Hillary Clinton in September of 2015 entered into a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC that allowed the candidate to pay down the party’s considerable debt in exchange for exercising control of some hiring decisions was seized upon by some supporters of Bernie Sanders as proof that the primary was indeed “rigged” against him.

As Donna Brazile tells it, the DNC was dead broke by the time Clinton cut the deal to retire the organization’s debts in 2015. Indeed, in the excerpt from her book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House, Brazile writes that by the time Clinton set the party’s finances right and “put it on a starvation diet,” the DNC “had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”