Hillary Clinton may have worked with the Democratic National Committee to shut Bernie Sanders out of getting media coverage, new leaked documents from within the DNC’s own servers seem to suggest.

This week, a hacker calling himself “Guccifer 2” released a number of documents stolen from the DNC. The part that got the most media attention was an extensive piece of opposition research on Donald Trump that outlined the party’s plan of attack against the real estate mogul and GOP nominee, but supporters of Bernie Sanders claim the real bombshell was another email.

In an email dated the day Hillary Clinton officially announced her nomination, the DNC was already planning a media strategy that contrasted Clinton and Trump. The document shows that the party had been planning for Clinton to become the nominee, not Bernie Sanders.

As The Anti Media noted in its analysis of the emails that the DNC appeared to be in lockstep with Hillary Clinton.

“‘Our goals in the coming months will be to frame the Republican field and the eventual nominee early and to provide a contrast between the GOP field andHRC,’ reads an email dated May 26, 2015, referencing the former secretary of state by her initials, posted by ‘Guccifer 2.0‘ — after the Romanian hacker who allegedly accessed Clinton’s private email server multiple times.” “One of the strategies listed for ‘positioning and public messaging’ states, ‘Use specific hits tomuddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC.'”

The emails struck at a common refrain among Bernie Sanders supporters — that the entire primary process was tilted toward Hillary Clinton at the outset, with Sanders struggling to get his message across through what many saw as a total media blackout.

The allegations that Hillary Clinton and the DNC may have worked together to shut Bernie Sanders out of media coverage comes amid a number of other allegations against Clinton, some true and others leaning toward shadowy conspiracy theory territory. Bernie Sanders himself has spoken out against a primary system that allowed Clinton to amass a major lead in superdelegates even before the first vote was cast, giving voters an impression that she had a large early lead even when Sanders was narrowly ahead after the New Hampshire primary.

There is even a lawsuit being filed by the Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity claiming that exit polls show votes were shifted from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders.

The Free Thought Project had details of the suit.

“The group claims that in about eleven states, there has been noted a significant difference between the exit polls and the electronic vote totals presented on the morning after the primaries. These differences show votes appear to be shifted from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton. The chances of this kind of shift happening are considered to be statistically impossible between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in these eleven states.”

But experts in exit polling say there is no basis for this theory and that those pushing it seem to be confusing international exit polling with the very different kind that takes place in the United States. While exit polls can be used to verify the results of international elections, in the United States it is a function carried out by the media in order to gain information about voter demographics.

DID HILLARY CHEAT? – Lawsuit Finds Millions Of Uncounted Bernie Sanders Ballots https://t.co/vmSlvdwSX9 #FeelTheBern #BernieSanders — Ted Hooley (@ed_hooley) June 15, 2016

These exit polls include a more involved process that tends to favor voters who have higher enthusiasm for their candidates as well as those who are younger and native English speakers — all factors favoring Bernie Sanders. As such, exit polling in the United States can sometimes carry a high margin of error and is not meant to serve as an indicator of election fraud.

But the much more real allegations that Hillary Clinton and the DNC were working hand-in-hand could be harmful to Clinton’s campaign and threaten the party unity she has been working hard to foster since defeating Bernie Sanders.

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