Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Thursday she believes the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged for Hillary Clinton.
When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if she believed the Democratic primary was rigged in favor of Clinton, Warren replied with a simple “Yes.”
Tapper was asking Warren about former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairwoman Donna Brazile’s new book in which she says she found evidence that Clinton’s campaign fixed the Democratic nomination system in her favor.
{mosads}In an excerpt from her book that was provided to Politico, Brazile explains how she was tasked with investigating the DNC after hacked emails suggested the Clinton campaign fixed the nomination.
Brazile said she discovered an agreement between the DNC, the Clinton campaign and Clinton’s joint fundraising committee that said the campaign would “control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money it raised.” The agreement was signed in August 2015, almost a full year before Clinton became the party’s official nominee.
Warren said the allegations are a “real problem” and called on new DNC chairman Tom Perez to unite the party.
“When …Tom Perez was first elected chair of the DNC, the very first conversation I had with him [was] to say, you have got to put together a Democratic party in which everybody can have confidence that the party is working for Democrats, rather than Democrats are working for the party,” Warren said. “And he’s being tested now.”
“This is a test for Tom Perez,” she continued. “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, it works, we all believe it,’ or he’s going to fail.”
Brazile blasted the agreement in her book, saying it “was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical.”
“This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity,” Brazile wrote.