Quote:

---

In a surprising turn of events, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin on Thursday released an unfinished, error-laden draft of the 2024 election autopsy report he had commissioned last year but then refused to release in December on the grounds that it would be a “distraction.”

Martin wrote a peculiar note announcing the unexpected release of the 192-page report, which read, in part:

I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it – in its entirety, unedited and unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.

But if this report doesn’t represent the DNC’s views, then why release it at all? And why the sudden epiphany about “transparency” some five months after publicly spiking the postmortem?

Perhaps the most likely explanation is that Martin was trying to get ahead of an imminent CNN report on the document that was published Thursday — and scramble to control the narrative ahead of yet another round of withering criticism.

The DNC report itself is at once both boring and a mess. And the drama surrounding its release distills how utterly disastrous Martin’s handling of the autopsy has been from start to finish. It’s all marked by an irony: If he had followed through on his original promise, this report wouldn’t be shrouded in a fraction of the controversy it is now.

Martin doesn’t name the author of the report, but according to a DNC official familiar with it, the author is Paul Rivera, a longtime New York Democratic strategist who is friends with Martin.

Martin’s argument in his announcement message is that the reason he didn’t release the report is because Rivera’s work was subpar. “It wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close,” he wrote. “And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning — every conversation, every interview, every data set.” Martin apparently eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort to fix it.

---