Throughout the Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton to release excerpts of the paid, private speeches she delivered to Wall Street audiences following her time as secretary of state. She refused—which occasionally made things pretty awkward, since her resistance suggested the remarks could contain something explosive.
Now excerpts of the speech transcripts appear to be out. On Friday evening, WikiLeaks released a trove of hacked emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. These include a long missive from the candidate's research director, Tony Carrk, in which he flags portions of Clinton's remarks that could potentially trip up the campaign. “There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy,” Carrk wrote to his colleagues.*
BuzzFeed reporter Ruby Cramer dug up the email, and Clinton's team declined to confirm to her whether the passages are authentic, adding that the Obama administration has “removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy.” Assuming the excerpts are the real deal, however, it seems fairly obvious why Clinton would not want them to see the light of day in the primary—when she was trying to prove her progressive bona fides and was fighting the perception that she'd be soft on banks—or even the general election. In the excerpts, Clinton presents herself as a finance-friendly moderate who is willing to criticize the industry but who also believes it took an excessive amount of heat for the financial crisis. She also suggests politicians need to hide their true policy positions from the public—not great for a candidate voters already tend to distrust—and that her long-term “dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” which Donald Trump is sure to pounce on....
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
