Bernie Sanders falls in line and forgets that Democrats stole the nomination from him in 2016
Prominent Democrats hope that we'll all just forget the last four years of Russia-gate conspiracy theories and believe that they're defenders of the sanctity of American elections

President Trump has refused to concede that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, prompting some to claim that he is attacking democracy itself and trying to perpetrate a coup. Senator Bernie Sanders, who sought the Democratic nomination for president unsuccessfully in 2016 and 2020, has weighed in on Trump’s refusal to accept the apparent result of the election.



Sanders’s comments are notable for the simple fact that while it is perfectly conceivable that Hillary Clinton could have defeated Sanders on her own, the Democratic Party worked with the Clinton campaign behind the scenes to ensure her victory over Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party primary.
It was always clear that Clinton was the favored candidate of the Democratic Party establishment, but the lengths they would go to to ensure her coronation only became clear when WikiLeaks began leaking emails that they had received from top officials in the DNC and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The emails showed a high-level of collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign, and an anti-Sanders agenda at the DNC.
The leak prompted the resignation of several top officials in the DNC: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Chair), Amy Dacey (CEO), Brad Marshall (CFO), Luis Miranda (Communications Director), and Donna Brazile (Vice Chair, Interim Chair) was forced to resign from her position as a CNN contributor for leaking debate questions to the Clinton campaign.
In an excerpt from her book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House, published by Politico, Brazile outlines the corruption that she found at the DNC after taking over as Interim Chairwoman when Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign.
When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.
The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings…
When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.
Brazile can recollect all the tear-filled conversations with Bernie Sanders that she wants, and portray herself as someone just rooting out corruption in her beloved party, but it will never change the fact that she was one of the key people who tried to rig the election in Clinton’s favor. Her cynical and transparent attempt to throw the Clinton campaign under the bus to save herself after the fact does not mean that what she is saying about Clinton’s takeover of the DNC almost a year before she won the Democratic nomination is false, however. The DNC was controlled by the Clinton campaign during the entirety of the Democratic Party primary, and as such worked on Clinton’s behalf to defeat Bernie Sanders when they were supposed to remain neutral.
After Clinton officially “won” the Democratic nomination in 2016, I wrote this about Bernie Sanders:
WikiLeaks has released a trove of emails from the Democratic National Committee that prove that Bernie Sanders was right all along when he said that the DNC and its chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz were biased against him during the Democratic primary. The emails also show much collusion between the DNC and media outlets such as NBC.
However, despite the very party that he was seeking the nomination of being against him and in the bag for his opponent all along, Bernie Sanders still claims that he is fully behind the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Sure he makes the argument that Wasserman-Schultz should step down, but he’s too afraid to revoke his endorsement of Clinton. There’s no question that Donald Trump is right when he says that Bernie’s so-called revolution was a joke all along…
What has Sanders’s revolution amounted to? A few pointless planks in the Democratic Party platform that was forgotten five minutes after it was officially adopted. All that time, energy, and money poured into his campaign only to be relegated to an endorsement of a beloved figure of Wall Street, neoconservatives, and the military industrial complex. Of course, this is all enormously beneficial to Sanders, who will be able to sell his email list off to other parties, will inevitably receive a lucrative book deal, and will receive all the benefits of being someone willing to play ball with the Democratic Party establishment.
Despite being an “independent” senator, Sanders has found that it’s so much easier, and personally enriching, to be friendly with the Democratic Party than it is to point out their corruption. He allowed them to steal the 2016 nomination from him without so much as a wimper and to marginalize him and his supporters for daring to challenge the corporate-backed, warmongering core of the Democratic Party. And now he’s fallen in line to deliver their carefully choreographed propaganda lines about questioning the integrity of an election being tantamount to an attack on democracy itself despite the fact that these are the same people who stole an election from him.
You might say it’s some form of Stockholm syndrome, but I think it’s more easily explained as Bernie Sanders simply having sold out.
Senator Sanders having been cheated out of the Democratic nomination by the Democratic Party in 2016 doesn't mean that the 2020 general election was “rigged” against President Trump, of course, but it does mean that you can’t simply declare that it’s an “attack on democracy” to suggest that an election could have been stolen. We can see from the fact that Democrats were willing to steal the nomination from Sanders only four short years ago that it does happen.
In Trump’s case, no evidence has yet been provided to suggest that any voter fraud on a scale necessary to change the outcome in even a single state that he lost, let alone enough states to change the outcome of the election itself, had occurred. Trump’s characteristic petulance does not change the fact that there is some level of voter fraud in every American election and always has been, and that sometimes elections are even stolen.
It’s not controversial when Democrats are the ones claiming that an election has been stolen, however, as the Democratic Party spent four years creating a web of conspiracy theories centered around the Russian government in general and Vladimir Putin in particular stealing the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton even went so far as to call him an “illegitimate president,” but it’s only “attacking democracy” when it’s a Republican claiming that an election was “rigged” or “stolen” without any evidence, not a Democrat in good standing.
The idea that there couldn’t possibly have been any voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite the fact that mail-in ballots made up a huge percentage of votes for the first time in American history, marking a fundamental change to the electoral process in America, is completely delusional. France, a fellow western democracy, banned mail-in voting in 1975 due to concerns over its propensity to increase voter fraud.
Again, the Trump regime has to prove their case in a court of law and provide actual evidence before we can take their claims seriously, but it is insane to suggest that voter fraud couldn’t have happened at all under the circumstances. Given those circumstances—a fundamental change to the electoral process in the country among a large percentage of the electorate to mail-in voting which is more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting—I expect that future historians will find an above-average amount of voter fraud to have taken place in the 2020 election. I doubt that it will turn out to have been enough to have changed the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor, and even if there is enough I’m not sure Trump and his team will be able to credibly document enough of it in time to matter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 2020 will go down in history as one of the more fraud-heavy elections of our time period.