I am truly shocked by Donny Brazile’s much discussed book excerpt in Politico. She claims that she had been surprised by information about the DNC finances that were publicly known, sometimes for years, before she allegedly learned about that. Unfortunately, there are only two possible explanations for this: Either she is super incompetent or she is lying — and I’m not sure what would be worse.
Let’s take a detailed look at her words:
The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.
“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”
The big problem with this: The DNC has to file monthly reports with the FEC and these reports are visible on the FEC website just a few weeks after the end of each month (e. g. the report for the September 2017 is already online, just five weeks after September ended). These monthly reports show receipts, disbursements, cash on hand, debt owed and a lot more financial numbers for the DNC. Literally anybody who looked at the FEC’s website could see that the DNC’s cash on hand and debts owed were roughly the sanme — and the DNC broke — month after month after month in 2016. But somehow the actual DNC chair claims that she was surprised by this information.
That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly.
“Taken a look at the DNC’s books” sounds ominous, but all the Clinton campaign had to do was to open the FEC website, because, again, this information was online for the entire world to see. But, again, this is supposed to have come as news for the actual real-life DNC chair.
“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”
The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.
Have I mentioned that monthly reports about the finances are on the FEC website? Additionally, to make it easier to understand, these reports have a helpful column titled “Operating Expenditures” that actually tell you how much money is needed to fund the party. Again, these reports are available online for everybody. But the actual DNC chair self-reportedly does not know these numbers. And that makes her either incompetent — or it means that she is lying about it.