A look at hacked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
John Podesta, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton, on Tuesday, Oct. 11, accused Roger Stone, a longtime Donald Trump aide, of receiving “advance warning” about WikiLeaks’ plans to publish thousands of hacked emails and suggested the Republican candidate is aiding the unprecedented Russian interference in American politics.
WASHINGTON >> Hacked emails released in daily dispatches this past week by the WikiLeaks group exposed the inner workings of Hillary Clinton’s campaign leading up to her 2015 announcement that she would seek the presidency, and through this year’s primary.
The thousands of emails were hacked from the accounts of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
U.S. intelligence officials have blamed the Russian government for a series of breaches intended to influence the presidential election. The Russians deny involvement.
Among the revelations from Podesta’s hacked emails:
———
WALL STREET SPEECHES
Don't miss out on what's happening!
Stay in touch with top news, as it happens, conveniently in your email inbox. It's FREE!
The campaign asked former President Bill Clinton to cancel a planned speech to a Wall Street investment firm last year because of concerns the Clintons might appear to be too cozy with Wall Street just as the former secretary of state was about to announce her White House bid.
Clinton aides wrote that Hillary Clinton did not want her husband to cancel the speech, but was eventually convinced that canceling was the right step.
Campaign manager Robby Mook said he realized canceling the speech would disappoint both Clintons, but said, “it’s a very consequential unforced error and could plague us in stories for months.”
Clintons’ paid speeches have been an issue throughout the campaign, particularly Hillary Clinton’s private speeches to Wall Street firms.
Bill Clinton was scheduled to speak to Morgan Stanley executives in April 2015, a few days after his wife was set to launch her bid for president.
“That’s begging for a bad rollout,” Mook wrote in an email from March 11, 2015.
———
SHUFFLING PRIMARY DAYS
The Clinton campaign tried to move the Illinois presidential primary to a later date. The campaign said a contest held after the Super Tuesday primaries might stop momentum for a moderate Republican candidate, and it emphasized that Clinton and her husband “won’t forget” a political favor.
The email, from Mook to Podesta, said Obama administration officials should use their connections in the president’s home state to try to push back the March 15 Illinois primary by at least a month.
“The overall goal is to move the IL primary out of mid-March, where they are currently a lifeline to a moderate Republican candidate after the mostly southern Super Tuesday,” Mook wrote. “IL was a key early win for (GOP presidential candidate Mitt) Romney” in 2012.
“The Clintons won’t forget what their friends have done for them,” he added.
Mook suggested that Bill Daley, a former White House chief of staff and longtime Illinois power broker, should reach out to Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan to make the request.
The effort was ultimately unsuccessful.
———
PRIVATE EMAIL SYSTEM
As news broke last year about her use of a private email server, one of Clinton’s top aides suggested simply releasing all the messages from her time as secretary of state.
The email was sent on March 4, 2015, the day The Associated Press first reported that Clinton had been running a private server inside her home in New York.
Within hours of AP’s reporting, Republicans from the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued a subpoena demanding Clinton’s emails regarding the deadly 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya.
Adviser Phillipe Reines proposed that Clinton should respond by tweet: “No need for this, happy for you to have what I gave State. If they can’t, I will. Bring a dolly!” — referring to a moving cart.
Clinton lawyer and chief of staff Cheryl Mills responded: “Seriously?”
Reines, who had worked for Clinton at the State Department, reiterated that he was serious, though he suggested maybe a campaign spokesman could respond less “flippantly.”
Mills appeared to like the idea, at least initially. “Can we implement this in the next hour?”
It never happened.
Instead, Clinton’s team waited more than a year as the State Department pored through more than 55,000 pages of Clinton’s work-related emails from her time as the nation’s top diplomat. And the issue kept bubbling up, no matter how hard Clinton’s team worked to put it behind her.
———
HOW TO REPLY
Clinton’s campaign was slow to grasp the seriousness of the email controversy and believed it might blow over after one weekend.
Two days after the AP report, her advisers were shaping their strategy to respond to the revelation.
Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill optimistically suggested that the issue might quickly blow over.
“Goal would be to cauterize this just enough so it plays out over the weekend and dies in the short term,” Merrill wrote on March 6, 2015.
It did not, and instead became the leading example of Clinton’s penchant for secrecy, which has persisted as a theme among her campaign critics and rivals throughout her election season. Clinton did not publicly confirm or discuss her use of the email server until March 10 in a speech at the United Nations, nearly one week after AP revealed the server’s existence.
———
BILL CLINTON’S BUSINESS
There was consternation among those closest to Hillary Clinton about how Bill Clinton’s business dealings might damage his reputation and potentially affect her presidential hopes.
