by

Citizens have been swamped by the tidal wave of corruption associated with or emanating from the Trump campaign and presidency, but late last week brought affirmation of a long-held belief that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee rigged the primary campaign against populist Bernie Sanders. The revelations emanated from none other than Donna Brazile, the woman who sat in as the DNC’s chair after Debbie Wasserman Schultz was deposed for exactly the corruption Brazile now exposes. As the old saying goes, “the fish rots from the head” — and there’s a tremendous stench coming from the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign that undeniably smells of rot.

Those readers with good memories may recall the early warnings of this corruption written by Montanan Margot Kidder and covered in this column (April 18, 2016) — and that the Montana Democratic Party was part of the rotten deal.

As Kidder wrote:

“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. The leadership of a very broke Montana Democratic Party decided in August of 2015 that this was a seductive deal they were willing to make.”

Not being a D.C. Demo Party insider, and in fact a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, it’s no surprise that Kidder only scratched the surface of the Clinton campaign and DNC’s collusion and perfidy. The same cannot be said of Brazile, and her further revelations are both alarming and repulsive.

The DNC was broke and deeply in debt while the Clinton campaign was rolling in big-donor money. Unbelievably, Clinton’s campaign then “loaned” $2 million to the DNC to keep its day-to-day operations running. But there was a quid pro quo from Clinton.

As Brazile exposes in her op-ed column in Politico titled “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC”: “As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.” This, of course, flies in the face of the by-laws of the DNC, which is supposed to remain impartial during primary campaigns. Unfortunately, it gets worse.

When Brazile found out about the loan, she writes: “’No! That can’t be true!’ I said. ‘The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.'” Yet, that’s exactly what happened. And the kickback scheme detailed earlier that year by Kidder’s expose was verified. “Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement — $320,000 — and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that.”

That the Montana Democratic Party was involved in this perversion of our political system is nothing less than disgusting. That the same “players” involved then remain in office and in charge of the party now is outrageous. It’s far past time to get rid of the Democrat’s “rotten fish” — both in Montana and at the highest national levels.