from CNN for leaking CNN questions, for doing the very thing she's saying that she never would have accepted this position had she known how much this favored Hillary. Well, what? You were part of that. You leaked Hillary a question ahead of time. And that was in the primary, mind you. That wasn't in the general election. That was inthe primary.

0:17:45 Thomas: So what? I mean, that's very bizarre. So then I'm going to read the end of this because I find this a little funny as well. Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead, he asked me what I thought Hillary's chances were. Keep in mind, this is like in July, I think, something like that. The polls were unanimous in her winning, but what he wanted to know was my own assessment. I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I had found a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials. I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into the fold with Hillary and to campaign with all the heart and hope he could muster. He might find some of her positions to centrists, and our coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of our country in peril.

0:18:36 Thomas: I knew he heard me. I know he agreed with me, but I have never in my life felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call. When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to. That's the end of the article. So again, well, I was concerned about the polling? Really, you were concerned, you, everybody thought Hillary was going to win, but you were the one person, you know, who in hindsight now you're saying, oh no, I knew, I I knew there was a problem, there wasn't enough enthusiasm, I didn't trust the polls, like, come on, really? So this whole piece strikes me as very self-serving and pretty biased. But here's the thing, let's still look at the facts. I, again, I'm not trying to discount this entire thing because of the source. I think it's worthwhile to point out the holes in her argument and the places where this looks very self-serving.

0:19:27 Thomas: I Think that's useful information to know, but it doesn't mean we can just ignore this. And I didn't, I've looked into it, but I mean, she has the right. Donna Brazil, of course, has the Right to write her book, to write her tell all book as everybody is. I'm not saying she shouldn't have written it. I do you think timing it for right the minute before we need Democrats to show up in this off-year election, I think that kind of sucks. Her counter-argument was, oh, well, if I had waited a year, then they would have said I was spoiling the 2018 election, which seems like a false choice because you could have just done it a month ago or in a month from now, and then it wouldn't have been timed right around the election. So that seems to really be geared toward trying to sell your book.

0:20:12 Thomas: And furthermore, she just, as I'm speaking right now, made an appearance on Fox News. She was pictured with that sheriff, David A. Clark, who is kind of like Milwaukee's Joe Arpaio in some ways. Maybe not literally, but it's some of the same claims of deaths of newborns and pregnant women and other people in his Milwaukee County jail, stuff like that. Really weird. I just going on Fox News to promote it and linking arms with this Sheriff David Clark. I don't know. It seems self-serving. It seems designed to sell books. But OK, we've covered that. We've covered what might be her hypocrisy. But let's forget that and let's take a look at the facts. We can't just dismiss the arguments just because of the person making them.

0:20:58 Thomas: So let's talk about what happened. Then after that, we can make our best guess as to what the effect was, because that's two separate questions. I saw a tweet from David Smalley who said that the general was stolen by the Russians in favor of Trump, but the primary was stolen in favor by Hillary and stolen from Bernie. And so that's something I have in the back of my mind is how much of a difference did this make? If any, to what extent could we say something like that? That strikes me as an extreme claim, given that Hillary won over Bernie by something like three million votes. That's a lot in the primary. Now, could this explain it? I don't know. But let's start with what happened first before we make judgments as to what difference it might have made.

0:21:45 Thomas: So what happened was after the 2012 election, as I've already sort of touched on, somehow the Obama administration, the Obama election committee left the DNC with a staggering amount of debt. And this is something that Stephanie Zvan uh wrote a piece on the orbit.net where she, I mean, she's unapologetically very much in the Hillary camp, but she says that what happened was the DNC was left in a sorry state. And she says, I'll quote her here, this is again, Stephanie Zvan, she's been on the show, I'm disturbed that I haven't seen any outlet reporting that they reached out to Obama and Biden for comment on that. Bankrupting the DNC is not, is just not a small thing in itself, but it created the opportunity for an ethical quagmire that, from reports, it took the party and the candidates months to work through.

0:22:39 Thomas: End quote. So that's, she's got an interesting point there. Why did nobody ask Obama or Biden like, hey, why was the DNc left 20, what was it, $24 million in debt? Why, why such massive debt? Why didn't you help out? Why didn't you know, it sounds like I've read stuff now and we'll get into all these sources, but I had previously thought that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was like a Clinton shoo-in. And I had gotten that impression from, you know the fact that she had showed some favoritism in those emails and had to resign.

So I thought, oh, she's just a Clintonite and somebody who's loyal to But it turns out, if you go back to 2015, in that same article from Politico that I mentioned before predates all this and was pretty much already public, so literally nothing that Donna Brazile said was a revelation, really. So in that same article, Wasserman Schultz is portrayed as like somebody almost nobody likes, that somebody Obama didn't like, that Hillary didn't like. And honestly, it supports Brazil's account of things of her having mismanaged it. From multiple accounts, it sounds like Debbie Wasserman Sherman Schultz, mismanaged, but not in service of Hillary Clinton, actually, in service of herself, from what I'm seeing, just from the fact that both Hillary and Donna Brazile are saying the same thing here, it kind of seems more believable to me, multiple sources.

