During an election, several incidents inevitably come to light that onlookers point to as potential game changers. For this presidential election, it could end up being the WikiLeaks release of e-mails involving Democratic-party officials’ direct targeting of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

If so, we may have just moved one giant step closer to this possible scenario: President Donald J. Trump.

Let’s briefly examine what happened.

On July 22, WikiLeaks dumped 19,252 e-mails that pertained to the Democratic National Committee. The source remains unclear, although some suspect it has to do with mischievous Russian intelligence officials. (That remains to be seen, however.)

Within this e-mail dump, eagle-eyed observers discovered some intriguing discussions between DNC officials about Sanders’s tooth-and-nail campaign against Hilary Clinton. Some were worried that Clinton, an establishment figure and the DNC’s obviously preferred candidate, could be unexpectedly tripped up by the 74-year-old dyed-in-the-wool socialist. And they clearly weren’t in the mood to let this type of political story win the day.

According to one e-mail string reprinted in several publications, Sanders’s religious beliefs, or lack thereof, was a potential target.

Here’s the original May 5 e-mail written by Brad Marshall, the DNC’s chief financial officer:

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Date: 2016-05-05 03:31
Subject: No shit
It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.

This led Amy Dacey, the DNC’s chief executive officer, to make a one-word response: “Amen.”

Marshall told The Intercept’s Sam Biddle on July 22, via e-mail: “I do not recall this. I can say it would not have been Sanders. It would probably be about a surrogate.” Sorry, but that’s a difficult pill to swallow.

When the fit hit the shan, so to speak, all hell broke loose.

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In particular, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC’s chairwoman, came under attack. The “Queen of Mean” in the world of political liberalism was involved in several questionable e-mails, too. In one instance, she tried to grab seven tickets to see the sold-out Broadway sensation Hamilton to celebrate a 50th birthday with old college friends. Meanwhile, she wrote to NBC’s Chuck Todd in frustration over his MSNBC colleague Mika Brzezinski’s call for her to resign her post. Her complaint: “Chuck, this must stop!”

After a couple of days of intense pressure, Wasserman Schultz lost her speaking engagement at the Democratic National Convention, and she planned to step down as the chairwoman when the convention was finished. Not a moment too soon, it seems. Many news sites across the political spectrum reported that Wasserman Schultz was booed and jeered at a pre-convention Florida-delegation breakfast this morning in Philadelphia. Perhaps Wasserman Schultz expected her own Florida compatriots to go easy on her; if so, she received a rude awakening that suggests her upcoming reelection bid might not be a cakewalk.

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After this morning’s eruption, high-level Democrats must have realized it was not enough to have Wasserman Schultz step down at the end of the convention. This afternoon, Wasserman Schultz told the Sun Sentinel, “I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention.”

It’s obviously too early to determine what the overall impact of the WikiLeaks e-mails will be. Politics is a blood sport, after all, and many things happen behind the scenes that are often left unsaid.

But if you’re part of the growing movement of people who support the claims of Sanders and Trump that the American political system is rigged, well, here’s your hard proof.

#share#It gets better, however. While the Wikileaks e-mail release naturally hurts the Democrats in the short term, it actually has long-term political benefits for the GOP.

How so? The Republican outsider, Trump, who was thoroughly disliked by most senior officials from Day One of his campaign, ended up winning the party nomination. Yes, there were open discussions about changing the nomination process and finding another presidential candidate. In private, too, many officials were either worried or furious. But there was no active campaign among the party brass (that we know of, anyway) to trip up Trump and bring him down.

GOP dissension about Trump was at least open, honest, transparent, and democratic in nature.

GOP dissension about Trump was therefore open, honest, transparent, and democratic in nature. For all the dramatic anger, tears, screaming, and frustration that filled the airwaves from the primaries all the way to last week’s Republican National Convention, the openness is a real achievement. It speaks volumes about the GOP and the U.S. conservative movement.

In contrast, some senior-level Democrats were seriously considering ways of screwing over their own outsider, Sanders.

It was bad enough that Clinton controlled most of the party’s superdelegates, which was an enormous and undemocratic advantage she had over her opponent. Add to that the DNC’s musings about how to go after Sanders when he was beating her in various states. How undemocratic can the so-called Democratic party be? Quite a bit, it seems.

Here are the two wild cards in all of this.

First, it remains to be seen whether Sanders, in good conscience, can continue to support Clinton when he now knows the deck was completely stacked against him.

On Sunday, Sanders said to George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week: “I told you a long time ago that the DNC was not running a fair operation, that they were supporting Secretary Clinton. . . . So what I suggested to be true six months ago turned out to be true.” Yet, he would only say that he was “disappointed” but “not shocked” by this revelation.

Fine. Was he shocked when many journalists that same day reported that Clinton had immediately thrown a lifeline to the beleaguered DNC chair, announcing in a statement, “Wasserman Schultz has agreed to serve as the honorary chair of my campaign’s 50-state program”? If Sanders is unbothered by this, that’s really saying something about his deference to the Clinton camp.

The second wild card is that it remains to be seen whether Sanders supporters, in good conscience, can vote for Clinton after their candidate was screwed by a system that is anything but clean.

#related#Keep this in mind. A June 14 Bloomberg Politics national poll of likely voters revealed that only 55 percent of Sanders supporters favored Clinton. A startling 22 percent would consider voting for Trump in November, and 18 percent would be in Libertarian-party candidate Gary Johnson’s camp. After these revelations, one would have to assume that the Republican presidential nominee’s support among Sanders supporters has spiked upward.

If you see Donald Trump smiling a bit more on the campaign trail this week, there’s a good reason for it. His new BFF, WikiLeaks, has ruined the Democratic convention, making his task of winning the White House a whole lot easier.