The emails also gave insight into tension and turmoil within the Clinton Foundation while Clinton was secretary of state. The chief operating officer of the family charity was reported to be threatening to commit suicide over the stress.
The messages that circulated among Podesta, Chelsea Clinton and former Bill Clinton aide Doug Band detail internal tensions that simmered inside the Clinton Foundation and appear to have played a role in Band’s departure from the family charity.
After Chelsea expressed concerns about Band and the private corporate advisory firm he co-founded, Teneo Holdings, Band wrote that she was “acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she’s doing because she, as she has said, hasn’t found her way and has a lack of focus in her life.”
Also in December 2011, Clinton Foundation chief operating officer Laura Graham contacted Band to complain that stress she blamed on the former president and Chelsea Clinton was causing her to consider suicide.
Band wrote that when Graham called him, she was in her car parked near the water with her foot on the gas pedal. He said he dissuaded her from hurting herself.
———
TRADE POLICY
Hillary Clinton told bankers behind closed doors that she favored “open trade and open borders” and said Wall Street executives were best-positioned to help reform the U.S. financial sector, according to transcripts of her private, paid speeches that appeared in hacked emails released Oct. 7.
Excerpts of the speeches given in the years before her 2016 campaign included some blunt and unguarded remarks to her private audiences, which collectively had paid her at least $26.1 million in speaking fees. Clinton had refused to release transcripts of the speeches, despite repeated calls to do so by her Democratic primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Among the emails was a compilation of excerpts from Clinton’s paid speeches in 2013 and 2014. It appeared campaign staff had read all Clinton’s speeches and identified passages that could be potentially problematic for the candidate if they were to become public.
One excerpt put Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she has retreated on significantly during the 2016 election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her “dream” is “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders” and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America “would mean for everybody in this room.”
Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has made opposition to trade deals a cornerstone of his campaign.
39 responses to “A look at hacked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
CROOKED HILLARY IS CORRUPT AND PODESTA IS JUST A MOUND OF SCUM !!!
I don’t think you help your cause by calling names.
The Clinton people are totally delusional.
The Clinton people are always name calling.
hiLIARy Bubba Chelsea…..pure EVIL.
Podesta has his dancing shoes on and egg in his face.
I can’t believe the American people would fall for all these scandalous revelations about women coming out of the woodwork claiming that Donald ‘touched/fondled/kissed’ them.
Is this the Clinton foundation causing a distraction because they have no other solution ?
Also Mr.O and the DNC are all in it.
Now we see why she doesn’t want to release transcripts for her million dollar speeches as Bernie Sanders wanted! Behind closed doors, the truth is spoken and in front of the press and nation, different words are said.
Baloney… most Democrats support free trade but not at the cost of too many American jobs.
Free trade is supported by Democrats because free trade improves economies in foreign countries such as China. China has taking hundreds of Millions of their people out of poverty into the middle class. It’s a great step towards a more peaceful world.
In most of these Chinese jobs in high tech, these are new jobs and have not been a drain when American jobs.
However globalization which began in the eighties and the nineties with the container ships has reduced American jobs. And no treaty has been able to stop globalization.
Most labor unions don’t want to admit it. There is no way to turn back the clock on globalization. They can’t tell their members that.
BS Our American manufacturing jobs went to China and Mexico. Always talking befoere checking.
Blame it on globalization… it didn’t depend on a trade agreement.
Unions should realise that you can’t argue with the bottom line. Companies will do what is in their best financial interests to do.
Wiliki – Perhaps you’ve heard of Nafta which was signed by Bill Clinton in the 90’s? If not you should really read up on it before making such dingy statements.
The Clintons are among the greediest and most corrupt politicians in American history. The fact that the media and so many duped Americans are hell bent in dragging this woman over the finish line is mind boggling. She represents the corporatacracy that is running this country and its middle- and working classes into the ground. And she wants to be president after selling out all these years to big corporations and foreign countries for $26 million in so-called “speaking fees?” Outrageous.
Noteworthy here is the lack of liberal commentary as is normally seen within the posts on this website. What can they say? Nothing. Stunning in it’s unsurprising candor about nearly everything republican conservatives have been saying for years, these emails factually document all the allegations that conservatives have been making about Obama and his entire administration as well as the Clinton Crime Family apparatus. Liberals are speechless as the spotlight of reality underscores what we have always thought and said: Hillary Clinton is a congenital liar, a cheat, a scorned woman looking to ingratiate herself upon others for her own political and financial gain. She is unrepentant in her efforts and without any shame. The wikileaks documents demonstrate a lifetime of living audaciously at the public’s expense. How any reasonably intelligent person can bring themselves to politically support this woman as the leader of the free world is appalling to me. You can hate Trump all you want. You can dislike his behavior if you will. But he doesn’t lie and cheat and take advantage of the public at their expense as Hillary Clinton has done her entire life.
