“NO WONDER SHE DIDN’T WANT THEM TO GET OUT”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Oct. 8, 2016) — Early on Saturday afternoon, Wikileaks tweeted that it has released just 1% of the emails it acquired from the account(s) of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In an introduction to the release on Friday evening of 2,060 emails sent by or exchanged with Podesta, many from last year, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote that “Mr Podesta also controls the Podesta Group, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank.”
Podesta, a longtime Clinton operative who was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, on Friday suggested that “the Russians” had hacked his email accounts and that some of the released emails may be fraudulent. He also took issue with what he said was Assange’s claim that he “co-owned the Podesta Group,” a public-relations lobbying firm owned by Podesta’s brother, Tony, described by Yahoo! News’s Michael Isikoff last October as “a prolific Democratic Party fundraiser who is among 43 Washington lobbyists (many of whom also represent foreign governments) listed as Clinton campaign bundlers in reports filed by the campaign with the Federal Election Commission.”
Assange claims that the authenticity rate of his document releases over the last decade since the organization’s founding is “100%.”
Isikoff’s article was reproduced in its entirety in a forwarded email among Tyson Brody, Sara Latham and John Podesta on October 16, 2015.
Many of the emails in the trove released on Friday contain links to news articles and both Democrat and Republican political news from the 2016 primary season. Others contained excerpts of Hillary Clinton’s speeches given to “Wall Street bankers,” who Clinton publicly chides for “irresponsible behavior” on her campaign website.
“No wonder she didn’t want them to get out,” wrote Jordan Weissman of the left-leaning Slate, referring to Clinton’s heretofore refusal to publish the speeches.
“Potentially problematic excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s paid Wall Street speeches were flagged for her campaign in an email that was sent to chairman John Podesta and other senior staff this past January,” reported CBS News on Friday in response to Wikileaks’ release.
A Clinton staffer reportedly said that the speeches required “an extra scrub” as they related to “policy.”
According to CBS, Clinton was paid $3,000,000 for the speeches given after she left the State Department in February 2013.
Also contained in the emails was an one from Jose Fernandez to John Podesta offering his support of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Assange reported that Fernandez played a role in approving the sale of Uranium One to Russia while Clinton was Secretary of State but that that fact was not disclosed to The New York Times in a rebuttal letter written by Clinton campaign staffer Brian Fallon.
On April 22, 2015, in a timeline of events detailing the birth of Uranium One, The Times posted:
