In October 2016, Wikileaks released over 33,000 pages of emails from John Podesta, Hillary
Clinton’s campaign chair.
The Clinton campaign has refused to authenticate individual emails provided by wikileaks, instead,
saying correctly that the Russian government appears to be behind the attack.
There are no bombshells in these emails.
If you were planning on voting for Hillary Clinton, you’re probably still going to
do so, and if you weren’t planning on voting for Clinton, you probably won’t.
That said, I think these emails will be really concerning to a lot of liberals who fear and
have already feared that Clinton is too close to bankers on Wall Street.
Sanders: Our job is to take on Wall Street, not to take their money
Bash: Secretary Clinton, the question was about the transcripts of the speeches to Goldman
Sachs.
Why not release them?
One of the ironies of this story is that we know about these emails at all because the
campaign itself did self-opposition research to find what in her Goldman Sachs speeches
could prove damaging should they leak.
Among the stuff that’s gotten the most attention is Clinton saying that Dodd-Frank, Obama’s
signature initiative to reign in Wall Street, was, quote, “passed for political reasons.”
that doesn’t mean necessarily that her bank regulation platform is any weaker than Donald
Trump’s. It’s not, it’s much tougher.
But for the left wing of the party, that sees Clinton as already too close to a lot of these
interests, this is just going to confirm those suspicions.
You can see aides in the emails, internally debating how to make sure that her apparent tone deafness
on Wall Street didn’t seep out into the public.
One example that really drives this home is that right after the campaign launched, Bill
Clinton was planning on giving a speech at Morgan Stanley, and Clinton’s aides freaked
out about this.
They said this is something we shouldn’t do and Hillary herself appeared to be okay
with it.
Now, again, if you are a Clinton fan, you probably don’t think that’s a big deal,
you probably think that Clinton and her husband can march into Wall Street, say what they
need to say, collect the money, and not change their viewpoints at all.
I have never, ever been influenced in a view or a vote
by anyone who has given me any kind of funding.
But it does speak to, I think, something that we’ve long suspected, which is that Hillary
herself doesn’t really see the political ramifications for appearing close to Wall Street, or doesn’t care.
Another piece of context that people really should keep in mind is that if you’re going
to hold Clinton herself to blame for a lot of this stuff, you also have to find fault
with Obama.
Similarly, Republicans crying foul over this is pretty rich.
The Republican party has curried extensive ties with big money donors, and for years
maintained that it wasn’t influencing their politicians.
The emails also show that Clinton agreed to go to Morocco in exchange for a $12 million
donation to the Clinton Global Initiative.
Now, Clinton herself wasn’t Secretary of State at this time.
There’s no reason to believe that there was a quid pro quo in which she promised to
do a government favor in exchange for something that the Moroccan government wanted.
But it does, again, add to this idea that Clinton was more likely to meet with people
who gave lots of money to her husband’s private charity.
We should be very clear, the Clinton Foundation has done genuinely live-saving work all over
the world.
That said, it certainly won’t erase fears from the left wing of the Democratic party
that the reason people were giving to the foundation was to curry favor with a potential
Clinton white house.
One of the interesting debates from the emails has to do with the Cadillac Tax, which taxes
luxury healthcare plans at a higher rate than other plans.
You can see from the internal debates in the emails that the Cadillac Tax sharply divided
Clinton’s team.
On the one hand you had her political aides, which were strongly urging her to back away
from the Cadillac Tax in order to win the endorsement of unions, who she needed in the
Democratic primary.
On the other hand, her policy aides clearly thought that this was the right agenda, and
urged her to support it.
This is how all politicians operate.
They take a policy position that they think is good, and they weigh it against the political
considerations.
That said, getting a chance to see how that works yourself can sometimes be an ugly sight.