What was the Watergate scandal in simple terms?

Top institution of the U.S. Democratic Party

Not to be confused with the Democratic National Convention

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the principal committee of the United States Democratic Party. The committee coordinates strategy to support Democratic Party candidates throughout the country for local, state, and national office, as well as works to establish a "party brand".[1] It organizes the Democratic National Convention held every four years to nominate a candidates for President and Vice President of the United States and to formulate the party platform. While it provides support for party candidates, it does not have direct authority over elected officials.[2] When a Democrat is president, the White House controls the Committee. According to Boris Heersink, "political scientists have traditionally described the parties’ national committees as inconsequential but impartial service providers."[3][4]

Its chair is elected by the committee. It conducts fundraising to support its activities.[2]

The DNC was established on May 26, 1848, at that year's Democratic National Convention.[5][6] The DNC's main counterpart is the Republican National Committee.

Role and organization

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The DNC is responsible for articulating and promoting the Democratic platform and coordinating party organizational activity. When the president is a Democrat, the party generally works closely with the president. In presidential elections, it supervises the national convention and, both independently and in coordination with the presidential candidate, raises funds, commissions polls, and coordinates campaign strategy. Following the selection of a party nominee, the public funding laws permit the national party to coordinate certain expenditures with the nominee, but additional funds are spent on general, party-building activities.[7] There are state committees in every state, as well as local committees in most cities, wards, and towns (and, in most states, counties).

The chairperson of the DNC is elected by vote of members of the Democratic National Committee.[8]: 5  The DNC is composed of the chairs and vice-chairs of each state Democratic Party's central committee, two hundred members apportioned among the states based on population and generally elected either on the ballot by primary voters or by the state Democratic Party committee, a number of elected officials serving in an ex officio capacity, and a variety of representatives of major Democratic Party constituencies.

Chicago delegation to the January 8, 1912 Democratic National Committee

The DNC establishes rules for the caucuses and primaries which choose delegates to the Democratic National Convention, but the caucuses and primaries themselves are most often run not by the DNC but instead by each individual state. Primary elections, in particular, are invariably conducted by state governments according to their own laws. Political parties may choose to participate or not participate in a state's primary election, but no political party executives have any jurisdiction over the dates of primary elections, or how they are conducted.[citation needed]

All DNC members are superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention, and their role can affect the outcome over a close primary race only if no candidate receives a majority of pledged delegates.[9] These delegates, officially described as "unpledged party leader and elected official delegates," fall into three categories based on other positions they hold:[10]

• elected members of the Democratic National Committee,
• sitting Democratic governors and members of Congress, and
• distinguished party leaders, consisting of current and former presidents, vice presidents, congressional leaders, and DNC chairs, are all superdelegates for life.

Current Leadership

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In 2021, Jaime Harrison was selected by President Joe Biden to Chair the Democratic National Committee, and his nomination was approved by its members.[11]

In addition, a National Advisory Board exists for purposes of fundraising and advising the executive. The present chair is Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, former U.S. Ambassador to Portugal.

Chairs of the Democratic National Committee

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Deputy Chairs

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The Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee was re-established by Tom Perez in February 2017 after his win in the 2017 DNC Chair race.

After a close victory over Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, Perez appointed Ellison as Deputy Chair in an attempt to lessen the divide in the Democratic Party after the contentious 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, which saw conflicts between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.[19] Perez was seen as being more in line with the Clinton wing, while Ellison was more in line with the Sanders wing.[20] The role's revival in 2017 has been described by critics as largely titular and ceremonial.[21]

On November 8, 2018, Ellison resigned from the position due to his win in the Minnesota Attorney General election.[22] The position remains unoccupied.

Treasurers of the Democratic National Committee

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Controversies

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Watergate

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In the 1970s, the DNC had its head office in the Watergate complex, which was burglarized by entities working for Richard Nixon's administration during the Watergate scandal.

Chinagate

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Chinagate was an alleged effort by the People's Republic of China to influence domestic American politics prior to and during the Clinton administration.[110] In 2002, the Federal Election Commission fined the Democratic National Committee $115,000 for its part in fundraising violations in 1996.[111]

Cyber attacks

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Debbie Wasserman Schultz served as DNC chair from 2011 to 2016.

Cyber attacks and hacks were claimed by or attributed to various individual and groups such as:

2016 email leak

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On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks released approximately 20,000 DNC emails.[121] Critics claimed that the Committee unequally favored Hillary Clinton and acted in support of her nomination while opposing the candidacy of her primary challenger Bernie Sanders. Donna Brazile corroborated these allegations in an excerpt of her book published by Politico in November 2017.[122] The leaked emails spanned sixteen months, terminating in May 2016.[123]

The WikiLeaks releases led to the resignations of Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Communications Director Luis Miranda, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall and Chief Executive Amy Dacey.[124] After she resigned, Wasserman Schultz put out a statement about possible FBI assistance in investigating the hacking and leaks, saying that "the DNC was never contacted by the FBI or any other agency concerned about these intrusions."[125] During a Senate hearing in January 2017, James Comey testified that the FBI requested access to the DNC's servers, but its request was denied. He also testified that old versions of the Republican National Committee's servers were breached, but then-current databases were unaffected.[126]

