On the eve of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz abruptly announced that she will resign her position after the convention as part of the fallout from emails leaked from the DNCon Friday night. Donna Brazile, the veteran Democratic operative and well-known television commentator, will serve as interim chair.
Wasserman Schultz says that she plans to "address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans," and then step aside. Just a few hours earlier the plan had been for Schultz, somewhat anomalously, to not speak at her own party’s convention. Now she is out from the DNC entirely, a key concession to Bernie Sanders and to his supporters and allies as Hillary Clinton tries to put a united Democratic Party behind her for the fall election.
Sanders called it the "right decision" in a statement.
As Vox’s Tim Lee noted, none of the emails contained a smoking gun demonstrating that the primary was rigged for Clinton — or even that DNC officials set in motion any of the plans to derail Sanders’s candidacy.
But the emails do strongly suggest that some DNC leaders personally regarded Sanders as an outside threat and that they wanted him to lose.
