Democratic Party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned over the weekend after Sanders’ campaign pounced on a number of leaked emails that they said showed that party officials had favored Clinton during the primaries.
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Monday’s convention program is expected to open with a showing of some of the party’s biggest political stars, and it will also highlight some of the party’s most progressive voices.
Chants of “Bernie! Bernie!” were met by counter echoes of “Hillary!” Not to mention Sanders himself.
She saw Wasserman Schultz’s ousting as a move “probably to appease” Sanders’ supporters.
In a joint interview with Kaine, Clinton told “60 Minutes Sunday” that she won’t engage in “that kind of insult-fest” and that she prefers to talk about Trump’s record. She had, in his campaigns estimation, put her thumb on the scale throughout the process.
Included among the emails released by Wikileaks was a message from DNC CFO Brad Marshall in which he suggested raising the issue of Sanders’ religion to dissuade support for him in states like Kentucky and West Virginia.
“I’m not shocked, but I’m disappointed”, Sanders said of the hacked emails, one of which questioned whether his religious beliefs could be used against him, on ABC’s “This Week”.
Wasserman Schultz announced on Sunday she would resign at the end of the convention.
Sanders supporters have a full lineup of protests planned for the week, including events called “Occupy the DNC Convention”, “Bernie or Bust Rally”, “Shut Down the DNC!” and “Mass Civil Disobedience at the DNC”. There were also emails about when the Sanders campaign improperly accessed Clinton campaign’s proprietary voter information that was housed at the DNC.
Sanders, who is scheduled to address the Democratic convention Monday night, had previously asked for the resignation of Wasserman Schultz and reiterated that call Sunday.
“This is a tremendous victory for Senator Sanders’ fight to democratize the Democratic Party and reform the Democratic nominating process”, Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, said of the commission on superdelegates.
That doesn’t mean his supporters won’t be coming to Philadelphia with a head full of steam and a list of demands.
Protesters holding signs labelled “E-MAILS” jeered and disrupted a breakfast for the Florida delegation to the DNC.
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Florida delegate John Archer, wearing a Canova T-Shirt covered in Sanders buttons, said he’s proud of the way the challenger is funding his campaign. “But a guaranteed recommendation of two-thirds fewer superdelegates is a major step, and one that I’m excited to continue building on in future years”, said rules committee member Aaron Regunberg, a state lawmaker from Rhode Island who had pushed an effort to completely eliminate the use of superdelegates. “I would like to be able to do that. Everything they’re doing is making money”. And it undermines Clinton’s claim that her party’s convention would reveal markedly less disunity than the Republican convention in Cleveland last week. Still, it wasn’t almost as unified as the Dems hoped to portray. “The Dems Convention is cracking up and Bernie is exhausted, no energy left!”
The release of thousands of embarrassing internal email exchanges between Democratic Party officials threatens to overshadow the party’s message of unity on the eve of the party’s convention in Philadelphia. His campaign chairman Paul Manafort said – on Twitter, as it happens – that Trump raised about $4 million that day. Ted Cruz, refused to endorse the billionaire businessman.
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Reluctantly, he did, to the chuckles of the assembled press corps.