The DNC subsequently filed a lawsuit in federal court against WikiLeaks and others alleging a conspiracy to influence the election.[127]

History

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The DNC has existed since 1848.[128] During the 1848 Democratic National Convention, a resolution was passed creating the Democratic National Committee, composed of thirty members, one person per state, chosen by the states' delegations, and chaired by Benjamin F. Hallett.[129]

In order to strengthen the national party organization, Franklin Roosevelt proposed in 1925 that the DNC should open a permanent headquarters in order to function "every day in every year" and exist on a "business-like financial basis." In 1929, John Raskob led the creation of the first permanent national headquarters for the DNC in Washington, DC.[130]

See also

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References

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Further reading

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Deep Throat was the anonymous source who provided leaks to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Only after some 30 years later, it was revealed that the informant was FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt, Sr.

Police apprehended five burglars at the office of the DNC in the Watergate complex. Four of the five burglars were formerly active in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) activities against Fidel Castro in Cuba. The fifth was James W. McCord, Jr., who was the security chief of the Committee to Re-elect the President (later known popularly as CREEP).

The Watergate scandal was a series of interlocking political scandals of the U.S. President Richard M. Nixon's administration. The scandal included a break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972, and subsequent cover-up by people who worked for or with the White House, and by Nixon himself.

Watergate scandal , interlocking political scandals of the administration of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon that were revealed following the arrest of five burglars at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Watergate office-apartment-hotel complex in Washington, D.C. , on June 17, 1972. On August 9, 1974, facing likely impeachment for his role in covering up the scandal, Nixon became the only U.S. president to resign.

Burglary, arrest, and limited immediate political effect

Early on June 17, 1972, police apprehended five burglars at the office of the DNC in the Watergate complex. Four of them formerly had been active in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) activities against Fidel Castro in Cuba. (Though often referred to in the press as “Cubans,” only three of the four were of Cuban heritage.) The fifth, James W. McCord, Jr., was the security chief of the Committee to Re-elect the President (later known popularly as CREEP), which was presided over by John Mitchell, Nixon’s former attorney general. The arrest was reported in the next morning’s Washington Post in an article written by Alfred E. Lewis, Carl Bernstein, and Bob Woodward, the latter two a pair of relatively undistinguished young reporters relegated to unglamorous beats—Bernstein to roving coverage of Virginia politics and Woodward, still new to the Post, to covering minor criminal activities. Soon after, Woodward and Bernstein and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigators identified two coconspirators in the burglary: E. Howard Hunt, Jr., a former high-ranking CIA officer only recently appointed to the staff of the White House, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent working as a counsel for CREEP. At the time of the break-in, Liddy had been overseeing a similar, though uncompleted, attempt to break into and surveil the headquarters of George S. McGovern, soon to become the Democratic nominee in the 1972 U.S. presidential election.

Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler responded that the president would have no comment on a “third-rate burglary attempt.” The preponderance of early media reports, driven by a successful White House public relations campaign, claimed that there had been no involvement by the Nixon administration or the reelection committee. Meanwhile, the conspirators destroyed evidence, including their burglary equipment and a stash of $100 bills. Jeb Magruder, deputy director of CREEP, burned transcripts of wiretaps from an earlier break-in at the DNC’s offices. The president, his chief of staff, H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, and the special counsel to the president, Charles Colson, Nixon’s close political aide, spread alibis around Washington. Meanwhile, the White House arranged for the “disappearance” to another country of Hunt (who never actually left the United States), part of a plan for the burglars to take the fall for the crime as overzealous anticommunist patriots. On June 23, 1972, the president, through channels, ordered the FBI to tamp down its investigation. Later, this order, revealed in what became known as the Nixon tapes (Nixon’s secret recordings of his phone calls and conversations in the Oval Office), became the “smoking gun” proving that the president had been part of a criminal cover-up from the beginning.

Throughout the 1972 campaign season, Woodward and Bernstein were fed leaks by an anonymous source they referred to as “Deep Throat,” who, only some 30 years later, was revealed to be FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt, Sr. They kept up a steady stream of scoops demonstrating (1) the direct involvement of Nixon intimates in Watergate activities, (2) that the Watergate wiretapping and break-in had been financed through illegally laundered campaign contributions, and, in a blockbuster October 10 front-page article, (3) that “the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House,” part of “a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.”

Nevertheless, the White House successfully framed Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting as the obsession of a single “liberal” newspaper pursuing a vendetta against the president of the United States. Shortly before the election, CBS News prepared a lengthy two-part television report synthesizing the scandal’s emerging ties to the White House. However, after the first segment aired on October 27, Colson threatened CBS’s president, William Paley, and the second segment was truncated. Newspapers that were sympathetic to Nixon hardly mentioned Watergate at all. In an election eve Gallup Poll, respondents overwhelmingly said that they trusted Nixon more than Democratic candidate McGovern. Nixon was reelected in a historic landslide—winning all but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia—and embarked on what looked to be a dynamic second term.