0:24:10 Thomas: But it seems like, again, this is speculating based on the sources I have, that she was really into promoting herself and had not spent money well and had maybe kept on a lot lot of Obama's consultants way too long after they were necessary, like into 2016, when they really did not need to know Obama's approval rating every day in 2016 when he was about to leave the office, stuff like that. She was paying way too much. So that part of Donna Brazil's story actually holds up, like the fact that she was mismanaging things so bad, because I'm hearing it from two sides here. And it seems as though that that might have been a key problem, that Obama didn't really like Wasserman Schultz, and that's kind of why they were left with such a big debt.

0:25:00 Thomas: The Obama campaign didn't care that much about the DNC. Now, is that right? I don't really think so. I think that, as Stephanie pointed out, that created a bit of a void for Hillary to come in. Somebody needed to come In. They were in debt. They had nothing going on. They needed to spend money better and spend money in preparation for 2016. So Hillary comes in, getting back to the facts of the matter, Hillary comes and they're in debt. Hillary already has these relationships, so she already knows this because of 2008. She does have ties to the DNC, of course, going back. And she says, okay, let's do a fundraising agreement. I will help you with all this debt. I Will Help Raise Funds in Exchange for Some Things. Here are the obligations.

0:25:46 Thomas: We We now have the agreement. It's been made public. Number one, with respect to the hiring of a DNC communications director, DNC agrees that no later than September 11th, 2015, it will hire one of two candidates previously identified as acceptable to HFA, which is Hillary for America. Number two, with regard to the hire of a communications director. With respect to hiring a future DNC senior staff in communications technology and research departments, in the case of vacancy, the DNC will maintain the authority to make the final decision between candidates acceptable to Hillary for America. Number three, agreement by the DNC that HFA personnel will be consulted and have joint authority over the strategic decisions over staffing, budget expenditures, and general election related communications, data, technology, analytics, and research.

0:26:33 Thomas: The DNC will provide HFA advanced opportunity to review online or mass email communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate. This does not include any communications related to primary debates, which will be exclusively controlled by the DNC. The DNC will alert HFA in advance of mailing any direct mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate or his or her signature. Number four, if asked by the state party, the DNc will encourage the state body to become a participant in the victory fund. That's not a big deal. So there's more to the agreement. Later on, now this is important because it's subject to a little bit of controversy. Later on, there's a clause here. It says, nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC's obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the nominating process.

0:27:22 Thomas: All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the general election and not the Democratic primary. Further, we understand you may enter into similar agreements with other candidates. So let's do a little bit of translating just because I know I read that at you pretty quickly. But what's happening here is because Hillary has agreed to essentially bail out the DNC and fund the analytics, technology, data, research, and communications, in exchange they have said, and according to Hillary and according According to other people, this seems believable to me. Whether or not you agree with it, the rationale makes sense. They said, because we are bailing out these specific sectors of the DNC, like these specific sections, the data, technology, analytics, all that, we want to control the spending there because we don't think the money has been spent well.

0:28:18 Thomas: That's why there's such a big problem to begin with. So if this is going to be our fundraising, we wanna know where it's going. You know, it seems kind of reasonable. Now, here's where if we if we want to take the worst reading of this, which I find helpful, sometimes I take like, OK, what's the worst case scenario? What's the best case reading, you know, and kind of compare them. And I would say the biggest crooked Hillary read on this is, well, this is totally unwarranted control because they are going to be hiring only a communications director that Hillary Hillary for America agrees with, and there's future other staff like DNC senior staff in those, you know, again, it's in those sectors that I outlined that, that Hillary's bailing out, but still they're going to have some undue control, a lot of undue control over the DNC itself.

0:29:10 Thomas: And now this is confusing because it says here communications that feature a particular Democratic primary candidate. It. But then it says this does not include any communications related to primary debates, which will be exclusively controlled by the DNC. And then, of course, we have that language later on that said this is only supposed to be for the general election. However, to take, again, a crooked Hillary reading, there's a lawyer that is quoted as saying this is pretty disingenuous. It's like if you give someone a bribe and then later on the agreement, you have like a clause laws that said nothing here could be construed as a bribe. Like it's sort of an attempt at a get out of jail free card. So that's one reading of it.

0:29:56 Thomas: And I think there's a lot there. And I will say unequivocally, it sounds as though Hillary had too much control over the DNC. I don't believe she should have had any control over hiring. I'm fine with some control over the money when it's her money that's bailing out things. So the idea was now to take it it the other way and give a better reading of it to try to, you know, take the not crooked Hillary reading.

The idea was, okay, we're going to help you in these specific sectors, but this data and this research technology and all that, this could be used whoever wins the primary. So the, the totally, like if you're on the all the way other side, like Hillary's a saint, she doesn't do anything wrong. Your explanation would be, no, no. She's just taking control of these things. She's paying money for, but this is data, this is research on the opposition. This is research on the Republicans. This Is technology in preparation for that. So even if Hillary doesn't win all of that technology and data and information will be used by whoever wins. So that's like the best case reading. So if I were to try to make a judgment here, well, hold on, I'll save judgment because we need to go over a couple of, um, in some ways, fake news stories that happened as a result of this. So, patron ByTheLake23 posted this article from The Intercept, and it has four falsehoods that were spread, according to The Interzept, again, four false hoods that were spread in defense of Hillary in this whole debacle.

