Most of the attention lately has been on Donald Trump’s words and alleged actions regarding women. That’s because we, as a society, are adolescent. We want titillation. But there is more going on in the world. There’s even more going on in the campaign. On the Democratic side, there is a lot of worry about the Wikileaks documents, which are being released, with the stated purpose of bringing down Hillary Clinton.
Politico says Democrats have a strategy to minimize the effect.
The Clinton campaign has a three-fold plan to interrupt press coverage of the gusher of emails sent to and from campaign chair John Podesta’s account and released by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization. The first is a Fight Club-style vow of silence about the emails, which appear to have been hacked, as Podesta and the campaign have refused to confirm or deny their authenticity to reporters. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked,” Podesta tweeted.
The second has been to call attention to what appears to be the emails’ tainted provenance.
“Media needs to stop treating Wikileaks like it is same as FOIA,” tweeted Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon on Monday in one of five tweets on that theme. “Assange is colluding with Russian government to help Trump.” That WikiLeaks hasn’t released material on Trump, Fallon continued, “tells you something.”
The third has been to assign Clinton surrogates to the talk shows to dismiss the significance of the very documents that have so upset Fallon. . .
Clinton’s allies warn us that because the WikiLeaks dump may contain forgeries—not a fully imaginary admonition, mind you—reporters should keep their distance for their own good. Forged documents are as old as journalism itself, and as technology grows more sophisticated, more forgeries will appear, and reporters will have to be even more vigilant lest they be hoodwinked.
There have been no “bombshells,” Politico says, but they are, at least, interesting because they show the inner workings of the Clinton campaign.
One indicator that the hacked Podesta emails are legit is that they are so boring. . . This is not to say that the emails contain no news value. From them we gain a sense of how the Clinton team works together, what Clinton said in her Wall Street speeches and more on the political sabotaging of Bernie Sanders. We learn that Clinton aide Doug Band was feuding with Chelsea Clinton at the Clinton Foundation. That Hillary Clinton has made herself expert in taking both sides of an issue. That Donna Brazile leaked CNN Town Hall questions to the Clinton campaign. That Podesta was courting Martin O’Malley in February, hoping to win his endorsement for Clinton, of petty squabbles involving Lanny Davis and Robby Mook, and that Podesta was phone buddies with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
One of the interesting things in the Wikileaks emails is how worried the campaign was that they may have to run against Marco Rubio, according to the Washington Examiner.
Emails suggest Clinton’s closest aides were concerned about facing Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in the general election, fearing he could pose the greatest threat to her White House ambitions.
“He gives a good speech, and sounded much more reasonable, populist and accessible than much of the rest of the GOP field. Felt more like an inspiring Democratic speech than a GOP candidate,” wrote a communications aide in April 2015.
The emails also showed that John Podesta is obsessed with space aliens, according to Breitbart.
The recent dump by WikiLeaks of hacked emails from the chairman of Hillary R. Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman exposed John Podesta’s obsession with aliens … not immigrants. Podesta is obsessed with space aliens.
Podesta found other people who shared his interest in spacemen, like the former lead singer of the band Blink-182, Tom DeLonge. . .
Speaking June 2 at the Code Conference, a media and technology trade show and convention held in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Podesta was asked by Kara Swisher: “Do you think there might be aliens?”
“I think there might be two issues,” Podesta said. “One, are there aliens and, two, have we been visited–or visited recently by aliens. . .It seems to me inconceivable that there aren’t aliens,” he said. . .
DeLonge was not the only rocker reaching out the Podesta about encounters of the third kind.
Small Black guitarist Juan Pieczanski checked in with Podesta after he tweeted Feb. 13, 2015, on his last day as a senior advisor to President Barack Obama: “Finally, my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisstilloutthere cc: @NYTimesDowd.”. . .
In an sit-down interview posted Dec. 30 in The Conway Daily Sun, Clinton gave her word that she believed aliens and UFO’s were real: “I think we may have been (visited already). We don’t know for sure.”
As president, Clinton would investigate the rumors surrounding Area 51, she said.
More seriously, the leaks suggest that Hillary accused Saudi Arabia of funding ISIS, also from Breitbart.
Perhaps most remarkably, Clinton flatly stated in this email that the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia were funding the Islamic State.
Clinton pushed the Obama Administration’s favorite solution to all foreign crises, arming local forces and hoping they could defeat the bad guys without a major American military presence.
In this case, she recommended arming the Kurdish peshmerga and Free Syrian Army (FSA) – i.e. the “moderate Syrian rebels” of political legend – to “surprise” the Islamic State with a “coordinated assault supported from the air.” As with Obama, she also had a daydream about the white-hat Syrian rebels simultaneously overthrowing the regime of Bashar Assad in Damascus.
Part of this plan involved leaning on Qatar and Saudi Arabia to stop providing “clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
The emails show that Hillary believes that there can honestly be two stands on the same issue—one private and one public, according to the Washington Examiner.
In April 2013, Clinton said lawmakers should conceal the policy-making process from voters because the backroom deals it entails could make them “nervous.”
“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 said during a speech. . .
One of those issues is the proposed Syrian no-fly zone. In public, Hillary has said it would be wise, but in private, she said it could cause unacceptable civilian casualties.
During the second presidential debate Sunday evening, Clinton expressed her support for a no-fly zone over parts of Syria as an approach to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in that country.
However, in a speech paid for by Goldman Sachs in June 2013, Clinton expressed skepticism that the tactic could ever work in Syria.
“But the idea that we would have like a no fly zone—Syria, of course, did have when it started the fourth biggest Army in the world. It had very sophisticated air defense systems. They’re getting more sophisticated thanks to Russian imports,” Clinton said, according to leaked speech excerpts.
There will be much more of interest in the Wikileaks emails.
