A top Democratic Party official tried to use Bernie Sanders’s religious beliefs to hurt his presidential campaign, according to a startling internal email.
The suggestion of undercutting Sanders based on religion is included in one of 19,252 hacked emails dumped Friday — just ahead of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia — by WikiLeaks. The emails appear to have been stolen by a hacker identified as Guccifer 2.0.
In one email dated May 5, 2016, with the subject line “No s–t,” the chief financial officer of the Democratic National Committee, Brad Marshall, plotted how to try to portray Sanders, who is Jewish, as an atheist. “It might [make] no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief,” Marshall wrote, apparently referring to Sanders’s run just ahead of the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries.
“Does he believe in a God[?] He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist,” Marshall said. “This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and atheist.”
The chief executive officer at the DNC, Amy Dacey, responded with a single-word email: “Amen.”
Marshall told the Intercept website that he didn’t recall the email. But then he claimed it wouldn’t have been about Sanders. “I can say it would not have been Sanders. It would probably be about a surrogate,” Marshall said, without explaining why the DNC would try to undermine a Sanders surrogate.
Source: Market Watch
