It appears that Clinton may have seen the question coming.

“From time to time I get the questions in advance,” wrote Brazile in the pre-town-hall email. At the time, Brazile was vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in addition to being a CNN contributor. She stopped being a contributor in mid-summer, when she started serving as interim DNC chair.

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CNN has insisted that it did not lose custody of the question; reports have suggested that the leak came from Brazile through TVOne, whose Roland Martin co-hosted the debate in cooperation with CNN.

“To find out that someone was unethically helping the Clinton campaign — tipping them off — is just very, very upsetting,” Tapper said in a WMAL radio interview. “I have tremendous regard for Donna Brazile; she’s a good person and a nice person and I like her a lot. But . . . whatever took place here, and I know that I had nothing to do with it. And I know that CNN — we were so closely guarding our documents, they weren’t ever emailed around. I think this was a follow-up question that Roland Martin was going to ask, theoretically . . . We wanted to put [Clinton] in a tough situation: You support the death penalty, here’s someone who was almost killed because of the death penalty — what do you have to say to him?”

Tapper said his understanding was that the question got to Brazile via Martin or someone in his orbit.

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Whatever the particulars, it’s incontrovertible that the more organizations that are involved in producing an event, the greater the chances that a leak will occur. “I am sure it will have an impact on partnering with this organization in the future. And I’m sure that it will have an effect on — Donna Brazile is no longer with CNN because she’s head of the DNC right now, but I’m sure it will have an impact on Donna Brazile.”