0:31:26 Thomas: And I want to talk for a quick second about The Interept. That's, of course, Glenn Greenwald's organization. I know it's, I don't think it's exclusively his, but he's a major figure in it. And, I know when I bring up the a name, Glenn Greenwald, a lot of people are going to have a lot of feelings about that. And frankly, they have been really hard on going really, really solid for there was no Russian interference. You know, the intercept in a weird way has this intersection with the right, like the far left. I'm not going to go all horseshoe theory on you here, but in certain respects, in terms of information, the far right and and maybe the mainstream right in some ways, have a bit of an overlap.

0:32:12 Thomas: It's kind of weird. The Bernie left, because they lost the primary, they have tended to agree sometimes, some of them, I have friends who do this all the time, and The Intercept is a good example of this, this extreme left that is so anti-Hillary that they're willing to say that the Russia thing is a whole distraction, like it's a farce that's just designed to make Hillary voters feel better for having lost. I literally have friends who have said this exact thing. I've argued with them to no end. And then I quit because it just was not I could not get through. Now, I bring that up because, again, that's the source. So consider this source. However, I think it's worth reading because they are also right on some stuff. I mean, The Intercept has their biases, Glenn Greenwald has his biases, but it doesn't mean they're never wrong.

0:33:01 Thomas: I think they are definitely wrong on the Russia question, and I think that will come back to haunt them quite a bit. I think we'll be doing an episode on that as soon as more indictments come down. But they're 100% wrong on that, and that will comes back to bite them, I think. But I think there are largely right in this article. So there are four falsehoods that they identify, and I've only seen three of them. The fourth one, I think, I don't know, we'll get to it. But here's the first defense. Number one, the Clinton slash DNC agreement cited by Brazil only applied to the general election, not the primary. So that's the First Defense that actually a lot of people shared. And this article, which I'll link, of course, it shows some tweets by some major journalists who shared this.

0:33:48 Thomas: And you know, it's, it's not that great of a defense. I actually think The Intercept is correct on this. They are referring, of course, to that language at the end that I already referenced, the kind of catch-all, oh, nothing in this agreement will be construed as affecting the primary, it'll only affect the general. And this is where they quote Campaign Legal Center's Brendan Fisher, who's a lawyer, uh, this is the one who brought up the bribery example that I used before, that wasn't original to me. This is Brandon Fisher. And he points this out. He says, despite the fact that you have this catch-all language, it effectively, the agreement, you know, really depends on how it was run. And it looks like, as it's written, it looks the Hillary campaign had control over all these key hires and communications.

0:34:39 Thomas: And therefore, I actually agree with the intercept on this one that I don't think this is that good of a defense. I think if I were to try to make a best case scenario for it, I would say it really depends on what actually happened. Like the contract itself, I don'T think is magical either way. I think, if the people agreeing to the contract had really taken on that catch-all language and had, when they were making decisions, thought, hmm, well, what are we beholden to? And if they had looked at the top part, part, you know, they would go one way. If they looked at the bottom part, which has that catch all paragraph, uh, saying you can't do anything, you Know, this all only applies to the general, they would Go another way. So I really do think it depends on what actually happened and we'll get to that in a second, but I think the intercept is largely correct that that, that isn't a get out of jail free card here because I, it, it does seem to be contradicted by the rest of the agreement.

0:35:31 Thomas: Number two, people spread the idea and I actually saw this as well. And I'm, I may have fallen victim to this because I had seen a source I trust say that Bernie Sanders signed the same agreement with the DNC that Clinton did. And this is slightly misleading. I'll say it's very misleading because it is true that Bernie signed an agreement. And it's even true that in the agreement that I just read, the Clinton agreement, there's language in there saying, yeah, we We understand other candidates could sign similar agreements. So the potential was there. Now here's where we get into the muddy waters a little bit, because Bernie did not sign an agreement that gave him control over communications and anything like that, like hires.

0:36:20 Thomas: If that was what anyone intended to communicate, they were being misleading. If anyone on Twitter, and I saw people do this, and I might have fallen victim to it very briefly, because I saw someone I trust do this, say that Bernie signed the same agreement. That's not true. That's very misleading. Now, he could have. Now here's the thing. This is where it gets a little murky, because he could've signed an agreement that would've been similar, but he chose not to. And we'll get to more data on this, but that isn't nothing, because because there was a trade-off. Hillary agreed to bail the DNC out. Bernie didn't make any such agreement. And we'll get into the ethics of exactly how that worked out, but it did mean that Bernie didn'T have to give any of his money over to the DNCC, and Hillary allegedly did.

0:37:17 Thomas: I mean, Hillary had to bail them out for a certain amount. Now, when we get further into the weeds here, which we're going to do. It turns out that Hillary kept more of the money than she should have. The campaign kept probably more of money than they otherwise had made it look like they would. So that gets further murky. But the fact is, Bernie could have done the same thing. And indeed, Donald Trump did a similar thing. We don't have the details of his agreement, but Republicans could do the same things. This wasn't some like illegal thing that only Hillary thought of. It wasn't illegal. It was probably a bit unethical. But it also is one of those things where the larger theme of campaign finance reform comes up.

0:38:03 Thomas: Like, what is the correct answer? Is the correct answer not to play by the rules? Is that the right answer? I don't know. I don't know. The correct answer to allow the other side to over fundraise better than you because you're trying to hold yourself to a higher standard. And there are people who make that argument. And it's a very compelling one. Bernie made that argument. He decided to go a different way. He decided, I'm not going to take advantage of this, a bit of a loophole that came up in 2014. So, you know what, why don't I talk about that now? So what happened was as a result of some rule changes in 2014, this is the point of all this. What became possible was this sort of money laundering-esque thing where the individual campaign limit is $2,700.

