The Democratic Party’s top messaging gurus are tuning in regularly to Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 and reading Breitbart News Network across its various platforms, emails contained in the WikiLeaks dump of about 20,000 private messages show.
The WikiLeaks database shows that a search of the term “Breitbart” finds 75 separate references to this news organization in the DNC’s hacked emails, including some from other media covering Breitbart News Network related items like the “Clinton Cash” narrative. The scope of the DNC’s monitoring of Breitbart News is vast, ranging from coverage of Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton to even interviews with congressmen and articles about election turnout data. Matt Sarge, a staffer at the Democratic National Committee, circulated an email internally at the DNC on April 27 after Donald Trump—now the Republican nominee for president, then likely to wrap up the nomination—appeared on the show.
In the email, Sarge broke down several of the key points from the Trump interview with Stephen K. Bannon—Breitbart News Daily host and the Executive Chairman of Breitbart News Network.
“Trump on Breitbart Radio Earlier today,” Sarge wrote before providing bullet points of Trump’s arguments in this interview.
Point one, Sarge wrote, was that Hillary Rodham Clinton—the presumptive Democratic nominee for president who he refers to as simply “HRC,” will “be easy to beat” because she is “Bad on jobs and the border.”
“Clintons have $100 million. Just influence peddling?” Sarge’s second point summarizing Trump read, before he listed out three bullet points summarizing Trump’s arguments.
“To get to those numbers, they got paid a fortune for speeches,” was the first bullet point contained underneath that second broad point.
“Look at the countries and companies they gave speeches for and look how they got treated in government,” was the second bullet point under the second broad stroke.
“She took money and did favors for it. No doubt,” was the third bullet point there.
The third broad point that Sarge summarized Trump as saying was: “Met with president of Northern League of Italy. Refugee Crisis?”
That one contained two sub-points from Sarge summarizing Trump.
“Crisis is horrible. Should have built safe zones,” read the first, while the second said: “Germany will never be the same.”
Before including a link to Breitbart News’s lead Donald Trump reporter Alex Swoyer’s write-up of the Trump interview with Bannon, Sarge included just one more broad point with five separate underscored bullets.
“Koch’s comments comparing your anti-Muslim rhetoric to Nazis,” was the final broad point.
“I’ve always liked the Kochs. Members of my Palm Beach club,” read the first bullet under that.
“I don’t need their money,” read the second.
“Disagree with what he says,” read the third.
“He doesn’t like me because I’m one of the few that doesn’t need his money,” read the fourth.
“Who knows how well he is doing because he is in the oil business and the business is down,” read the fifth.
That was hardly the only time the DNC operatives were watching Breitbart News Network closely. Again on May 17, after Trump was the presumptive GOP nominee, they tuned in to Breitbart’s coverage of Trump. Sarge, again on point for the Democrats, circulated a set of key details from a print interview Trump did with Breitbart News with this reporter on sanctuary cities.
The email included the headline of the story: “Exclusive – Donald J. Trump to San Francisco: Sanctuary Cities ‘Unacceptable,’ A ‘Disaster’ Creating ‘Safe-Haven for Criminals.’”
It also contained most of the text of the piece:
Donald J. Trump, the billionaire businessman and presumptive 2016 GOP presidential nominee, told Breitbart News that he is shocked that San Francisco’s local government would entertain the possibility of expanding its sanctuary status for illegal aliens after what happened to Kate Steinle last year.
“Sanctuary cities are a disaster,” Trump said when questioned. “They’re a safe-haven for criminals and people that should not have a safe-haven in many cases. It’s just unacceptable. We’ll be looking at sanctuary cities very hard.”
Trump’s comments came in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News in his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower in Midtown, Manhattan last week. They come in response to efforts by far left progressive organizations in San Francisco to expand that city’s sanctuary city laws.
As Breitbart News’ Lee Stranahan reported from the scene last week at a city meeting, San Francisco city officials are aiming to expand their sanctuary city protections for illegal aliens there. As Stranahan was recording the event via video, several illegal alien sympathizers successfully sought to have him illegally removed by law enforcement from the public meeting.
When informed of what happened to Stranahan at the meeting during this interview, Trump said it was “unbelievable.”
In subsequent reporting, Stranahan has exposed the fact that the groups pushing this expansion of sanctuary city policies are actually radical progressives who want to hand several U.S. states in the American southwest back to Mexico. In other words, they want to—as some signs and hats have stated—literally “Make America Mexico Again.”
Trump has repeatedly honed in on sanctuary cities—and specifically the Steinle murder—throughout the course of his campaign.
The email only left off one line from the Breitbart News piece.
They also circulated a data analysis this reporter did with Breitbart News’s Andy Badolato showing that Democratic primary turnout is significantly down in 2016 as compared with 2008, a warning that Hillary Clinton is in significant trouble walking into November. Of course, the Democrats–as Breitbart News has already reported–confirmed that Breitbart News’s data analyses have all been correct.
They also, as the DNC emails from May 11 show, tuned into an interview that Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI)—now a Trump supporter who spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week—did with Bannon.
The email from the DNC’s Kelly Roberts quotes a Tweet from Judd Legum, a progressive activist who works at ThinkProgress, on the interview in a request for the full interview.