Democratic Party bigwigs enlisted prominent media outlets to slant coverage to boost Hillary Clinton and sandbag Bernie Sanders, according to some of the 19,000 e-mails hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s servers and posted to WikiLeaks.
The messages reveal behind-the-scenes meetings and off-the-record exchanges between DNC operatives and staffers at newspapers, networks and news Web sites, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Politico and RealClearPolitics.
In one case, an investigative reporter at Politico gave DNC officials a sneak peek at an article about Clinton’s state-party fund-raising — before his editor even saw the piece.
“Per agreement . . . any thoughts appreciated,” wrote Politico’s Ken Vogel to the DNC’s national press secretary, Mark Paustenbach, on April 30.
“Vogel gave me his story ahead of time/before it goes to his editors as long as I didn’t share it,” Paustenbach told his boss, communications director Luis Miranda.
The communication officials cherry-picked reporters.
“We [have] been working him for weeks in general on writing up something positive,” Miranda wrote of The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent on May 20. “We think he’d play ball.”
‘We [have] been working him for weeks in general on writing up something positive. We think he’d play ball.’
- Luis Miranda Miranda of The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent
Days after top DNC officials held an off-the-record meeting with editors at The Wall Street Journal in early May, Miranda leaked a letter to Journal reporter Laura Meckler — with a note saying,
“You didn’t get this from me.”
The letter, sent privately to the DNC from the Sanders campaign, complained about the rejection of almost all of his nominees to the party’s platform and rules committees. The next week, Miranda pressured Meckler to dismiss the Sanders campaign’s objections.
“The only reason the Sanders camp even sent that letter is that [Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] was courteous enough to reach out to give both camps representation,” he wrote.
“But the appointments . . . are at the chair’s discretion.”
Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said Saturday that the e-mails show “what many of us have known for some time, that there were certainly people at the DNC who were actively helping the Clinton effort and trying to hurt Bernie Sanders’ campaign.”
The searchable collection is “part one of our new Hillary Leaks series,” according to the WikiLeaks Web page.
The Journal is owned by News Corp, which also owns The Post.
With Post Wire Services