TOTALLY GEEKED!

PHILADELPHIA — The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee said she will resign this week in the aftermath of the release of thousands of embarrassing internal email exchanges among Democratic officials.

The episode had pitched the party into turmoil on the eve of a convention that was promised to showcase unity.

“I know that electing Hillary Clinton as our next president is critical for America’s future,” Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in a statement released Sunday. “I look forward to serving as a surrogate for her campaign in Florida and across the country to ensure her victory.”

Wasserman Schultz, a member of Congress from south Florida, said her resignation will take effect upon the close of the convention. It came amid a growing drumbeat for her to step aside, including strong pressure from the Clinton campaign, according to a senior Democrat familiar with the negotiations.

Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic strategist, will take over as interim chair, according to the DNC.

And it may not be the end of it. R.T. Rybak, a former Minneapolis mayor and a DNC vice chairman, said in an interview that Wasserman Schultz did the right thing by resigning and “allowing the rest of us to clean up this mess so that we can quickly pivot to talking about Hillary Clinton.”

Rybak called for DNC staff who wrote emails aiming to discredit Sanders or any other candidate to be dismissed.

“There is some deeply disturbing information in the emails, but they don’t need to distract from the convention if the DNC takes clear and immediate action,” Rybak said. “We should clearly state that any person from the DNC who worked to discredit another presidential candidate, especially on DNC time and equipment, should be fired immediately. No question.”

In a trove of messages released by hackers on the website WikiLeaks, party officials discuss boosting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy during the primaries — and disparage Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

The Clinton campaign — and several cyber security experts — said the leak was a political ploy carried out by the Russian government to aid in the election of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The events come at a time when concern was already growing among national security officials that Russia is attempting to meddle in the U.S. election; even before the leak, on Thursday, the White House convened a meeting that included representatives of intelligence agencies, the FBI, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.

[Cyber experts agree with Clinton campaign: Russia is behind email release]

The controversy comes at a critical time politically, too — just as Clinton is hoping to patch up disagreements with Sanders supporters. And it undermines her claim that her party’s convention would reveal markedly less disunity than the Republican convention in Cleveland last week.

[Democrats grapple with intraparty divisions two days before convention opens]

“Long overdue,” said Norman Solomon, a Sanders delegate from California who is trying to organize enough fellow delegates to replace Kaine with a more progressive vice presidential nominee. “It’s shameful that the Clinton campaign — and, it should be said, the Obama White House — served as longtime loyal enablers for such a flagrant abuser of democratic principles.”

Trump jumped quickly on the story too.

“I always said that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was overrated,” Trump tweeted. “The Dems Convention is cracking up and Bernie is exhausted, no energy left!”

He also compared Wasserman Schultz to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, tweeting: “Today proves what I have always known, that @Reince Priebus is the tough one and the smart one, not Debbie Wasserman Shultz.”

According to one top Democratic official who requested anonymity to speak candidly, “Things started going south yesterday.”

By late Saturday, the official said, the clear sense was “something has to happen. People feel the culture of the DNC is not right, and it starts at the top.”

In addition to the friction with Sanders and his supporters, donors were upset over the way they were talked about in some of the emails, and were complaining: “They talk about us that way?”

“Bittel will be sitting in the sh---iest corner I can find,” responded Shapiro, who also referred to donors who had yet to confirm for the event as “clowns.”

The top party official also said that Wasserman Schultz called the president and offered her resignation. She expects to continue to help out through the end of the convention.

In a statement, President Obama said he was “grateful” for Wasserman Schultz’s service. “Her fundraising and organizing skills were matched only by her passion, her commitment and her warmth. And no one works harder for her constituents in Congress than Debbie Wasserman Schultz.”

Clinton also issued a statement in which she announced that Wasserman Schultz would serve as honary chair of the campaign’s 50-state program as well as continuing as a surrogate nationally and in Florida.

Others were less generous.

“On the whole I’d rather she not be in Philadelphia,” said James Carville, a longtime Clinton confidante.

[Clinton campaign manager: Russians leaked Democrats’ emails to help Donald Trump]

Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said that the DNC would need to investigate the hack, including checking to see whether any emails were “doctored,” and that the party would “take appropriate action.”

“What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian state hackers broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Mook said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here, and that’s disturbing.”

The Washington Post reported last month that Russian government hackers penetrated the DNC, stealing opposition research about Donald Trump and compromising the party’s email and chat systems.

But that explanation seems unlikely to mollify Sanders supporters who are angry about the messages and distrustful of Clinton and the party.

The emails revealed a DNC official apparently discussing how to use Sanders’s religion against him to help Clinton ahead of the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries. And in another email, a Clinton campaign lawyer suggested to the DNC how it should respond to claims from the Sanders campaign that it was improperly using a joint fundraising committee with state parties.

They also reveal the prized perks given to the party’s top donors.

On Sunday, Sanders renewed his call for Wasserman Schultz to resign and said the emails vindicate his earlier claims that party officials were actively working to undermine his candidacy.

“I think she should resign, period,” Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week.” ”And I think we need a new chair who is going to lead us in a very different direction.”

On Saturday, after a tense meeting of the rules committee, supporters of Clinton and Sanders reached a compromise to curtail the role of superdelegates in the party’s nominating process.

But the meeting also revealed unhappiness among Sanders supporters with Clinton’s choice of Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (Va.) as her running mate. By the end of the day, some of Sanders’s supporters mulled putting an alternative name into nomination in opposition to Kaine.

Even though Sanders sought to redirect the outrage over the leaked emails and urged his supporters to focus on Trump, he acknowledged that Kaine is not the vice-presidential pick he had hoped for.

“Would I have preferred to see someone like an Elizabeth Warren selected by Secretary Clinton? Yes, I would have,” Sanders said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Asked about Kaine on CNN’s “State of the Union,” he added: “Are his political views different than mine? Yeah, they are. He’s more conservative than I am.”

Monday’s convention program is expected to open with some of the party’s biggest political stars, and it will highlight some of the party’s most progressive voices.

Sanders, first lady Michelle Obama and Warren, the senator from Massachusetts and a liberal firebrand, are expected to kick off the opening session, which will be focused on hammering home Clinton’s agenda for families.

Sanders moved quickly on Sunday to separate the dispute with the DNC from his support for Clinton. He strongly denied that the revelations had changed his support for Clinton and said the real threat was Trump.

“To my mind, what is most important now is the defeating of the worst candidate for president that I have seen in my lifetime, Donald Trump, who is not qualified to be president by temperament, not qualified to be president by the ideas that he has brought forth,” Sanders said on ABC.

Meanwhile, other Democrats acknowledged that the dispute threatened to cause a serious rift.

Brazile, a vice chair of the convention, wasalso caught up in the leak. Asked for comment in an email from a Washington Post reporter about negotiations between the Sanders campaign and the DNC about the composition of the party’s convention committees, Brazile forwarded the reporter’s request to DNC officials.

“I have no intentions of touching this,” she said. “Why? Because I will cuss out the Sanders camp!”

 Phillip reported from Washington. Dan Balz, Lois Romano and David Weigel in Philadelphia, Karen Tumulty in Washington and John Wagner in Raleigh contributed to this report.