0:38:50 Thomas: So that's, you know, supposed to be how much I can donate to Hillary before it's too much, right? Well, there's a bit of a loophole. Again, what I'm seeing is it came about in 2014, and so both sides took advantage of it in this past election. And the loophole is if you form an agreement with the DNC or the RNC, you're allowed to raise money for them and you can multiply that amount times how not all, not all 50 states. It's some weird number. I don't know why, but it's something like 33 states for the Democrats. It might have to do with how many states have an official DNC. So I don'T know, but for some reason it's like 33 states or something. And the amount comes up to 350 something thousand dollars.

0:39:37 Thomas: So it increases, increases that $2,700 amount to a much higher amount. And you're able to do this by kind of saying you're fundraising for the party in all 50 states. And the idea is, you know, quote unquote, you are raising money to help down ballot elections. And both sides have done this, and both sides, that is Democrats and Republicans, not Bernie, I will say, not not Bernie, but Democrats and Republicans took advantage of this to raise a lot more money than they would have been able to otherwise because of the campaign limit. So what Hillary did, for example, was she had parties with celebrities, with George Clooney, with big names, people with millions of dollars, and they were able to make vast donations.

0:40:23 Thomas: And what would happen is then this weird kind of money laundering thing, which I would be in favor of simply patching this loophole, by the way, but what they would do is the the money would go to the DNC and it would go to the state office, and then the DNC would cut a check to the victory fund for virtually that same amount. And so it's this weird money laundering way to get around the limit, and only like 1% of the money ended up going to the states, to the down ballot election. So I think we should talk about the ethics of that very briefly, because I think it's reasonable to have a problem with that. But I think it's important to realize, again, that this wasn't just crooked Hillary, that the Republicans did this as well, and it's a result of bad laws.

0:41:15 Thomas: I mean, this is just bad laws, so then it comes down to the philosophy of, do you have to take advantage of the current laws to the fullest in order to compete with the right? And personally, my feeling is I think you kind of do. Now, I think more of the money should have gone to the states. That part, I don't know who could have fixed that. I suppose that would be a place where you could say if the DNC had been smarter, had been less biased, I suppose they could have formed an agreement that allowed at least, I do not know, 10, 20 percent, something to go to the the state. So that part, I think, definitely is wrong. But I see the argument that Hillary has made, which is, look, I'm tough on campaign finance reform.

0:42:05 Thomas: It's in my it's right there in my agenda. It'S right there in my platform. So anyone donating money to me knows that I'm using that money to win and then do campaign finance. And I think it's something I referenced last week, when it comes to those like, well, do you take that at face value or not? It kind of already depends how much you like or dislike Hillary Clinton. And so a bad reading is, well she's just saying that and then she's not going to do that. A good reading is well that makes sense. I mean you're raising the money in the best way you can, taking advantage of the laws as best as you can because you know the Republicans are doing that too. But you are going to use the money to win and then do better things than the Republicans. Republicans, I tend to lean a little more toward that, to be honest.

0:42:53 Thomas: And also, I lean more toward that because I would rather find out whether that's true. I would have rather had Hillary win and then find out and try to hold her to it versus having the other side in power. But that's just my belief. And I have so much more to do. I'm getting low on time. I don't think I'm going to go much into the other two falsehoods on the Intercept article. Third was that Brazil stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee.

So this one actually, okay, I'm sorry, I do have to talk about this because it does kind of go both ways. So that was a headline by the Washington Post, and it was a bit of a clunky one, because it made it sound like Donna Brazile thought she could just replace Clinton with Biden, when in actuality, and in fact, they issued a bit of a clarification, Not a correction, but the Washington Post issued a clarification saying, hey, this seemed like, this made it seem as though Donna Brazile thought she could just do this herself, but what it seems like she meant was she would initiate the process to replace Hillary, because there's some extensive process if the candidate were to become incapacitated, like Hillary maybe was looking like she would, according to some people, around when she had pneumonia. So, the Intercept labels this as like a falsehood that was spread. However, there is a little complication in here, because one thing that further shows a bit of Donna Brazile's hypocrisy is she didn't say, oh, I considered replacing Hillary with Bernie Sanders, the second place, you know, the runner up in the primary.

0:44:28 Thomas: She said, and this is after Hillary, of course, had won the primary, so she said, I consider replacing Clinton with Biden. So that would have been even more biased. That would have been like far more biased against Bernie than even reality was. Imagine that if you replaced Hillary, not with Bernie Sanders, who came in second, but with someone who didn't even run in the Democratic primary. I mean, that's a weird thing for Donna Brazile to have said. So the intercept does, I mean they're right to say that this was a bit misreported when people said, oh Donna Brazile thought she could just replace Hillary? Well, no, not quite. However, I mean, they're kind of missing the point on some level when Donna Brazile said, I considered replacing Clinton with Biden.

0:45:15 Thomas: And by the way, just as another questionable Donna Brazile judgment, when she found out Hillary had pneumonia, she suggested acupuncture. So, I mean, that's her level of judgment. Just as a further insight to Donna Brazile's judgment. Okay, but off of Donna Brazile and back, the fourth claim on The Intercept is that evidence has emerged proving that the content of WikiLeaks documents and emails was doctored. I haven't seen anyone saying this now. I saw them say it a year ago. And I think The Intercept is correct when they say that despite the fact that Hillary Clinton said, you know, these could be doctored, they never provided any proof, which would have been easy to do. I mean, if an email came out and it was doctored, the Clinton campaign could have said, Hey, we, here's the screenshots.

