Hacked e-mails show Hillary Clinton’s campaign feared that remarks she made during paid speeches to Wall Street firms behind closed doors would become public and used against her by political opponents.
WikiLeaks released a batch of more than 2,000 internal e-mails out of 50,000 from the Clinton campaign and said the rest will be posted in coming weeks.
Some of the e-mails include excerpts of Clinton’s private speeches after she stepped down as secretary of state and before she became a 2016 presidential candidate.
Clinton was paid up to $225,000 per speech and earned more than $3 million from addressing financial firms.
Clinton campaign research director Tony Carrk was so worried about the political impact if the speeches ever came out that he sent campaign chairman John Podesta and other aides possible damaging headlines.
“CLINTON ADMITS SHE IS OUT OF TOUCH,” “CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY,” and “CLINTON REMARKS ARE PRO KEYSTONE AND PRO TRADE,” he wrote in a January 2016 e-mail.
While her aides considered potential political fallout from the release of the speeches, Clinton refused requests from Democratic rival Bernie Sanders to make them public.
In one speech, Clinton told investors she had one thing in common with them — she was part of the top 1 percent and “far removed” from her middle-class upbringing.
“And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it,” she said in a Feb. 4, 2014, speech to Goldman-Black Rock.
Negotiations on politically sensitive issues sometimes require politicians to have “both a public and private positions,” she told the National Multi-Housing Council in April 2013.
Clinton also made it clear she was a free-trader.
“We have to resist protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade,” Clinton is quoted as telling a Brazilian bank in 2013.
The Clinton campaign fingered Russia as being behind the hack to aid presidential rival Donald Trump.
“We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton. Guccifer 2.0 has already proven the warnings of top national-security officials that documents can be faked as part of a sophisticated Russian misinformation campaign,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin.