Hillary Clinton Says WikiLeaks Is 'Russian Propaganda'
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is firing back as Wikileaks released a new tranche of hacked emails from the account of its chairman John Podesta, dubbing the website a “propaganda arm of the Russian government” seeking to help elect Republican nominee Donald Trump.
The latest batch of more than 2,000 emails, disclosed on Monday 10th Oct, offered a glimpse into the inner workings of the Clinton campaign. They included insights on multiple fronts, such as a lack of preparedness for Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign, concerns raised by Chelsea Clinton over potential conflicts of interest for the family’s foundation, and efforts by aides on how to best frame the former secretary of state’s second bid for the White House.
Early October, Wikileaks published other hacked emails from Podesta’s account, which included alleged excerpts of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street. Clinton’s campaign has neither confirmed nor denied authenticity of the emails, but in recent days escalated its charge that the hack was conducted by Russian state actors.
Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton’s campaign, fired off a recent tweet storm in which he assailed Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, for working on behalf of the Russian government.
“You are no media organisation,” Fallon tweeted at Wikileaks. “You are a propaganda arm of the Russian government, running interference for their pet candidate, Trump.
“How about probing possibility of Trump associates directly coordinating with Russia and Wikileaks? That is the thing that should cause chills,” he added.
In another tweet, Fallon acknowledged that reporters would be interested in their internal campaign operation but implored the media to scrutinize collusion between the hackers and Trump’s associates.
“For God sakes, Roger Stone admitted meeting with Assange,” Fallon said of one of Trump’s closest advisers. “Wouldn’t it be good reading to see internal discussions [about] Trump’s taxes? Yes but Wikileaks isn’t targeting Trump. That tells you something.”
The US government has formally accused Russia of attempting to “interfere” with the 2016 presidential election, pointing to the hacking of more than 19,000 emails from Democratic party officials in a statement over the weekend to suggest that only the country’s “senior-most officials could have authorized these activities”.
The allegations against Russia include the hacking in July of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, which were released just before the party’s convention in Philadelphia and prompted the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Russian president Vladimir Putin praised that breach as a public service, but has denied that his government had any involvement.
The White House weighed in about the latest hack, saying the administration “will ensure that our response is proportional”.
“The president has talked before about the significant capabilities that the US government has to both defend our systems in the United States, but also carry out offensive operations in other countries,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “So there are a range of responses that are available to the president and he will consider a response that is proportional.”
The latest batch of Podesta emails include concerns within Clinton’s inner circle about her positioning on key issues as well as the private server email controversy that has dogged the campaign since March of last year.
In one email, Clinton’s chief strategist Joel Benenson wrote that she “risks looking very political” in coming out against the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline. In another, Podesta said he was “skeptical” about hitting Sanders on his gun control record, which during the Democratic primary became one of Clinton’s more prominent lines of attack against the Vermont senator.
“Interestingly, I am worried about blowback from our supporters,” Podesta wrote, as the campaign mulled criticizing Sanders in an op-ed that ran in Clinton’s name in the New York Daily News.
Aides ultimately concluded they would “tone down the contrast” between Clinton and her Democratic opponent.
One exchange revealed tensions between Clinton’s longtime aide Doug Band and her daughter Chelsea Clinton in late 2011, when Chelsea cited “serious concerns” about the blurring of lines between the family’s foundation and Band’s consulting company, Teneo.
Band, who insisted his company had “almost nothing to do” with the Clintons or its foundation, lashed out at Chelsea in an email to Podesta on the subject. “She is acting like a spoiled brat 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,” Band wrote.
The fallout from Clinton’s use of a private email server while heading the state department was also a topic of discussion. In an email from August of 2015, campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri noted Clinton was “not in the same place” as her team on how to address the controversy.
“As you all know, I had hoped that we could use the ‘server moment’ as an opportunity for her to be viewed as having taken [sic] a big step to deal with the email problem that would best position us for what is ahead,” Palmieri wrote. “It is clear that she is not in same place (unless John has a conversation with her and gets her in a different place).”
The Trump campaign pounced on the hacked emails, focusing on one exchange it claimed showed evidence of “collusion” between Clinton’s campaign and the Department of Justice in the investigation into her private server. But the emails cited by Trump adviser Jason Miller were sent two months before the federal government opened its inquiry into Clinton’s email setup, and show nothing more than the exchange of information that was already publicly available.
Trump tried to draw attention to the hacked emails himself during a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, holding up a printed statement he misattributed to longtime Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal. “Sleazy Sidney,” Trump told his supporters, admitted “they could have done something about Benghazi”.
“This just came out a little while ago,” he added, prompting the familiar “lock her up” chants against Clinton that are now a staple at Trump’s rallies.
But the words the Republican nominee claimed were written by Blumenthal were, in fact, sentences from a story published in Newsweek by journalist Kurt Eichenwald last October about the 2012 attack in Benghazi. Blumenthal was simply passing along the article to Podesta, in an email that contained the subject line “the truth” and prompted an essay in Newsweek from Eichenwald himself titled: Dear Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, I am not Sydney Blumenthal.
The source of the false story linking Blumenthal to the passages he never wrote was Sputnik, a government-controlled Russian news agency. The website took its post down after the error became clear, but Eichenwald questioned how a conspiracy went quickly from Russian print to Trump’s podium.
