During a primary election, the Democratic National Committee is supposed to behave like a UFC referee: while the candidates beat the daylights out of one another—Clinton's muay thai roundhouse kicks and Sander's jiu jitsu ground grappling—the Committee should observe from afar, unbiased, and ultimately support the clear winner.

As was revealed by an enormous data dump made by WikiLeaks last night—nearly 20,000 emails from the accounts of seven DNC employees—that's not what happened in the Democratic presidential primary, which wraps up at the Convention next week in Philadelphia. Instead, some of those within the Democratic Party's largest organization acted like a bunch of mean girls passing notes in the back of class.

"Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess," wrote Mark Paustenbach, a committee communications official, to Luis Miranda, the communications director for the committee, according to The New York Times.

"Get someone to ask his belief" in God, suggested DNC chief financial officer Brad Marshall on May 5, according to CNN (though he did not name Sanders directly). "This could make several points of difference with my peeps. My Souther Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist."

For months, Sanders lodged complaints against the DNC, accusing the organization of treating him unfairly. For months, the DNC denied it. But the leak, the emails in which were exchanged between January 2015 to May 2016, reveal consistent and systematic backroom planning on how to damage Sanders' campaign.

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This does not bode well for the DNC's chairperson, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. We, for one, have consistently pointed out her poor leadership and general ineptitude. She oversaw the mess of a midterm election in 2014 in which Democrats were trounced, and she has not supported the president on important foreign policy issues like our new openness with Cuba and our nuclear deal with Iran, sending signals of disunity in the party. Which is the exact opposite thing she's supposed to do.

It's unclear what this will mean for the tenuous friendship Clinton and Sanders have only recently forged. If he decides to stop supporting her candidacy, his many millions of rabid followers may very well do the same.

For his part, honest citizen Donald Trump is shocked and dismayed by the revelations.

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Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders. Mock his heritage and much more. On-line from Wikileakes, really vicious. RIGGED — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2016

Eric Sullivan Eric Sullivan is a senior editor for Esquire.

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