0:46:04 Thomas: Here's, you know, multiple copies of the original email. It's different. It didn't actually say that they never did. Um, I don't know why that's in this article because it really has nothing to do with this. I feel like they just kind of threw it in there to further crap on the Hillary campaign. But anyway, I largely think that the intercept is correct in most of what they're saying here in that there's no easy way out of this. So the quick defense of, well, Bernie signed the same agreement. No, not really true. I mean, there's, you know, again, we went through the layers of complication there, but no, it's not true. He didn't sign the same argument. And furthermore, I think they're right to point out that that catch-all provision that I talked about doesn't just get you out of jail free. Now, let's go the other way here and talk about some of the ways in which there are some defenses.

0:46:50 Thomas: And I will say one that I didn't really think of that I saw an article about was, okay, okay, sure, there was an agreement to have the Hillary campaign or the Hillary victory fund approve the communications director and have them hired by September 11th, if you remember, I read that. Well, when you look at what actually happened, that didn't happen. So yes, they agreed to, but actually what happened was they didn't hire a communications director until September 15th.

And you might say, okay, that's no big deal. Just a four day delay. Well sure. But also Also, they didn't hire one of the two candidates that the Hillary Clinton campaign wanted. And here's why I kind of believe the stories about Wasserman Schultz, because there's a third source here that's saying the person Wasserman Shultz hired, she hired because that person whose name was Louis Miranda, and he got the job, according to sources from the Daily Beast, he got the job because he promised Debbie Wasserman-Schultz more TV time. So, you know, I mean, I kind of tend to believe that because it looks like a lot of what she did, Wasserman Schultz, was in service of kind of herself and her campaign. And furthermore, that person, Louis Miranda, was not the first or second choice of the Hillary campaign.

So interestingly, despite the fact that this agreement, I agree with people who say it does look unethical and shady, the fact that Hillary would have control over so much. They did not honor that particular part of it. Now, I don't have all the data. We just might not have sources on this or no one's written about it. In terms of like other hires, I couldn't tell you. I'd have to be agnostic on that. There's certainly evidence and from Donna Brazile, evidence that Hillary did have control over certain communications.

0:48:42 Thomas: But it is interesting that they did not honor that. That was like the number one item, was hire the communications director we, we want, and do it by September 11th. And they did neither of those two things. And so, you know, that's data. There's one more aspect we haven't talked about, and it's critical to the argument that Bernie could have won. So if anyone is thinking Bernie could've won, the best case that I've seen is that there would've been more debates. Now, let me know if you have any other argument for this, but I'm not seeing too much else, because frankly, the DNC doesn't really control too much, much else. It's not as though they can do a whole lot, but they can schedule the debates. And so the argument might be that had they given Bernie more debate or just had scheduled more debates, because they actually scheduled them before they knew who, I mean, they obviously figured Hillary was running, but they didn't necessarily know how the rest of the field would shape up.

0:49:37 Thomas: And they had already scheduled the debates and they had already decided to only schedule six sanctioned debates. But the argument is, had they scheduled more, it would have given Bernie more time to shine because he was a relative unknown to Hillary, and therefore that could have swung the election. So first we need to evaluate the claim of did Hillary or whoever rigged the debate schedule, and then we can finally take a look at all of this and say, well, what was the effect? Is someone correct or likely correct if they said it cost Bernie? So let's start with the first thing. So was the debate schedule essentially rigged? Well, we can start with a low hanging fruit here. There was a claim in January.

0:50:22 Thomas: Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed that the Democratic debates were set to maximize exposure, and PolitiFact rates that as false. But that's slightly different from saying, therefore, the opposite is true. Like, therefore they arranged them to minimize exposure. The article doesn't really make that claim, but it does seem pretty clear. And oh, I'm going on a little long. So there's a lot of evidence in this. It does seem clear that the debates were intended to be lower by the DNC. But this was decided a while back. So it was decided when Hillary was the only clear frontrunner, and she had an unprecedented level of frontrunner Democrat status earlier than in any time past.

0:51:13 Thomas: So as a result, and possibly as a result of this DNC corruption, the debates, they didn't want to do a lot of debates, but there's also a good reason for this. After the past election, there were far too many debates, and both sides thought the number of debates they had hurt their own side for the general. So there is a bit of a dance you do strategy wise of, well, you don't want too many, because then that gives such an opportunity for the candidates to attack each other and then take each other down before the general election. So in 2008, there were 25 Dem debates and 21 Republican debates. In 2016, there are only six Democrat debates, but there are also only nine scheduled sanctioned Democratic debates.

0:52:02 Thomas: Now, there's a couple of things going on. They didn't want to have unsanctioned debates this time around. That's one of the reasons there were so many in 2008 is, yes, there were actually the same number of sanctioned debates. So in 2004 and 2008, the Democrats only had six sanctioned debates. So it's actually in that way, you can make the argument, well, it's actually in keeping with history. However, in those years, there were also unsanctioned debates, but in 2016, both the Democrats and the Republicans decided that the RNC and the DNC decided to penalize any candidate who participated in an unsanctioned debates and therefore made it so they could only participate in the sanctioned one. So that's why you had that dramatic drop off from 25 Dem, 21 Republican in 2008 to six Dem and nine Republican in 2016.

