Clinton campaign chief dismisses furor over DNC E-mails as temporary

Bloomberg

Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager insisted that Democrats are unified as they kick off their nominating convention amid the ouster of Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and said he is “very confident” Bernie Sanders will deliver a rousing speech Monday night in support of the nominee.
Speaking at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast on Monday in Philadelphia, Robby Mook also defended Wasserman Schultz’s tenure, saying she deserves credit for helping get President Barack Obama re-elected in 2012 and other efforts on behalf of the party. Although she drew the ire of Sanders and his supporters, Mook said Wasserman Schultz still deserves to have a role in opening the Democratic National Convention before stepping down at the end of the week.
“She’s put in a lot of work,’’ Mook said. “She’s going to be gaveling in this convention.”
Wasserman Schultz’s abrupt resignation announcement on Sunday was engineered to head off any public rebellion by supporters of Sanders that would upend the carefully crafted image of unity that Democrats planned for their convention. Demands for her to step down reached a crescendo after WikiLeaks on Friday released almost 20,000 DNC e-mails, some of which showed party leadership leaning in support of Clinton’s presidential campaign during the Democratic primary, a longstanding complaint from Sanders.
Mook said the dissent within the Democratic Party doesn’t compare with the divisions Republicans displayed during their convention last week in Cleveland and that it won’t hurt Clinton’s chances in November. He dismissed two polls released Monday that showed the race between Clinton and Donald Trump tightening with the Republican nominee getting a boost coming out of the Republican convention.
“We’ll have some lift coming out of ours as well,” he said.
Mook addressed questions about the Russians’ reported role in hacking DNC e-mails carefully. “I want to let the experts speak on this,” he said, adding that analysts have concluded the hack was “perpetrated by Russian state actors.” He said that “considering the calculated release,” experts have inferred that “it was the Russians who perpetrated this leak for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary
Clinton.”