RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—Democrats became embroiled in an intraparty fight Friday over last year’s presidential election.

Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee during the election, asserted in a new book that the fundraising agreement between the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign was unethical because it gave her too much influence on the party’s infrastructure.

In excerpts published on Politico, Ms. Brazile said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign raised money for the DNC and helped fund it, and in return took control of its finances and strategy as well as the funds. Ms. Brazile noted that it is common practice for a presidential nominee to take control of his or her party’s operations and fundraising.

But she said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign signed the agreement with the DNC in August 2015, almost a year before she clinched the party’s nomination. That disadvantaged Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his primary fight with Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Brazile wrote.

Late Friday, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters pointed to a memo obtained by NBC News that said the agreement related only to the general election.

“Enough of this. If you’re a Democrat, we have things to do,” wrote Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, in a Twitter message referencing the reported memo.

WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib explains what have we learned after Special Counsel Robert Mueller unveiled his first two big actions in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Photo: Getty

DNC Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement Friday morning that “there shouldn’t even be a perception that the DNC is interfering” in the primary process. She noted that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders had the option to raise money through joint DNC accounts.

The two campaigns set up joint fundraising accounts with the DNC during the Democratic primary, though the accounts were ultimately used very differently. Joint fundraising accounts allow campaigns and parties to solicit larger individual donations that are then divvied up between the entities that sign the agreement.

Mr. Sanders shunned big-dollar fundraising, relying instead on small donors to fuel his campaign. Mrs. Clinton, however, routinely held large-dollar fundraisers for her joint account with the DNC and state parties—some of which would then transfer the funds they received back to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

Robert E. Lee is back in the news thanks to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. In a Fox News interview Monday, Mr. Kelly called Gen. Lee “an honorable man” and observed that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had made them stand.”

Mr. Kelly has a point. It is worth remembering that Lee, who has lately been painted as a traitorous caricature, embodied in countless ways the poignancy and tragedy of the Civil War. It would be a gross misfortune if the political debate obscures his story.

Lee’s lineage was impeccable. His father was Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee III, the celebrated Revolutionary War general and close friend of George Washington. Lee himself descended from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, who later became an ardent Confederate, was none other than Mary Custis, a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and, through adoption, of George Washington himself.

Lee agonized over whether to fight for the Confederacy. As war loomed, Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the new Union Army, a position he had always coveted. Despite being an avowed Federalist who longed for compromise to save the Union, Lee, like so many others, gave in to the permanency of birth and blood. “I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children,” he wrote a friend, “save in defense of my native state.” Instead he became the commanding general of the Confederate armies, while predicting that the country would pass “through a terrible ordeal.” He was right.

Still, he was never much of a hater. Like Lincoln, more often than not Lee called the other side “those people,” rather than “the enemy.” Nor was it clear that he loved war itself. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he once said, “or we should grow too fond of it.” With words that could have been uttered by Lincoln, Lee talked of the cruelty of war, how it filled “our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.”

Nor was he fond of slavery, once describing it as “a moral and political evil.” True, he did benefit from slavery. But in 1863, one day after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Lee went a step further than Thomas Jefferson ever did and freed his family slaves, fulfilling the wishes of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. And in 1865, as the Confederacy stood on the throes of destruction, Lee supported a dramatic measure to put slaves in uniform and train them to fight, which would have effectively emancipated them.

Upon the conflict’s close, Lee gave a forceful interview to the New York Herald in which he strongly condemned Lincoln’s assassination and claimed that the “best men of the South” had long wanted to see slavery’s end. Later he declared, “I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.”

Arguably his most powerful statement about race relations came at war’s end in St. Paul’s Church, the congregation of the Richmond elite. To the horror of many of the congregants, a well-dressed black man advanced to take communion, and knelt down at the altar rail. The minister froze, unsure what to do. Lee knelt down next to the black man to partake of the communion with him.

Finally, Lee’s greatest legacy was not in war, but in peace. Lee went to great pains to heal the bitterness that cleaved the country after Appomattox. When Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, in arguably one of the most moving scenes in American history, the military situation remained quite perilous. The war was still raging. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was on the run, calling on Southerners to take to the hills and wage guerrilla warfare. This at a time when there were still three Confederate armies, and hatreds between North and South were at their peak. Lincoln was assassinated five days later. Had the South undertaken guerrilla warfare, it’s more than likely the U.S. would have broken up into two countries.

Clinton: There Is A Difference Between Paying For Trump Dossier And “Collusion” With Russia

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Hillary Clinton told host Trevor Noah that there is a difference between the Clinton campaign and the DNC working together to obtain the infamous Russian-tainted Trump dossier and the possibility that “Trump’s people” worked with Russians…

Sen. Warren: “Yes,” The Democratic Presidential Primary Was Rigged For Hillary Clinton

On Thursday’s broadcast of The Lead, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told CNN host Jake Tapper she believes that the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged in favor of the party’s eventual nominee Hillary Clinton. JAKE TAPPER: I want to ask you one other question, Senator, we learned…
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: “The DNC Needs To Be Completely Overhauled… No More Games, No More Retaliation”

TULSI GABBARD: Earlier today we heard from Donna Brazile that what many people had suspected for a long time turned out to be true. The DNC secretly chose their nominee over a year before the primary elections even occurred.

This shines a light on how deeply broken the campaign finance laws are — and how they have weakened individual candidates while strengthening and empowering political parties and special interests.

These laws essentially allowed the Clinton campaign to bypass individual campaign contribution limits by funneling millions of dollars through the DNC and state parties — taking control of the DNC in the process.

Along with the recent retaliatory purge of Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison supporters from the DNC’s executive committee, this is just further evidence that the DNC needs to be completely overhauled, to take our party back from the special interests and the powerful few, and put it back in the hands of the people.

We must bring about real campaign finance reform. We must get rid of the undemocratic system of superdelegates. We must implement instant or same-day registration in Democratic primaries, and actually encourage voter engagement.

The stunning revelation by longtime operative Donna Brazile that the Hillary Clinton campaign secretly took control — literal control — of the Democratic National Committee a year before Hillary became the party’s nominee is the talk of American politics.

As it should be.

Brazile’s piece in Politico describes her shock at the discovery of formal legal paperwork between the two entities when she took the reins at the DNC in August 2016. Brazile had been tapped for the job when DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign. Leaked emails had shown how Schultz had been putting her finger on the scale to help Clinton while the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign was making a serious bid to seize the party nomination away from New York’s favorite carpetbagger.

Her account features ridiculous and unbelievable melodramatics — she says she “gasped” when she found out the truth and that she “lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music” to calm her before she called Sanders to deliver the awful news.

But silly though Brazile’s prose is, her account is vitally important not only for all those who want to understand how American politics works but also for the future of Brazile’s beloved party.

First, it raises key questions about what was happening as Clinton faced a time of trial in the middle of 2015. Her reputation was taking hits as her evasions and denials and untruths about what had happened to the private email server she had set up illegitimately in 2009 seemed to mushroom on a daily basis.

As this was happening, she found herself with only two semi-serious challengers for the nomination — Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

There was another person out there — then-Vice President Joe Biden. Though grieving over the tragic loss of his son Beau, Biden was still seriously considering a late entry into the race. Indeed, it would not be until October that Biden would declare himself out of contention.

Consider, then, that a formal agreement signed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign was executed in August 2015, two months before Biden made his decision.

The agreement, according to Brazile, “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.”