After getting booed at a Florida delegates breakfast Monday, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz didn’t open the Democratic National Convention as previously planned.
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Sanders’ delegates chanted the Vermont senator’s name during the start of the convention and booed lustily at any mention of rival Hillary Clinton.
Ironically, Sanders also drew ire from his own supporters on Monday after trying to urge them to vote for Clinton in an attempt to show party unity.
Seth Lipsky, the neocon former editor of the Forward, opines in Haaretz that her departure is yet another anti-Zionist purge of the Democratic Party.
The signs referenced the controversy over roughly 20,000 leaked DNC emails that showed some staffers plotting against and disregarding the Sanders primary campaign. Several e-mails had a tone suggesting that DNC officials preferred Clinton over her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.
The party announced Monday it would kick off its convention with speeches from some of its most popular figures. According to CNN, President Obama called her to personally thank her. “This is not the party that writes emails like that”. Her announcement followed a Wikileaks release of hacked emails that backed up Bernie Sanders’ claims the committee was actively hobbling his campaign.
Cybersecurity experts who initially responded to the DNC hack identified two distinct groups of hackers operating in the system – one who had exclusively gone after the party’s opposition research file on Donald Trump, and one that had been snooping on DNC emails for about a year.
Trump dismissed the suggestion in a tweet: “The joke in town is that Russian Federation leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me”. “I think we’ve all gotten the message that what was done was wrong and it can’t be undone, but they’ve done their best to take care of it”.
The Democratic National Committee chairwoman on Sunday made a decision to resign from the position after the convention.
The startled DNC released an apology to Sanders.
Wearing a T-shirt supporting Wasserman Schultz’s congressional re-election, state Sen. Clinton and President Barack Obama both quickly praised the departed party chief.
“I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention”, Wasserman Schultz said.
At the Republican convention, Trump cast himself as the law-and-order candidate in a nation suffering under crime and hobbled by immigration, sticking to the gloom-and-doom theme.
The alternative, he said, being Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign chairman Paul Manafort said – on Twitter, as it happens – that Trump raised about $4 million that day.
“I know that electing Hillary Clinton as our next president is critical for America’s future”, Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. She will formally accept the nomination on Thursday.
Mrs. Obama was one of the night’s standouts. Despite the email leak – and constantly railing against the system throughout his primary fight with Clinton – the USA senator from Vermont is still scheduled to speak at the convention Monday night.
While her ouster was a major victory for Sanders, it wasn’t enough to ease the frustration of his supporters.
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“I think he’s going to emphasize how far we’ve come and talk about party unity”, Donna Whiteside, a Lewes, Del., real estate agent and a Sanders delegate.
