This piece originally ran on AlterNet.

According to Counterpunch and Cenk Uygur, the host of Young Turks, the DNC and different states’ Democratic parties have long been funneling money into Hillary Clinton’s campaign, otherwise known as “laundering by the millions.” Counterpunch explains:

In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called the Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.

No one had cast a single vote yet in the Democratic primary. “Not only had we not decided who the Democratic nominee was in August of 2015, we still haven’t decided,” Cenk Uygur pointed out on Monday. “But back then, the DNC already made their decision.”

The DNC was so positive Hillary was going to be the nominee that it began a process of actively funneling money to her campaign. At the same time, it convinced 33 Democratic state parties to go along with the plan. Counterpunch states:

The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.

“McCutcheon was a terrible decision,” Uygur explained, adding that, “it put Citizens United on steroids, and said, ‘you can give even more money as long as you give it to the party, and then in this case they figured, ‘I got it, there’s still caps on how much an individual can give to Hillary Clinton directly but what if we funnel it through the party. And we funnel it through the state democratic parties.’ Bingo.”

Using this system to arm the party against Republicans in a general election makes it slighly more understandable, Uygur opined. But shouldn’t voters in the Democratic Party at least have a say?

“With this scheme, the Hillary Victory Fund raised over $26 million for the Clinton campaign by the end of 2015. [And] not only did Hillary’s multi-millionaire and billionaire supporters get to bypass individual campaign donation limits to state parties by using several state parties apparatus, but the Clinton campaign got the added bonus of buying that state’s superdelegates with the promise of contributions to that Democratic organization’s re-election fund,” Counterpunch concluded, eliminating any doubt as to where the DNC stands.