PHILADELPHIA: The Hillary Clinton campaign, responding to leaked internal Democratic Party emails that threatened to revive tensions with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ followers, moved quickly to squelch the problem Sunday as the party’s embattled chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced she would step down at the end of the convention week.
Wasserman Schultz, who has long been under fire for the appearance of partiality toward Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries, announced her resignation in a statement Sunday afternoon.
The move culminated a series of steps by the Clinton campaign to sideline her — first by appointing a new party executive last month to run the party’s operations, then by taking away her speaking role at the Democratic National Convention and removing even the simple task of gaveling the convention in and out of session. The convention officially starts Monday, with Clinton expected to accept the party’s nomination on Thursday.
The announcement came after internal emails newly disclosed by the website WikiLeaks revived suspicions that the Florida congresswoman had tilted the scales in favor of Clinton.
On Friday, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 emails from a 17-month span that appeared to have been obtained by someone who hacked into the accounts of seven top party officials.
One email, in particular, caught the attention of Sanders loyalists. In it, the party’s chief financial officer — an ally of Wasserman Schultz — indicated interest in raising questions about whether Sanders may be an atheist.
Clinton’s campaign said Sunday that the hack may have been the work of Russian operatives seeking to boost Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign. The Democratic National Committee had reported last month that its computer system had been hacked and that the cyber-security firm hired to investigate had traced the breach to two groups tied to Russian intelligence organizations.
During an interview several hours before Wasserman Schultz announced her decision, Sanders renewed a long-standing call for her ouster, but then briskly sought to change the subject.
“There is no question but the DNC was on Secretary Clinton’s side from Day One,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Still, he said, the most important thing was for Democrats to unite and focus on defeating Trump, whom he called “the worst Republican candidate that I have seen in my lifetime.”
Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, suggested that it was now Clinton’s turn to step down, given her own email correspondence controversy.
Donna Brazile, the DNC vice chairwoman who was a campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000, will serve as interim chair through the election. She will be the first African-American woman to head the party.