Make America Great AGAIN!!!
Trump lies all the time. He’s a pathological liar.
Corruption runs deep in the HilLIARy camp, and she is just getting started, if elected, America will see corruption we have never seen since its birth, right up there with all the most corrupt countries of the world like China. Russia and right here at home. We already see this level of pay to play corruption in Honolulu and the rest of the state, my question is do you really want to see this in the rest of the country?
I think a “dream” could be a hemispheric free-trade zone, ala Europe. That would be fine, perhaps, if all parties were making the same income, as exists in Europe.
I’d like to know what she said after that. Did she couch it with a “but…”? Would it be dependent on all parties being equal? We need to say more before we can say this is bad, I think.
“Parties being equal” is the goal. The goal is income redistribution within and outside of the country. Unfortunately This is a very sad, corrupt election.
So it’s not a crime to try and alter the dates of an election to influence the outcome?
Interesting, though…they were not trying to change the outcome on the democratic side, I think. So, no, I don’t think it is criminal.
I didn’t follow their reasoning, though. Were they trying to help a moderate or an extremist? An extremist might be easier to beat; but, an extremist might also have a loyal following. Was it explained?
Iirc the campaign hoped that moderates would have a better chance in the southern Belt states.
And a New Yorker like Trump would have to wait longer for the Iowa primary for a win.
They were hoping with so many losses to the Republican Tea Partiers that the southern Belt states would select out the Republican moderates for Clinton to run against.
Iowa Democrates like their traditional early primary. They’re not going to change it for the Clinton campaign.
Iirc the campaign was hoping that Jeb Bush would win the primary. They may have been worried about a Kasich win. Kasich wasn’t expected to do well in the southern Belt states.
The light are on but nobody’s home huh.
Wheres trumps taxes? Where’s trumps hacked “locker room text”? When is the NYC madame going to drop the bombshell?
where illiary’s 33000 hidden emails?
where is opala’s college transcrips?
Liberals feel Bill Clinton was a great President. They said his personal life didn’t matter. And I haven’t seen any coverage of his umpteen trips to Lolita Island. Now look at Trump. Like Clinton, he does seem to like attractive women. If he were running as a Democrat (because he very well could be, except for the obvious stuff like closing the border, and bringing back jobs through good trade deals, normal things that any good businessman would do),would the press even mention anything negative about Trump? The answer is no they wouldn’t.
The moral of these “tales” is that the technologies of our present time can’t be trusted to keep privacy private!
i like the part about open borders and open trade
just think..all the drugs coming up from mexico and south america
and all the jobs be gone and we be just like venezuela and mexico will have to build a wall
to keep americans out
Another biased Associated Press article. They write: “Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has made opposition to trade deals a cornerstone of his campaign”.
That is not true and is misleading. Trump repeatedly has said he is for good trade deals. I have heard him repeat it in his speeches over and over. I have never heard him say that he is opposed to trade deals. The cornerstone of his campaign? Really. Do Democrats in Hawaii really give any credibility to the AP? The media is suppose to be neutral. They’re given special privileges in our form of government. They are not suppose to be backing one candidate. That happens in places like Russia where you have a State run media.
What can we ecpect from the Associated Depress
The Clinton people are totally delusional.
To me it shows how good they are… Clinton has a better chance at winning with their help.
AP is soft-selling these disclosures…highlighting the most innocuous stuff. Go elsewhere for real news on what’s in these emails. For example AP states that Hillary made “some blunt and unguarded remarks,” but won’t tell you what they were. Journalist aren’t supposed to be in the spin control business, but this year that’s all they’re doing.
If these government employees emails were hacked by the Russians why do they blame it on Trump when he was not even a candidate at the time of these hackings.
It turns oh that a Trump supporter who produced the movie “Snowden” (great movie. I wonder how much of a ” dramatization” it was) which was critical of American intelligence and the NSA, was in contact with WikiLeaks on the hacking.
Trump knows more than he admits. He’s lying. Wonder if Congress goes after him too?
What happened to all the Clinton supporters in this comment section?
Did these hacked emails include Podesta’s private email?
Although not mentioned in this story, the hacked emails reported in other stories show just how corrupt the Clinton campaign and its DNC co-conspirators were in stealing the Democratic Party nomination from Bernie Sanders. His supporters should be outraged. It is mindboggling to think that any of them would now vote for Hillary.