Aisha Dew with notorious Clintonite Debbie Wasserman Schultz
-by SusanInIowa
Niko House is the President of North Carolina Students for Bernie Sanders. He worked as a paralegal in the U.S. Army doing investigative work, and is now going to UNC-Chapel Hill. He is 27 years old. He told his story to Ed Opperman of the Opperman Report and has posted videos online, detailing his claims about sabotage against the Sanders campaign by its paid North Carolina director whom he accuses of being a DNC mole working for Clinton, and by others in the campaign with Clinton connections.
House was part of one of the first groups organizing for Bernie Sanders. There was a lot of enthusiasm for Sanders in North Carolina, and two offices opened early on using only volunteer donations. They were doing so well that the leaders of the college organizations had a private meeting with Bernie Sanders about him coming back to North Carolina. Sanders told them they were the most organized college group he had seen in the country. They had 200+ members. At a Greensboro event on two days’ notice, they had 90 volunteers.
One day, a friend called him. “Niko, I need you to get in contact with the campaign. The campaign is hiring Aisha Dew. She cannot be hired. I don’t know how she even got to the point of being hired, considering she just bankrupted the Mecklenberg Democratic Party, on the order of $19,000. She was fired. She left the Democratic Party.” House went to Facebook and saw photos of Dew with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz taken in November. Dew was hired by Sanders in December. He also saw photos of Dew with establishment Democrats that he knows personally. There were lots of posts on her Facebook account about Hillary Clinton.
House immediately warned the Sanders campaign. The staffer he talked to said Dew was pretty thoroughly vetted. He was waved off. The campaign staffer was lied to, according to Niko. Either she was not vetted, or the red flags were why she was hired, he thought.
Aisha Dew began running the North Carolina campaign. House participated in campaign conference calls. The first instance that he knew something was wrong involved a planned student debt rally, March on Student Debt in Raleigh, run by student volunteers. The rally was planned for a Thursday, timed for when students are getting out of class, and for rush hour. Dew asked for the campaign to be a part of it. He told them to post the event. The event was changed from a Thursday to a Sunday, without anyone telling him, two weeks before the event. He told Dew: you are not going to have a rally on Sunday in the South, scheduled at the last-minute, set for 1 or 2 pm, and think that you’re going to get a large crowd. If you’re not at church, you’re eating because you just got out of church. She claimed that the campaign wanted to get surrogates and permits. So he backed off-- “I’m going to give her a chance”-- and compromised. But he kept asking about surrogates, flyers, and permits. He had people excited about going. He had speakers lined up. Two days before, he was told they were going to scratch it, not by Aisha, but by a field organizer. They could not get surrogates. They could not get permits from the campaign. He responded that the campaign does not get involved in volunteer events, and did not issue permits for them. He was told that “your event wasn’t going to happen anyway.” He initially ascribed this situation to incompetence. Then Dew scheduled a grand opening for a Sanders office at the same time as his student debt event, and he began to think it was worse than that.
Another incident involved HKonJ People’s Assembly and Annual Moral March, a rally led by Reverend Barber, President of the NAACP in North Carolina. Aisha Dew said that the Bernie campaign was uninvited to the rally by Reverend Barber. House was told to take all the ads down at the students’ site “or else,” although Clinton’s advertising was still up. He later confirmed that Barber had said “you can come, but please don’t take over the entire event.” Barber’s concern was not jeopardizing the nonpartisan status of the NAACP and nothing more. Barber denounced the accusation, published on Daily Kos and later taken down, that he had disinvited the Sanders campaign in his speech. House concluded that the apparent deception was purposeful.
He added: “Stuff like this is happening all over North Carolina. Aisha was two hours late getting to the grand opening. She was supposed to bring food, she didn’t bring food, didn’t bring any materials. We had another situation where we’re all waiting for materials to be distributed from the campaign, and a staffer told me ‘I don’t know why you have not gotten them, they’ve been chilling in Mecklenburg County. They’ve been there. There’s a whole box full of them.’”
One of his friends helped Sanders in New Hampshire with the African-American vote, and was brought back to North Carolina to work on the campaign. They had similar ideas about what was going on and agreed to keep their distance, and “see how it turns out.” He got off the phone with this friend and called staffer Anita at the Sanders office, who told him that his friend was fired, and it was “illegal” to talk to her. That turned out to be a lie. The friend was not fired. It was this incident that prompted him to make his first of a series of accusatory videos.
Another concern he raised was that North Carolina candidates and a member of the NAACP sought to endorse Sanders at a rally in Raleigh, and were “deflected” by Aisha Dew. Instead of participation by these potential endorsers, the rally speaker was Dew, who gave what House calls a cringe-inducing speech that sounded like a concession to Clinton.
He discusses the failures to return phone calls, not just from him, but from potential candidate endorsers. And then Dew’s suppression of the “rumor” via mass email that Sanders was coming to North Carolina, when Sanders in fact was coming. One day prior, she told him that Sanders was coming, as students were leaving for spring break.
He started seeing random complaints about the campaign on Facebook. “We had people come down from Virginia and just sat in an office, told that they weren’t needed for canvassing, the weekend before the primary.” The local NAACP leader in Durham, a heavily African-American county, did not know there was a Sanders office there. No one could find phone numbers for his offices.
