The gaslighting of Donna Brazile

Donna Brazile, in her new book “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House” walked back what everyone believed to be the truth: that Brazile gave the Clinton campaign questions from a CNN debate in advance.

“For the record, I could never find those so-called emails released by WikiLeaks or find anything on my laptop, desktop, or server,” she told the Washington Examiner. “So, as I state in the book, just go ahead and say what you know to be true.”

The facts

Either you believe her or you don’t. But let’s unpack the facts.

• The emails were exposed by Wikileaks, as a result of the DNC mail server being hacked.
• The DNC mail server was never examined by the FBI.
• CNN denies Brazile had the debate questions in the first place, though she was a network employee at the time
• The DNC mail server was effectively “destroyed” in the process of IT techs trying to solve security problems
• Brazile now claims–and has in the past–that the emails might never have been real at all
• The emails have only been provided in the Wikileaks haul–neither the recipients nor the sender have definitively found copies of them
• Wikileaks and Julian Assange is a friend of Russia and an enemy of the U.S.

Brazile keeps her sent emails (on her computer) archived forever, I’ve heard. So if she can’t find the “smoking gun” emails, either she deleted them, they were not sent from her computer, or something else happened.

Motive? Gaslighting?

So what motive might someone have had in implicating Brazile in a scandal that would surely bring her down?

Maybe someone who didn’t want a person not in Hillary’s pocket at the DNC. Maybe the Russians who simply want to sow chaos in American politics.

“As a Christian woman, I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted,” Brazile said on Fox News more than a year ago when asked if it was her. “Your information is totally false.”

Brazile was consistent in her denials at first, then began to believe, like most people, that maybe she did do it. That’s called “gaslighting” by the way, when you repeat a lie often enough that the person who knows better believes it.

Final thoughts

Again, it comes down to believing Donna Brazile or not. People who know her at CNN believe her. They believe she did not send the emails to the Clinton campaign and would remember if she had. Those who don’t believe her make her out to be a professional liar. We already know that Clinton’s campaign, her lawyers, Herself, and just about everyone in her orbit is a professional, and profligate, liar.

It’s up to every person to make up their own minds, but given the facts, and Brazile’s own attempts to reconcile the facts to her own role, isn’t it possible that she’s telling the truth, and might have been the victim of gaslighting? In fact, it might even be more likely that’s the case (the Clintons are experts at it) than the other possibility, that emails produced by an enemy of America, through a hacked server that the government never saw, that were denied by both Brazile and CNN, are all an elaborate lie to harm Hillary Clinton, who was the one person everyone involved counted on to beat Donald Trump.

Before passing judgment, think a bit. Or, as Clinton would say, what does it matter, at this point, anyway?