Hacked emails released by Wiki Leaks

A top Democratic Party official tried to use Bernie Sanders’s religious beliefs to hurt his presidential campaign, according to a startling internal email.

The suggestion of undercutting Sanders based on religion is included in one of 19,252 hacked emails dumped Friday — just ahead of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia — by WikiLeaks. The emails appear to have been stolen by a hacker identified as Guccifer 2.0.

In one email dated May 5, 2016, with the subject line “No s–t,” the chief financial officer of the Democratic National Committee, Brad Marshall, plotted how to try to portray Sanders, who is Jewish, as an atheist. “It might [make] no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief,” Marshall wrote, apparently referring to Sanders’s run just ahead of the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries.

“Does he believe in a God[?] He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist,” Marshall said. “This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and atheist.”

The chief executive officer at the DNC, Amy Dacey, responded with a single-word email: “Amen.”

Marshall told the Intercept website that he didn’t recall the email. But then he claimed it wouldn’t have been about Sanders. “I can say it would not have been Sanders. It would probably be about a surrogate,” Marshall said, without explaining why the DNC would try to undermine a Sanders surrogate.

The latest batch of emails confirms the party establishment was in the tank for Clinton well before the primary had been decided by voters.  

The DNC was supposed to be neutral in its party primary between Hillary Clinton and the Vermont senator.

But the latest batch of emails confirms the party establishment was in the tank for Clinton well before the primary had been decided by voters.

And top DNC officials were not happy when they were called out for taking sides.

DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz sent an email to NBC anchor Chuck Todd complaining about MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski, who was calling on her to step down.

The heading read: “Chuck, this must stop!”

Wasserman Schultz said she wasn’t confident that a meeting with the anchor would go well.

“She’s already served as a judge and jury without even bothering to talk to me. Not sure why I should trust having a conversation with her would make any difference. Or that she even matters, to be frank,” she said in a May 19, 2016, message.

In another email dated May 21, 2016, DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote to communications director Luis Miranda suggesting they plant a story that Sanders’s campaign was in chaos.

“Specifically, [Wasserman Schultz] had to call Bernie directly in order to get the campaign to do things because they’d either ignored or forgotten to [do] something critical,” Paustenbach wrote. “It’s not a DNC conspiracy. [I]t’s because [the Sanders camp] never had their act together.”