Private Clinton speeches leaked in latest hacking
Campaign chairman blames Russians trying to aid Trump.
WASHINGTON — Hillary Clint o n t o l d b a n ke r s b e h i n d closed doors that she favored “open trade and open borders” and said Wall Street executives were best-positioned to help reform the U.S. financial sector, according to transcripts of her private, paid speeches leaked Friday.
The leaks were the result of another email hacking intended to influence the presidential election.
Excerpts of the speeches given in the years before her 2016 presidential campaign included some blunt and unguarded remarks to her private audiences, which collectively had paid her at least $26.1 million in speaking fees. Clinton had refused to release transcripts of the speeches, despite repeated calls to do so by her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The excerpts were included in emails exchanged among her political staff, including c ampaign chairman John Podesta, whose email account was hacked. The WikiLeaks organization posted what it said were thousands of Podesta’s emails. It wasn’t immediately clear who had hacked Podesta’s emails, though the breach appeared to cover years of messages, some sent as recently as last month.
Among the emails was a compilation of excerpts from Clinton’s paid speeches in 2013 and 2014. It appeared campaign staff had read all Clinton’s speeches and identified passages that could be potentially problematic for the candidate if they were to become public.
One excerpt put Clinton squarely in the free-trade c a mp, a posi t i on she has retreated from significantly during the 2016 election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her “dream” was “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders” and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America “would mean for everybody in this room.”
Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has made opposition to trade deals a cornerstone of his campaign.
Podesta posted a series of tweets Friday night, calling the disclosures a Russian hack and raising questions about whether some of the documents could have been altered.
“I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” Podesta wrote. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.”