Warren: ‘Yes,’ 2016 was rigged

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren took a side in the Democratic Party’s roiling divide over 2016 — and set the terms for moving past it — with her one-word answer when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Thursday afternoon whether the primary was, in her view, rigged against Bernie Sanders.

“Yes.”

She was responding to former Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile’s book excerpt published by Politico alleging that Hillary Clinton had secretly taken over the party long before becoming the nominee.

“This is a real problem,” Warren said. “But what we’ve got to do as Democrats now is we’ve got to hold this party accountable. When Tom Perez was first elected chair of the DNC, the very first conversation I had with him is to say, ‘You have got to put together a Democratic Party in which everybody can have confidence the party is working for Democrats, rather than Democrats are working for the party.’ And he’s being tested now. This is a test for Tom Perez. And either he’s going to succeed by bringing Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders representatives into this process, and they’re going to say ‘It’s fair, it works, we all believe it’ — or he’s going to fail. And I very much hope he succeeds.”

Thursday was not a good day for Democratic unity. The morning began with Brazile’s bombshell — which led Sanders’ political organization Our Revolution to send an email blast with the subject line “It was rigged all along.” It ended with the Howard Dean-founded Democracy For America lambasting Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam’s campaign as “racist,” which led to Dean himself lashing out at the group he’d founded. And in between all that, Perez fired his finance director, Emily Mellencamp Smith, after five months on the job. A Senate Democratic campaign veteran who’d worked with Mellencamp Smith called, furious, to say “she was the most functioning thing they had there” and “the best person the DNC was going to get.”