Most people guessed at this anyway. But it wasn't until these documents were dumped last week under mysterious circumstances that the extent to which the party both advocated for Hillary and against her opponent Bernie Sanders was made plain.
Nowhere is the discrepancy on greater display than in an episode involving the DNC's reaction to a May 2nd article by Politico reporters Ken Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf, which itself pointed at a backdoor advantage for the Clinton campaign.
In the piece, headlined "Clinton fundraising leaves little for state parties," Vogel and Arnsdorf discovered an anomaly in Federal Election Commission filings.
A joint fundraising committee called the Hillary Victory Fund, ostensibly designed to funnel money from rich donors to local party committees, had in fact been used as a cut-out to funnel money back to the national party and the Clinton campaign.
As an example, take couples who paid or raised $353,400 to sit at a table with George Clooney, a sum that Clooney himself called an "obscene amount of money." The figure represented the maximum allowable donation given the structure of the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint venture between the Clinton campaign, the DNC and 32 state committees.
Donors can give a maximum of $5,400 per election cycle to Hillary's campaign, $33,400 per year to the DNC, and $10,000 per year to each of the 32 state committees in the fund.
If you assumed that the Clooney guests had already given their maximum $5,400 to the Clinton campaign, that left just over $353,000 for the DNC and the committees.
But Vogel and Arnsdorf found that less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by the Hillary Victory Fund went to the state committees.
Actually it's better to say that only 1 percent of the money "remained" with the committees. In talking to state sources, the Politico reporters found that large sums of money would sometimes appear briefly in state committee coffers, and disappear just as quickly, and then just as quickly be deposited into DNC accounts.
This was problematic at the very least because large sums of money were going to the DNC that came from donors who in many cases had already given the maximum amount to the DNC.
Vogel-Arnsdorf also noted that of the $23.3 million spent directly by the fund, most "had gone toward expenses that appear to have directly benefited Clinton's campaign, including $2.8 million for 'salary and overhead' and $8.6 million for web advertising that mostly looks indistinguishable from Clinton campaign ads."
The context was significant. Technically, Sanders raised more money than Hillary Clinton in each of the first three months of this year. Sanders early in the year also had a massive advantage over Clinton among small donors, raising $67 million from them through January 31st, compared to less than $22 million for Clinton during the same period.