“Muddy the waters …”
Donald Trump was a political target of the Democratic National Committee two months before he officially joined the 2016 presidential race, according to an email released by WikiLeaks on Monday.
The April 7, 2015, email from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the DNC is designed to help make anyone nominated by the Republican Party “unpalatable” to the voters. It states that the goals of the Clinton campaign and the DNC are “one and the same.”
The email labels as “Pied Piper” candidates three men who, the campaign believes, would move the GOP in a direction that would make it hard for Clinton to lose the presidential race. The memo lists the eventual GOP nominee as well as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson as “Pied Pipers.” At that point, only Cruz had publicly said he was running for the White House.
“[W]e don’t want to marginalize the candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream Republican Party,” the memo says.
It says Democrats should work with the media to boost such candidates.
“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously,” the memo reads.
The memo also suggests three overall approaches to protect Clinton. They are:
1) Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election;
2) Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents;
3) Muddy the waters on any potential attack lodged against HRC.
The memo suggests that Democrats should “use the [Republican primary] field as a whole to inflict damage on itself similar to what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right.”
After suggesting starting points to “undermine” the more establishment candidates the DNC expected to be running, the memo called for the start of a wide-ranging development of material to use against the GOP’s candidates.
“As we all know, the right wing attack machine has been building its opposition research on Hillary Clinton for decades,” the memo reads.
“The RNC et al has been telegraphing they are ready to attack and do so with reckless abandon. One way we can respond to these attacks is to show how they boomerang onto the Republican presidential field. The goal, then, is to have a dossier on the GOP candidates on the likely attacks HRC will face.”
Those areas were “transparency & disclosure; donors & associations; and management & business dealings.”
The DNC memo says, in essence, that all dirt was good dirt.
“In this regard, any information on scandals or ethical lapses on the GOP candidates would serve well. We won’t be picky. Again, we think our goals mirror those of the DNC,” the memo adds.
Source: Western Journalism
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