Blogger and retired lawyer Steven Searls has been doing good work researching what happened in North Carolina. He followed up with Dew to try to get her side of the story. He had obtained a copy of her email to Sanders volunteers and campaign staff stating that “Rev. Barber did not want Sanders supporters at his rally/event in February and that [she] told everyone to take down all his HKonJ events from all social media sites related to the campaign.” She has not responded to his inquiries.
Among the items Dew could explain:
• A tweet from Dew while at the Winthrop University debate on November 6, 2015: "@Hillary Clinton enters the room. It's Electric!"
• Seals: “What is also odd, of course is her enthusiasm regarding a candidate against whom she would be working to defeat one month later in North Carolina. For the record, I found no corresponding tweet by her regarding Bernie's entrance on the stage that night.”
• In a later post, he asks how she could have gotten a ticket to an event that sold out immediately?
• A photo of Dew at Winthrop, embracing Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, no friend of the Sanders campaign, in late November of 2015.
• Screenshots of announcements regarding the cancellation of the Sanders campaign’s participation in the HKonJ event.
• In his third video, House describes a photo on Facebook of Dew in which she was tagged at a “Hillary Captains Party.” Was Dew a Hillary Captain before she was a state director for Sanders?
• Why won’t Dew come forward and explain her actions, and/or defend herself?
So who hired Aisha Dew? In his third video, House said he thought that Marcus Ferrell hired her, and Ferrell is well-connected to the Clinton campaign according to House. But in a video published on 3/22/16, House claims he received a call from Christopher Smith, who claimed to be the Deputy Field Director for the Sanders campaign, and that he was the one who hired Aisha Dew. An odd conversation ensued.
House asked Smith why he hired Dew. Smith said that he had worked with her on another campaign, which was a “red flag” for House. He explained that the candidate Smith worked for was progressive. “I know Aisha Dew, and she works for establishment candidates. She doesn’t work for campaigns that she thinks she will lose, unless there’s something in it for her.” He did not believe they worked together on that campaign. Then House asked what made Smith think she was qualified. Smith did not respond with Dew’s qualifications. Instead, he asked House to think about the opportunities for black people, and opportunities for his own political career.
House asked Smith whether he had contacted Shannon Jackson, who is the Deputy National Field Director for the Sanders campaign. House explains in his video that he had emailed Shannon Jackson and asked not to be contacted about his allegations by anyone but members of the Sanders family or Jackson himself, as he did not trust anyone else on the campaign at this point. Smith responded that he had not consulted anyone. House said to Smith that he assumed that the matters he was revealing would be a press matter for the campaign, and asked why Smith would not contact the national campaign before making the call. Smith told House he did not understand politics or the campaign, then appealed to his ambition, then name-dropped people they both knew, then said he was a recruiter on his prior campaign.
House asked, “So who vetted her?” Smith said he had vetted her. House: “She couldn’t even run a campaign in a county. What makes you think she was qualified to run a state?” “Well, who else was African-American who could have run a state?” To House, this response was ludicrous. There had been at least 40 applications for the position, and many African-Americans who were qualified. The conversation ended when Smith refused to say who in the Sanders campaign had hired Smith.
Other Sanders campaign hires mentioned by House are discussed here and here, including Robert Dempsey, the current Wisconsin state director for Sanders, and who was fired as executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party. House claims that Dempsey, like Dew, was fired from the North Carolina Democratic Party and left his local party in debt, then was hired by Marcus Ferrell. [Note from Howie- Dempsey found the NC Democratic Party broke when he was hired and started turning things around. He went on to lead Bernie very successful efforts in Minnesota, in which Bernie grounded Hillary, won every single congressional district and took 46 delegates to her 31.] House also identifies S. Prescott Harris, a regional field director for Sanders who quit a few weeks before the primary and posted his happy #ImWithHer photo after the South Carolina primary. More on him and others here, including an accusation that the North Carolina communications director sabotaged efforts to get signs out in Charleston.
House now believes that this is not just a North Carolina problem. After he made his initial videos, he started hearing through social media from others with similar stories of incompetence or intentional sabotage in other states. Interviewer Opperman said he had heard stories from people in Louisiana who wanted to endorse and who were never approached. Social media comments along these lines include: George Fisher and Connie Jones. In an interview with Tim Black, he claimed to have received hundreds of messages from volunteers all over the country about Clinton supporters working on the Sanders campaign.
Taken as a whole, this picture looks bad. Is the Sanders campaign vetting the people it hires? Is it incompetence, or is it worse than that? Is Bernie Sanders being sabotaged by paid staffers who are really supporters of Hillary Clinton? If people connected to Clinton are trying to win dirty, that will not help them motivate Sanders supporters to help her if she is nominated. If the DNC is involved, it could cause a backlash beyond the Clinton campaign. The Sanders campaign should be aware of this by now. What are they doing about it?
[An aside worth pondering: 5 of the 12 Democrats in the North Carolina legislature who voted for the viciously anti-LGBT bill that passed yesterday are on Hillary Clinton's North Carolina leadership team: Charles and George Graham, Howard Hunter, Garland Pierce and Billy Richards. Is the tent too big? What would Hillary have done if the 5 of them had voted to allow discrimination against Jews or blacks?]
Aisha with Jim Clyburn, Hillary surrogate