SOPHIA McCLENNEN, sophia.mcclennen at gmail.com, @mcclennen65
McClennen recently wrote the piece “Why is Donna Brazile still emailing me? The tone-deaf DNC has no credibility,” which states: “To refresh our collective memory, Brazile is a perfect example of the DNC’s insider clique and its complete disrespect for the democratic process. When WikiLeaks dumped a bunch of emails from DNC insiders it revealed that Brazile had passed on questions to the Hillary Clinton campaign to give her an edge in debates against Bernie Sanders during the presidential primaries.
“When the emails were first dumped, Brazile denied she had cheated.
“But it’s worse than that. She didn’t just deny it, she went on a righteous rant. ‘I did not receive any questions from CNN,’ she said in a Fox News interview last October. ‘As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not stand here and be persecuted because your information is totally false.’
“Stop and think about that for a moment, because that sort of bald-faced lie is the exact thing that the DNC is excited to discover in the Trump team’s stories about their ties to Russia.
“After the first email dump, CNN decided to cut ties with Brazile, who at the time was a CNN commentator and interim chair of the DNC. Brazile replaced Debbie Wasserman Schulz who had been forced to resign as chair of the DNC back in July 2016 just before the convention when the WikiLeaks dumps ‘showed embarrassing emails among party officials that appeared to show coordinated efforts to help Clinton at the expense of her rivals.’”
McClennen is professor of international affairs and comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University. She is co-author of Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights.