On Thursday, President Trump and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a potential 2020 challenger, actually agreed on something: that Hillary Clinton's campaign "rigged" the 2016 Democratic primary. The charge had been leveled by former Democratic National Convention chairwoman Donna Brazile in a book excerpt she shared with Politico. Clinton faced a few rivals for the Democratic nomination, but her only serious challenger was Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
On Thursday evening, CNN's Jake Tapper asked Warren if she was shocked at Brazile's assertions — that Clinton entered a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC in August 2015, and in exchange for raising money for the heavily indebted party, was given significant control over the DNC's operations. "This is a real problem" and a test for new DNC chairman Tom Perez, Warren said. "And either he's going to succeed by bringing Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders' representatives into this process, and they're going to say it's fair, this works, we all believe it, or he's going to fail, and I very much hope he succeeds." Tapper asked Warren if she agreed with the idea that the primaries were rigged, she looked surprised at the question. "Yes," she said.
Charlie Baker, former Hillary for America's chief administrative officer, responded to Brazile's accusations in a statement Thursday, saying that the Clinton campaign "was keeping the party afloat, which included state party funding to administer caucuses, which Secretary Clinton lost the majority of" to Sanders. The Clinton campaign was "proud" to raise money for the DNC and leave it "in a better financial position following the election than it had been in decades," Baker said. He also said that joint fundraising agreements "are common," used by Al Gore, John Kerry, Trump, and even Sanders — about two months after Clinton — though Sanders "raised little to no money" through the agreement. He ended by urging Democrats to unite, which seems like longer-term goal.