0:52:56 Thomas: So, so far we kind of have evidence on both sides of it. I mean, I could see the crooked Hillary view of, oh, well, of course they wanted to just minimize it, but I could also see that, well no, both sides decided they wanted no unsanctioned debates. The reason there were more Republican debates is there were way more Republican candidates to weed down. So they started with this huge field and Hillary was pretty much the presumptive front runner. So the Democrats thought, well, there's no reason to do that many. We don't want to take our candidates down before the general. So I can kind of see arguments on both sides, honestly. And there's more data to look through on this. I would say In my heart of hearts, I do think that while I highly doubt it was intended to specifically hurt Bernie because the schedule was arranged far in advance, I think it was meant to minimize Hillary's exposure because she was the de facto Democratic frontrunner and even if not her, Biden might have been.

0:53:56 Thomas: They still didn't know about Biden. So it was decided, by the way, before we knew that. So if you would argue it would hurt Bernie, it would have also maybe hurt Biden. But I don't think it would. I don't think it was that premeditated. In my heart of hearts, I think ideally you would have had a few more, but I mean, the decision makes sense. You know, you've got a front runner.

You don't, there's no reason to expose your side to more than you need to, you know? And, and I, you know, maybe that's a little biased, but given that Hillary was the front runner and Bernie was not even a Democrat, I guess I don't really blame the DNC that much. And here's the thing, they actually agreed to have more. So when Bernie complained, they agreed to Three more debates. So despite the fact that they started off scheduling only six sanctioned debates, they ended up with nine. They were going to have a tenth, that one got canceled, they ended up with 9, and the reason was that, you know, they wanted more, Bernie wanted more, Hillary wanted one more in a certain state, and so there was negotiation and the DNC ended up sanctioning three more debates.

So considering that they ended up with as many sanctioned debates as the Republicans had, despite the fact that the Republicans had way more candidates, way more, there's like a hundred of those frigging candidates early on. It's hard for me to think that that was this corrupt Clinton conspiracy. So now we can talk about whether or not that had an effect. It is impossible to know for sure. And I would say if I was going to make the best Bernie Sanders argument,

0:55:29 Thomas: The best Bernie Sanders argument would be, well, the debates could have been scheduled for earlier, because it is true that the first Democratic debate was two months later than the first Republican one, and the debates, as, and this was planned far in advance, but despite the fact that they were on cable, so they were more reachable in that way, you didn't have to have satellite to watch most of them, they were scheduled for weekends, and some of them were scheduled for when there was like football, so ratings were lower.

Now, the first debate, here's something interesting. The first Democratic debate, the ratings were quite high, and the later ones, no, by that time, no one was really watching. Like, the watch, the viewership went way down, and, but anyway, if I was going to make the best Bernie argument, it would be, okay, if the debates were earlier, maybe Bernie's exposure would have been higher earlier, and maybe that could have made a difference, but I have to say that doing my best to filter through this data, honestly, Bernie did quite well in caucuses, and he didn't do very well when it was a primary. He did okay in an open primary because then independents could vote.

He did terribly when it was a closed primary for the most part, but I don't really see that more debates would have mattered because the later bumps, Sanders got his biggest bump in January when it kind of looked like he had a chance in some of the early caucuses. And again, because they were caucuses, caucuses vastly favored Bernie. This is something I found out that's interesting. And in some ways, I think it's a bit unfair. We got to get rid of these stupid caucuses because they favor a certain type of person.

0:57:08 Thomas: They favor a certain type of supporter who can go spend a whole day in a sweaty, weird room with a bunch of people doing this bizarre caucus process. And as evidence of my claim here that we shouldn't have these, there was a weird quirk where Nebraska and Washington had both a caucus, but then they also had a primary vote. But the primary vote, it wasn't what decided the delegates, the caucus did. And so for some reason, these two states had both a primary vot and a caucus. Bernie Sanders won the caucus in Washington by 46%. So he just absolutely crushed Hillary. But when they had the vote, the primary vot in Washington, Hillary absolutely crushed Bernie.

0:57:53 Thomas: So that strikes me as very undemocratic. And the same thing happened in Nebraska, actually. Bernie did way better in the caucus in Nebraska. But then when there was a primary vote, Hillary actually won. So for us to be the side, by the way, that says, oh, this electoral college is crap because you can win the popular vote, but you lose because, you know, some states have some undue power. I think that that argument applies times a million to this caucus system. Caucuses are stupid. I don't think it's a good way. It's not representative as we've seen in these two states. I mean, it's vastly different when Sanders wins Washington by 46% in the caucus and then loses by 6% in, in the vote. I mean, that, it just doesn't seem useful to me. I, that doesn't seem like how you want to be deciding your candidate.

0:58:42 Thomas: But anyway, the point is Bernie had his biggest jump when it looked like he had a chance, but as time went on, he got, he got pretty close. A lot of that I think is more to do with Hillary's email controversies and all that. And if you look at the numbers in a pretty naive analysis, I'll admit, this is just me eyeballing and comparing dates. When you compare the debate dates to the polling, it's not as though every time there was a debate, there was this Bernie Sanders jump and a Hillary drop because people didn't know who Bernie Sanders was. It's actually not really what happened. There's a couple of big Bernie jumps and they don't correlate with like right after a debate. They correlate more with the primaries. So when Bernie got a win in some of these caucuses, And they weren't just caucuses, but that was where he had the advantage.

0:59:34 Thomas: When he got some primary wins, it looked as though he had more of a chance. And so the far left got more motivated and the change came in the far left, actually. The centrist Democrats were with Clinton virtually the whole time, but she was able to peel off some of those far leftists until it looked like Sanders had a chance, and then they started pulling more towards Sanders.

But what happened was as those debates went on, there came a point in around April where Hillary only increased her lead. So despite the fact that there are more debates, her lead just increased. So I mean, the the strongest Bernie argument is maybe an earlier debate. I I think it's a bit of a faith-based argument because it's it's like a lot of maybes, like maybe an early debate would have gotten him on the scene sooner, and that, but I just, I don't, I don't quite see that as a powerful argument, short of, I mean, you you can make a vague argument, oh, he would have had some momentum and that would have changed a bunch of stuff. I I don't see a very scientific argument, though. So saying an earlier debate or a debate with more viewership would have made all the difference, it just doesn't seem like the numbers bear that out to me. You can look at the data for yourself.

But I mean, really, if you ran, and I'll link this FiveThirtyEight article, they did several different models and the system actually favored Bernie in a lot of ways because of these open primaries and the caucuses, which to me, the open primary, it honestly doesn't make a whole whole lot of sense either, because I don't see why a Republican should be able to come in and vote for which Democrat they like.

1:01:13 Thomas: Now, it seems like, oh, but Bernie's an independent, so you would want independents to be able to vote, and also you would want independents to have some say because they don't have any say at all in either primary, and then there are these swing voters in the general. So that argument kind of makes sense, but I don't think it should be fully open. And I also don't find it unreasonable that Democrats should be able to control their own nominee and not have outside people telling them who their nominee should be. But 538 modeled, if it was all closed primaries, Hillary would have won by about a billion. If it was all open primaries, Hillary would've still won according to 538 modeling, but she wouldn't have won by that much.

1:01:59 Thomas: So the independent vote would have made a difference for Bernie Sanders. It made like a 10% difference. And so it dropped her margin a bit. And then they did just for shits and giggles, they modeled if it was all caucuses and somehow Sanders would have won. I don't know how they even modeled that. That sounds hard to do, but they modeled that Sanders would have won had it all been caucuses. So there you go, Bernie bros. If you want a path to victory, just do all caucuses, which I think are a really ridiculous form of choosing somebody. So if anyone has a good argument or a good source for like, here's why this rigging made a difference of the 3 million votes Hillary won by and the numbers, she was ahead virtually the whole time. If you have a good argument for why that's wrong, I'm all ears.

1:02:46 Thomas: I'm just not seeing it in the data. One more thing to add to the mix in terms of counterfactuals was, had the DNC not had had some semblance of favoritism for Hillary, Bernie wouldn't have been able to use that to the extent that he did, because he really did. Bernie campaigned on the DNC being, and actually, it wasn't so much Bernie himself as his representatives, that there was a letter written by one of his campaign managers or one of his lawyers or something. There's a letter written about how the DNC's totally in the hands of Clinton and all that, he was able, his campaign Hayne was able to play up his outsider role. And one thing we saw in 2016 was outsiders won, you know, I mean, Trump won ultimately as a huge outsider.

1:03:33 Thomas: So you have to, I don't know how much you want to factor this into your personal calculus, but you have factor that in a little bit. I mean, had the DNC not been in favor of Hillary at all, would Bernie have been able to run as an outsider in the same way? Had they favored Bernie, would it ultimately have hurt him in some way? I don't know if I would go that far, but I do think there's a certain element of he was able to play the outsider there and he was able to campaign as someone independent from the establishment. And that might've helped him a little bit. So let's, in terms of the overall results, I really just don't see how this tipped the scales enough to have handed Hillary the election, the primary. I don't see it.

1:04:18 Thomas: That's my opinion based on everything I'm seeing. Now, let's talk about what was right or wrong, though, because I do want to very strongly say that the agreement the DNC signed was wrong. I do not think they should do that again. They will not do that Again. I am glad there is new leadership. It sounds like also there are tons of problems, some corruption problems in the DNC. There were infrastructure problems. There was spending that shouldn't have been done. Plenty to complain about with the DNC. I do not want to give the impression that everything is fine. It was all great. It was fine. No, my opinion is it didn't decide the election for Hillary, but there was plenty of wrongdoing. I'm glad Debbie Wasserman Schultz is out. I'm also glad Donna Brazile is not the chairperson because I really don't think she was as much better, honestly.

1:05:11 Thomas: I think she played the victim a lot more and she could have had more control. She was, again, number two for 10 years or something and she would have taken more of a role in that and she didn't. But anyway, what I mean to say is there was plenty of wrongdoing. There's plenty that the DNC should fix. It should be more transparent. And in fact, the current DNC chair, Keith Ellison, wrote an article or, you know, the DNC wrote it, whatever, and they published it. And here's the steps they're going to take as a result of these quote unquote revelations from Donald Brazil. Again, they weren't really revelations. They were public in 2015. But beside the point, he wrote, and I think this is good. Number one, to ensure that no candidate participating in our presidential nominating process gains any unfair advantage, real or perceived, during our primary season.

