The hacked Hillary Clinton campaign emails reinforce existing suspicions about the Democratic nominee, and would have posed a greater threat if she had a rival other than Donald Trump.
The thousands of emails released by WikiLeaks reveal some politically troublesome insights into Hillary Clinton and her campaign. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Imagine, for a moment, a scenario in which the Republican nominee for president was almost anyone other than Donald Trump.
Three weeks from Election Day, the race with Hillary Clinton surely would be competitive. And Democrats still would have their typical arsenal of opposition attacks designed to portray this hypothetical Republican as out of touch, dangerous for women and minorities, and sympathetic to millionaires and billionaires.
But it's also much more likely that a greater share of the national conversation would be trained on the thousands of Clinton campaign emails being released byWikiLeaks, which are reinforcing many of the existing suspicions Americans held about the Democratic nominee and those closest to her.
The dump of the more than 15,000 documents so far – the result of an illegal hack of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that Podesta has blamed on Russian spies – has yet to provide a race-altering bombshell. Much of what's contained inside the private missives merely offers a peek at politics as usual.
But the messages have revealed some politically troublesome insights, including Clinton's chumminess with Wall Street bankers, her proclivity to frame her thoughts on issues differently in private, and some unseemly campaign characterizations about opponents.
Stories of these emails are percolating through the news cycle, but for the most part, they are being drowned out by the latest Trump tangents: the unsubstantiated allegations of "large-scale voter fraud," the counterproductive attacks on House Speaker Paul Ryan – "a man who doesn't know how to win" – and the unserious proposal that Clinton take a drug test before Wednesday night's debate.
"Trump has proven incapable of allowing the story to be about Secretary Clinton, even when it would be in his best interest," says Mike DuHaime, a Republican consultant who advised New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's presidential bid. "There's no silver bullet, but rather a consistent drip drip, drip that would cause bad story after bad story, if Trump could get out of the way."
For example, there's the unearthing of paid remarks at a 2013 Goldman Sachs summit in Arizona, in which Clinton appears at ease joking about giving China "a red state" during a discussion about stemming the country's moves to claim the South China Sea.
In more serious moments during a different Goldman Sachs symposium, she allowed that the "conventional wisdom" of tarring Wall Street banks for the financial crisis was an "oversimplification," and that "the jury is still out" on Dodd-Frank legislation geared to rein in big banking – positions that would've been a ripe target for her Democratic primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who accused her of being too cozy with financial interests.
Clinton has pledged to defend and extend financial regulation. But during the symposium, she also framed the landmark Dodd-Frank law as originating at least in part out of political pressure.
"There was a lot of complaining about Dodd-Frank, but there was also a need to do something because for political reasons, if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing, but what you do is really important," she said, according to a hacked transcript of the speech.
Clinton was also stubborn about her top aides' insistence that former President Bill Clinton cancel a paid speech to a Wall Street firm just days after she was to formally launch her presidential campaign.
"HRC very strongly did not want him to cancel that particular speech," Clinton aide Huma Abedin wrote on March 11, 2015.
"Yes the issue is that if we're announcing on the 12th/13th and he's speaking to a Wall Street bank on the 15th, that's begging for a bad rollout," campaign manager Robby Mook replied.
Mook did not relent: "I know this is not the answer she wants, but I feel very strongly that doing the speech is a mistake . . . I recognize the sacrifice and [disappointment] that cancelling will create, but it's a very consequential unforced error and could plague us in stories for months."
The exchange highlights an acute political tone-deafness and the sharp defiance of a woman who has navigated political controversy for decades. Abedin eventually wrote back that Clinton was OK with canceling after "a cool down period."
Clinton aides appeared to agree that their candidate exhibited similar hard-headedness when she delayed apologizing for using a private server and email address while conducting official State Department business.
One email from adviser Neera Tanden sent in August 2015 to Podesta expressed concern that "her inability to just do a national interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem."
"She always sees herself bending to 'their' will when she hands over information, etc. But the way she has to bend here is in the remorse. Not the 'if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't do it.' A real feeling of – this decision I made created a mess and I'm sorry I did that," Tanden wrote.
Just a few weeks later, Clinton conducted a series of interviews in which she said she was sorry.
Like any politician, Clinton is found speaking more loosely and candidly in private. But her 2013 comments at the Goldman Sachs event in Arizona, lamenting "obstructionists" blocking immigration reform, are pure candy to an opposition researcher.
"They just have a backward-looking view of America. And they play on people's fears, not on people's hopes, and they have to be rejected. I don't care what they call themselves. I don't care where they're from. They have to be rejected because they are fundamentally unAmerican [sic]," Clinton said.
Coupled with her public comments in a speech last month referring to some of Trump's supporters as "deplorables," this easily could be used to depict Clinton as elitist and disparaging of those with opposing political views.
That theme is bolstered even more as the result of a 2011 email exchange between Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress, contemplating religion.
Palmieri wrote that Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, and News Corp. chief Robert Thomson are Catholic because "I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable, politically conservative religion – their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelical."
Positioned against a candidate that evangelicals could easily embrace – like Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin – those remarks would reverberate even more.
The Clinton campaign won't verify that any of the emails are authentic, preferring to focus solely on the prospect of foreign hackers attempting to influence the outcome of a U.S. election.
Trump aides have attempted to highlight the barrage of leaked messages through interviews and press releases – tagging Clinton as "the most cynical politician in American history" – but each day, almost every few hours, their candidate issues dubious or provocative statements that amount to an automatic media magnet.
Claiming an election is being "rigged" in the moment will always attract more attention than the task of parsing through comments made years ago. It's timely, more immediately relevant and, frankly, easier. But Trump's scattershot, scorched-earth approach certainly isn't helping his own case.
Then there's another theory altogether: that Trump and Trump alone prompted this WikiLeaks release due to his friendliness with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"If a tough-on-Putin Republican happened to be the nominee in your alternative universe question," ponders John Weaver, a GOP consultant who helped direct Ohio Gov. John Kasich's White House run, "Russian-fed Wikileaks probably doesn't happen."
