The release of more than 19,000 pages of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee competed on Saturday with the big reveal of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as the running mate of presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton.

On Friday, WikiLeaks dropped a bombshell cache of DNC emails. Several weeks ago, Russian hackers were reported to have breached the DNC's servers, but on Saturday WikiLeaks refused to disclose where it had obtained the trove of data.

Among other things, the documents purport to show the party apparatus favoring Clinton's campaign over the insurgency of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. On a number of occasions, high level DNC officials met with counterparts on Clinton's team to discuss ways to push back against stories that painted the Clinton campaign in a negative light.

One pointedly worded missive dismissed Sanders' campaign as "a mess" adding that his campaign apparatus "never had their act together."

The news took center stage on social media, threatening to upend the Democrats' messaging and steal attention from a chaotic and divided Republican National Convention, which wrapped up on Thursday night. The email exchanges may reopen the wounds of a bitter Democratic primary season, just as the party kicks off its own national conference designed to highlight a unified, energized party.



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The DNC did not respond to CNBC's request for comment, but Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told ABC News in an interview that "someone in the DNC needs to be held at least as accountable as the Trump campaign," for a controversy involving Melania Trump's speech earlier this week, Weaver said.

Separately, CNN reported late Saturday that Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the embattled DNC chair, would be denied a speaking role at the convention in the wake of the leak.



Indeed, only half a day after Clinton announced Kaine as her vice presidential pick, news of the DNC leak was one of the top trending item on Twitter on Saturday.

GOP nominee Donald Trump leaped into the fray to blast Democrats for their perceived treatment of Sanders, calling it "really vicious."



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On Saturday, some users accused Twitter of censoring search results of the leak — an accusation Facebook faced several months ago when it came under fire for suppressing conservative-leaning commentary on its site.

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