1:05:59 Thomas: We will decide the debate schedule in advance instead of negotiating after all our candidates have entered the race. They already did that last time, by the way, but that's just to double down. Number two, I will ensure that any and all joint fundraising agreements will be transparent, including the new Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund agreements that we've developed with all 50 state parties. This is the first time the DNC has signed joint fundraising agreements like this so early and before the midterms. This is great. I think that's key that we should not have any more of these weird, shady agreements that Hillary had. I don't think that is right. I do not think it should be right on either side. I agree with that. There are three or four more items, but they are kind of general. I believe they are good. The point is, I do think Democrats are taking this seriously.

1:06:46 Thomas: I do believe Keith Ellison is taking this serious. I want to echo, this was wrong. The DNC did a lot wrong, by no means. It's two separate things. You know, there's two separate questions, is what they did, is what the Hillary campaign did right or wrong, and separate question, what effect did it have? And I'm firmly in the camp that while I don't think it was crooked Hillary, she needs to be arrested. I do think she took advantage and the DNC was incompetent and allowed her to take advantage despite the fact that they didn't even honor their own agreement. It's possible they honored it in other ways that we don't know. There certainly was favoritism. That's wrong. There shouldn't be that. The DNC should be clear. It should be unbiased until you have your candidate.

1:07:32 Thomas: And then once that's decided, then the DNC can fight for that candidate. That should be how it works. Unequivocally, it was wrong. And then the separate question of did it change the election? I firmly believe it did not. So that's how I feel, definitely feel free to, of course, come up with your own conclusions based on the evidence I'll cite, all my sources I referenced, but that's where I come down on this. So I think that, you know, it's a weird scenario where in some ways I guess it was good that Donna Brazil did this weird thing where she came out with a revelation that everyone already knew, and she should have already known, it was good because I do think it's important that Keith Ellison Morrison and the DNC leadership now came out with this piece.

1:08:17 Thomas: I think it was important. They should have done it anyway. It shouldn't have taken Donna Brazile. Maybe they were going to do it anyway, I don't know. So there you have it. There's my deep dive into that. I actually didn't get to some of the things I wanted to. This was one of those four billion tabbers on my Chrome browser, which is pretty much every Thursday episode. But that's how I feel about it. I really think it's good that we're pushing for transparency and cleaning up the DNCC. And I think that's something we ought to do. I think, I hope the state elections get more money. And we saw that with Virginia. We saw that the DNC poured a lot of money into that. Um, I think the change is coming guys. I think the change is happening and it's unfortunate that it took such catastrophe to make it happen. Uh, but I think it's happening. The youth vote was killer in this, this latest election just two days ago.

1:09:04 Thomas: The Youth vote was great. Um it's happening, you know, and I think that we need to be vigilant. We need to keep it up because the price of letting it slip was so high in 2016. And furthermore, not just 2016, in 2010, it was so high for allowing the Tea Party to take control. And then that was crucial in the gerrymandering, all that stuff, constant vigilance. And by no means are Democrats above scandal. I don't think that's true at all. But I think that that the DNC, if we keep an eye on it, if we clean house as they are, I think ultimately, in my opinion, is the Democrats are far better at serving our country than Republicans are. Oh, that's one thing I wanted to say. Dan Errol had a Facebook status where he said that, as a result of this Donna Brazile quote-unquote revelation, he said, neither party cares about you, don't vote for either party, essentially, you know, vote to take down the system or something.

1:10:01 Thomas: You know, he's anarchist. This is why I disagree with Dan Errol so much. He's an anarchist and he's like a communist anarchist. And it's so unrealistic to me that I think it's actively harmful. I think it's actively harmful to look at this Donna Brazile thing and say, oh, DNC, no one cares about you. No, it's not that the DNC didn't care. It's that they thought the best path to victory was a little bit of favoritism toward Hillary. That doesn't mean they don't care about you or they don't care about the issues. They just thought Hillary was the way forward. And if you look at Hillary's platform, I think her platform was actually great. I think it was. I mean, I, I thinking that even Bernie supporters would have to acknowledge that a lot of his talking points made their way into, to some of her platform.

1:10:50 Thomas: And, and I, I think we would have been much, much better served with Hillary's platform than, of course, Trump's platform. And I think it's a result of great privilege to say, burn down the system and throw your vote away or don't vote, vote to take the system down, when what that ends up meaning is you're advocating your far lefties to not participate and make it easier for someone like Trump, or actually literally Trump, to win reelection if he's still in office by then. And that's harmful. And that throws trans people in the military under the bus. That throws gay people who don't want to be discriminated against and hiring under the bus. That throws Latinos, that throws dreamers under the bus. That throws people who require, you know, Obamacare for their health care under the bus.

1:11:36 Thomas: I mean, that's privilege to me. Privilege is saying, well, I don't care about any of that, I want a perfect candidate, or I'm going to take my toys and go home. I don't like it. And that was one thing I wanted to make sure to say. So this was a bit long. It was a real deep dive. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm very curious for feedback on this one. You know, it's always a contentious issue. I think definitely things were done wrong and I'm glad they're being fixed. So that's my opinion. Hey, thanks so much to everyone who pledges at patreon.com/seriouspod. We'll go ahead and take a break on the patron thanks for a week just because this was really long. I hope patrons will forgive me, but I'll make sure to catch you next week. Thanks for listening. Thanks most of all to the patrons who make this show happen, and I will see you guys on Monday.