Following accusations the Presidential election was “rigged” Democrats proudly declare they rigged their own election.
It has been a long year for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, with deep scandals swirling around the one time head of the Democratic National Committee(DNC). It speaks to the level of seriousness of her controversies that one other thorny involvement of hers has gone largely unnoticed. Wasserman has been in Federal court in Fort Lauderdale, facing charges regarding her involvement in allegedly certainly fixing the Democratic nomination for President.
(This would be the case where a bumbling idiot called the plaintiffs law firm and used a voice modulator, trying to get illicit information about the case, but failed to disable the caller-ID on the phone. The call originated from Wasserman’s office.)
What is notable is these charges are being brought by a group of Democrat Party operatives. The Hillary Clinton email scandal produced documents that revealed there was an inside scheme at the DNC, orchestrated by Wasserman Schultz, to secure the nomination for Clinton. Backers of her opponent Bernie Sanders are behind this court appearance.
The class action suit, filed by one hundred and fifty Democrat voters and donors, charged Wasserman Schultz with fraud for rigging the primary process. These Bernie Sanders supporters contend they were defrauded by Wasserman fixing the result so Hillary was assured the nomination.
Despite the requirements in the Charter, and in spite of the multiple public declarations of neutrality and impartiality with respect to the Democratic primary process, the DNC was not neutral. To the contrary, the DNC was biased in favor of one candidate — Hillary Clinton — from the beginning and throughout the process. The DNC devoted its considerable resources to supporting Clinton above any of the other Democratic candidates. Through its public claims to being neutral and impartial, the DNC actively concealed its bias from its own donors as well as donors to the campaigns of Clinton’s rivals, including Bernie Sanders.
In light of this charge the lawyers for the DNC took a unique defense: “Yes, we rigged the election — and everyone knew it!”
No, seriously. Rather than arguing against the accusation the DNC is taking the position that they were never expected to produce a fair and equitable primary. Central to the suit was Article V, Section 4 of the DNC Charter that outlines the duties of the chairperson during elections.
The DNC argued that despite the appearance of these very words, in this very order, within the charter of the DNC they did not amount to anything of importance or value. The lawyers describe this article as “a discretionary rule that it didn’t need to adopt to begin with.” Running with this more-of-a-guideline-than-a-rule theory the contention of DNC lawyers was that given this lack of adherence to their own charter the courts had no standing ruling on this case.
Further, they made the argument that the responsibility of any suffering experienced by backers of Bernie Sanders fell upon themselves.
The Court would have to find that people who fervently supported Bernie Sanders and who purportedly didn’t know that this favoritism was going on would have not given to Mr. Sanders, to Senator Sanders, if they had known that there was this purported favoritism.
This is a remarkable argument: The Sanders supporters would essentially have to disprove a negative (“can you give evidence you would NOT have donated had you known?”), in the assumption that they knew all along the DNC would never be expected to honor its own bylaws.
So the DNC is alleging the Sanders backers knew of this subterfuge, but they elected to donate money to the candidate whom they knew had no chance of being nominated, all of this due to what the hell, man?!
More remarkable than that is a barrister playing along with this farcical line of reasoning. Federal Judge William Zloch dismissed the suit brought by the plaintiffs, agreeing that it was perfectly reasonable to expect the DNC would never follow its own rules, set in ink and established as party standard. Said Zloch:
“The Court must now decide whether Plaintiffs have suffered a concrete injury particularized to them, or one certainly impending, that is traceable to the DNC and its former chair’s conduct — the keys to entering federal court. The Court holds that they have not, which means the truth of their claims cannot be tested in this Court.”
Given this legal standard we can now expect that any and all arguments made about an illegitimate election last November to evaporate into the ether, much like most of the Russian collusion charges. After all, the ones leveling that particular accusation more than anyone have just successfully argued that being held to any type of election standard is a ridiculous expectation — especially when they are standards drawn up by themselves.
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