PHILADELPHIA — Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn’t supposed to ask Joe Biden to come to her daughter’s bat mitzvah.

Democratic National Committee staff had sent the chair to the vice president armed with four specific requests for getting him involved in raising money for the party.


She decided to scrap them for two of her own.

First, she asked Biden to do a fundraiser for her own reelection to her House seat in Florida in the primary challenge she’s facing next month. He agreed.

The second was to get down to Boca Raton for the bat mitzvah.

Biden’s staff balked. They offered to tape a video message from him instead, hoping that would satisfy her.

Wasserman Schultz eagerly said yes. They played it for everyone who came.

The meeting with Biden was symptomatic of the way the DNC was veering off the rails just as the presidential election was heating up. More than a dozen people inside the party apparatus, speaking in the wake of Wasserman Schultz’s resignation on Sunday, describe an internal culture in which few felt they could challenge an increasingly imperious and politically tone-deaf chair who often put her own interests ahead of party functions.

Last week’s WikiLeaks dump, releasing thousands of emails showing DNC officials sparring with Bernie Sanders supporters and with one another, was what finally got Hillary Clinton’s top aides to force her out Sunday on the eve of the convention.

Now, all DNC senior staffers seem to believe they’re on the verge of being fired — and that’s before the next WikiLeaks release, which many fear is coming within days, and which DNC lawyers are bracing for. Several staff members have already been asked to prepare statements about their departures.

Staff members were briefed in a Tuesday afternoon meeting in Washington that their personal data was part of the hack, as were Social Security numbers and other information for donors, according to people who attended. Don’t search WikiLeaks, they were told — malware is embedded throughout the site, and they’re looking for more data.

This was all done to influence the 2016 election, they were told.

Wasserman Schultz battled to the end. But the dysfunction within the DNC had been mounting for months, according to interviews with over a dozen people in and around the organization. Wasserman Schultz’s detractors extend from party officials to the White House to the Clinton campaign — even though she was widely viewed as favoring Clinton. And many of them say they worry that the email drama has obscured the full picture of went wrong on Wasserman Schultz’s watch, which they worry won’t be fixed unless there’s a more complete airing.

“This [WikiLeaks release] didn’t peel back all the layers of the onion of incompetence,” said one person inside the DNC. “But it broke the fever.”

Neither the White House nor Clinton’s campaign made the moves to oust her earlier for fear of an untimely blowup. Her support of the Iran deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership helped keep the West Wing from going too hard at her. But senior aides to Clinton and President Barack Obama had long ago run out of patience with what they saw as her attempts to constantly insert herself and clumsily try to ingratiate herself at Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.

“It was an inch-by-inch battle for everything, and Debbie didn’t make it easy — not because she was trying to stay neutral, but because she was trying to maintain control,” said one person familiar with DNC operations.

Wasserman Schultz refused, without direct explanation at the time, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s request to have three members of Congress testify at the first party platform committee meeting in early June, leading Pelosi to clear her schedule that day and show up herself to speak about House Democratic priorities.

When Obama agreed to do a DNC fundraiser in Miami in June — and in the end, went out of his way in his public remarks to talk about why Wasserman Schultz needed to be reelected — she for weeks hassled White House political director David Simas to get 10 of the 60 seats (which went for $10,000 each) at the event for her congressional reelection campaign’s biggest donors. She ended up filling the seats, according to people involved with planning the event, with family and friends.

A DNC spokesperson did not dispute the Biden and Obama encounters. As for blocking Pelosi’s request, the spokesperson said it was because the session “was set up to hear from grass-roots voices as well as stakeholders around specific issues. When Leader Pelosi raised the question of testifying on the Innovation Agenda, Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz welcomed her testimony, and she testified at the hearing.”

A decision about how much money to transfer to state parties that was supposed to be made in consultation with DNC officers was made unilaterally by Wasserman Schultz, and without warning, angering top brass.

The other DNC officers, directly aware of many of the problems and told by staff about others, were constantly talking to one another about what was going wrong and how to get around a chair who was adamant that she would stay through the end of her term in January.

“In the last eight weeks, there was a growing sense that it just wasn’t going to work, and it was only a matter of time,” one officer said.

Frustration within the DNC, the White House and the Clinton campaign was exacerbated by Wasserman Schultz’s efforts to raise her own profile by appearing more often on national television.

Luis Miranda, the communications director whom Wasserman Schultz hired last September, pitched her hard in their interview on how he would get her on TV more often. He got the job over two candidates who were recommended by the Clinton campaign.

“The biggest problem with the communications department right now is that we don’t put Debbie out there enough,” Miranda said at his first staff meeting after coming on board in September, according to people in the room.

Requests for comment from Wasserman Schultz and Miranda were directed to a DNC spokesperson.

“The DNC got suggestions for the communications director job from many sources, and filled the position with a highly qualified communications professional who had DNC experience, Obama ’08 and White House communications office experience, and experience with communications in the private sector,” said a DNC spokesperson. “Managing the press profile of the DNC chair is part of the job, as anyone who has ever worked at the DNC, under any chairperson, will tell you.”

But Wasserman Schultz’s increased television activity increased her problems. After the raucous Nevada state convention in May, she went on the attack against Sanders and his supporters, and an enraged Sanders responded by calling for her resignation.

Just at the point when Democratic leaders were hoping to shift toward more party unity, she’d inflamed the situation and put herself in the middle of it.

“The people who were willing to look the other way stopped looking the other way,” said another person familiar with DNC operations.

She sometimes failed to show up at headquarters to make donor calls, or stay for long when she did. Key staffers couldn’t find her after her personal staff had stopped sending her schedule to all but two top staffers, which the DNC spokesperson said was due to security concerns as the email hack was being investigated.

More and more, the DNC staff, the White House and the Clinton campaign simply wrote her off.

“There was nothing we could do with her, so we just stopped pretending,” another DNC staffer said. “She became so ineffective for the building that we just stopped using her.”

Meanwhile, Wasserman Schultz accentuated an existing divide with Amy Dacey, who as committee CEO was supposed to have control over all operations. She was often left out of the loop of decisions by the chair’s staff, sometimes leading to contradictory plans.

“One hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing,” lamented one state party chair.

After Clinton won the nomination in June, her campaign moved quickly to try to take control of the DNC. But when Brandon Davis, former political director of the Service Employees International Union, was brought in to the DNC by Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook to be the campaign’s eyes and ears in the party office, Wasserman Schultz made comments both in introducing him to the full staff and in private conversations encouraging people to see him as working for her.

Wasserman Schultz couldn’t stop Davis’ hiring. But when the campaign tried to bring in a senior communications aide who’d be supervisor to Miranda, she dug in against the move, infuriating the Clinton campaign anew, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Wasserman Schultz, meanwhile, has remained in Philadelphia, attending events day and night with her police escort, and having her assistant reach out aggressively to donors, urging them to see her in her suite at the Wells Fargo Center, her base while in town.

She hasn’t seen DNC staffers since she stopped by their meeting of shaken staff Sunday night, within hours of Obama calling her to accept her resignation.

“And all those scumbags who are giving you shit on social media,” she concluded, according to several attendees, “f--- them, they don’t know the first thing. They don’t know you.”

Gabriel Debenedetti contributed to this report.

