Wikileaks Releases Thousands Of Hacked Emails From Clinton Campaign, Hints Bernie Sanders Was Right About Hillary’s Involvement With Big Banks

The October Surprise extravaganza continues, this time, it’s Hillary Clinton is the one dealing with an eye-opening debacle. WikiLeaks has released more than 2,000 emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. On Friday night, WikiLeaks announced that it had obtained well over 50,000 emails from the personal inbox of Podesta.

Podesta confirmed the breach but questioned the authenticity of the emails.

Included in the leaks are excerpts from transcripts of closed-door speeches Clinton gave to Wall Street companies after leaving the State Department. These are the same speeches that Bernie Sanders urged Clinton to release during the Democratic primary, but she refused to do so. If they are genuine they would validate Sanders’ suspicions that Hillary is subservient to powerful Wall Street firms.

The excerpts from paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and other giant financial groups shed a possible light on Clinton’s relationship with big banks behind closed doors.

About a week after Sanders raised the issue of Hillary being influenced by Wall Street in a January debate, Clinton’s campaign’s head of research, Tony Carrk, sent around excerpts from her speeches that were possibly damaging to Podesta and other top campaign officials.

The memo highlights potentially politically damaging quotes from each paid speech with headlines such as, “CLINTON ADMITS SHE IS OUT OF TOUCH,” “CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY,” and “CLINTON REMARKS ARE PRO KEYSTONE AND PRO TRADE.”

“That was one of the reasons that I started traveling in February of ‘09, so people could, you know, literally yell at me for the United States and our banking system causing this everywhere. Now, that’s an oversimplification we know, but it was the conventional wisdom,” Clinton said at a Goldman Sachs AIMS Alternative Investments Symposium in 2013.

Speaking about her first presidential run in 2008, Clinton said, “it would be very difficult to run for president without raising a huge amount of money and without having other people supporting you because your opponent will have their supporters.”

In another speech, Hillary says that politicians need to avoid conflicts of interest.

“There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” she said during a speech to Goldman Sachs. “You know, the divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes very onerous and unnecessary.”

“I represented and worked with so many talented principled people who made their living in finance,” she said in one 2014 speech to Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, a firm that specializes in complex securities litigation on behalf of investors.

Clinton says those who work inside a regulated industry are the best individuals to then regulate said industry.

“How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry,” she said.

One email shows that the Hillary campaign was worried that the Clinton Foundation held a meeting featuring Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea at the headquarters of Goldman Sachs to discuss the family’s philanthropy with the Clintons themselves.

There was an alleged gameplan by the Clinton campaign to paint Sanders as a sexist and attack his Bernie Bros for misogyny.

Throughout his campaign, Sanders preached that Wall Street companies had access to many politicians, especially Hillary Clinton.

“You’re not going to have a government that represents all of us, so long as you have candidates like Secretary Clinton being dependent on big money interests,” Sanders said in April.

Hillary and former President Bill Clinton made more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring.

From CNN:

In total the two gave 729 speeches from February 2001 until May, receiving an average payday of $210,795 for each address. The two also reported at least $7.7 million for at least 39 speeches to big banks, including Goldman Sachs and UBS, with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic 2016 front-runner, collecting at least $1.8 million for at least eight speeches to big banks.

“Our campaign is funded by the people,” Sanders said in February. To a significant degree, her campaign is funded by Wall Street and big money interests.”

Despite vehemently criticizing Clinton’s allegiance to protecting Wall Street firms, Sanders has endorsed Clinton ever since Hillary won the Democratic nomination.

Other notable revelations from the leaks thus far.

In one 2014 speech, Clinton admits to being “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle-class.

“My father loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle-class upbringing,” Clinton said. “And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it.”

Hillary allegedly told a Brazilian bank in 2013 that she wants open borders.

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders. We have to resist, protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade.”

Hillary Clinton in private speech allegedly said, “Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth.”

In an email on October 4, 2015, to her press secretary Brian Fallon, Clinton explained how she “would support closing the gun show loophole by executive order.”

Circling back around on guns as a follow-up to the Friday morning discussion: the Today show has indicated they definitely plan to ask bout guns, and so to have the discussion be more of a news event than her previous times discussing guns, we are going to background reporters tonight on a few of the specific proposals she would support as President – universal background checks of course, but also closing the gun show loophole by executive order and imposing manufacturer liability.

The Clinton camp released a statement about the leaks.

“We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton,” Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin said. “Earlier today the U.S. government removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy.”

The leak came at nearly the same time as the U.S. accused Russia of a cyber attack against political organizations in an attempt to influence the presidential election. The Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement on Friday afternoon, saying that U.S. intelligence was “confident that the Russian government directed” the hacks of emails and documents and their posting on WikiLeaks, DCLeaks, and the blog of the hacker calling himself ‘Guccifer 2.0.'” The hacks are “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process,” the statement said.

Russia has denied any and all involvement with the hacks.

You can search Podesta’s emails here.

[BuzzFeed]