Wikileaks hits DNC ahead of convention, competes with Kaine VP nomination The release of more than 20,000 pages of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee competed on Saturday with the big reveal of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as the running mate of presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton.
On Friday, Wikileaks dropped a bombshell cache of DNC emails. Several weeks ago, Russian hackers were reported to have breached the DNC's servers, but on Saturday Wikileaks refused to disclose where it had obtained the trove of data.
Among other things, the documents purport to show the party apparatus favoring Clinton's campaign over the insurgency of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. On a number of occasions, high level DNC officials liaised with counterparts on Clinton's team to discuss ways to push back against stories that painted the Clinton campaign in a negative light.
One pointedly worded missive dismissed Sanders' campaign as "a mess" adding that his campaign apparatus "never had their act together."
The news took center stage on social media, threatening to upend the Democrats' messaging and steal attention from a chaotic and divided Republican National Convention, which wrapped up on Thursday night. The email exchanges may reopen the wounds of a bitter Democratic primary season, just as the party kicks off its own national conference designed to highlight a unified, energized party.
The DNC did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment, but Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver told ABC News in an interview that "someone in the DNC needs to be held at least as accountable as the Trump campaign," for a controversy involving Melania Trump's speech earlier this week, Weaver said.
Indeed, only half a day after Clinton announced Kaine as her vice presidential pick, news of the DNC leak was one of the top trending item on Twitter Saturday, despite the document dump fanning new allegations of bias.
Opportunistically, GOP nominee Donald Trump leaped into the fray to blast Democrats for their perceived treatment of Sanders, calling it "really vicious."
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/23/wikileaks-hits-dnc-ahead-of-convention-competes-with-kaine-vp-nomination.html