How can Democrats demand accountability from Donald Trump and his party without some kind of accountability from a leader of our own party?
CNN’s Jake Tapper blasts leak of town hall question to Clinton campaign: ‘Journalistically it’s horrifying’
By Erik Wemple
Jake Tapper of CNN was a moderator of a March 13 Democratic town hall event in which Hillary Clinton appears to have gotten an unfair advantage. As disclosed earlier this week in a WikiLeaks trove of emails relating to Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, the Clinton campaign received word from then-CNN contributor Donna Brazile that a death-penalty question was on tap for the event, which took place at Ohio State University. A man named Ricky Jackson, who was exonerated after being sentenced to death, pressed the candidate on her support for the ultimate punishment.
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.
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.
I realize this came came to light through s foreign power trying to meddle in our election to damage the Democratic nominee and that really stinks, but Brazile’s helping one candidate over another stinks too! Despite the despicable manner this information came to light the DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile owes our party an apology.