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| WikiLeaks appears to reveal Clinton's Wall Street speeches |
WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton told
bankers behind 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 Campaign 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
camp, a position she has retreated on significantly during the 2016
election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her "dream" is
"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."
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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."
Podesta's comments came just hours after U.S.
officials publicly accused the Russian government of directing
cyberattacks on political organizations and American citizens in an
attempt to interfere with U.S. elections.
The joint statement from the office of the Director
of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department cited
disclosures of "alleged hacked emails" on sites like DCLeaks.com and
WikiLeaks as being "consistent with the methods and motivations of
Russian-directed efforts."
The statement didn't refer by name to the affected
political institutions, but federal authorities are investigating
cyberattacks on the computer systems of the Democratic National
Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus
said in a statement, "It's not hard to see why she fought so hard to
keep her transcripts of speeches to Wall Street banks paying her
millions of dollars secret."
The emails released Friday included exchanges between
Podesta and other Clinton insiders, including campaign manager Robby
Mook. Most were routine, including drafts of Clinton speeches, suggested
talking points for campaign surrogates and suggested tweets to be sent
out from Clinton's account.
The excerpts include quotes from an October 2013
speech at an event sponsored by Goldman Sachs, in which Clinton conceded
that presidential candidates need the financial backing of Wall Street
to mount a competitive national campaign.
"Running for office in our country takes a lot of
money, and candidates have to go out and raise it," Clinton said. "New
York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for
candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it's also our economic
center. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough
questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were
really playing chicken with our whole economy."
In the same speech, Clinton was also deferential to
the New York finance industry, exhorting wealthy donors to use their
political clout for patriotic rather than personal benefit. She also
spoke of the need to include Wall Street perspectives in financial
reform.
"The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry," Clinton said.
In an April 2013 speech to the National Multifamily
Housing Council, Clinton said politicians must balance "both a public
and a private position" while making deals. Clinton gave an example from
the movie "Lincoln," and the deal-making that went into passage of the
13th Amendment, a process she compared to sausage-making.
"It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but
we usually end up where we need to be," Clinton said. "But if
everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the
deals, you know, then people get a little nervous to say the least. So,
you need both a public and a private position."
Clinton's speeches often touched on technology and
privacy. In an April 2014 speech to JPMorgan, she denounced National
Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden for going abroad, saying, "if he
really cared about raising some of these issues and stayed right here in
the United States, there's a lot of whistleblower protections."
But she told her audience that her time in the public eye left her sympathetic to privacy concerns.
"As somebody who has had my privacy scrutinized and violated for decades, I'm all for privacy, believe me," she said.
Speaking on international affairs, Clinton's comments
were largely in line with her positions as secretary of state, if
sometimes more blunt.
"The Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than
any other place on Earth over the course of the last 30 years," she told
the Jewish United Fund at a 2013 dinner.
The speech transcripts were produced under an
agreement Clinton routinely imposed on any organization that hired her
to speak. The contracts, such as ones crafted by the Harry Walker
Agency, required the organizations to hire, at their own expense, a
stenographer who would provide the transcripts to Clinton and not keep
copies for themselves.
In some cases, the contracts themselves were obtained
by news organizations under public records laws because Clinton was
being paid to speak by public universities or colleges.
