Hacked emails show Clinton campaign communicated with State, DOJ
The latest hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday, Oct. 2, show that officials from the State Department and the Department of Justice had communicated with the Clinton campaign about the former secretary’s private email server, they reveal the transcript of a speech Clinton gave to Deutsche Bank, in which Clinton talked of “hourly” hacking attempts on the State Department and personal email accounts.
Here are some of the highlights:
May 2015: DOJ’s Peter Kadzik gives a “heads up” to Podesta about Congressional testimony.
Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik tipped off Clinton’s campaign chair that the email issue was likely to be brought up at a House Judiciary Committee hearing where another DOJ official was slated to testify.
The head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Kadzik wrote in an email, was “[l]ikely to get questions on State Department emails.”
And he went on to note on what appeared to be timing of the State Department’s release of Clinton’s emails, “Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.”
Podesta forwarded the email to Palmieri, Fallon, Mills, Samuelson, Schake and Merrill with the message: “Additional chances for mischief.”
Donald Trump hit on the latest WikiLeaks document during a rally in Miami, Florida Wednesday, alleging that Kadzik was “a close associate of John Podesta.”
“The two met for dinner after Clinton testified about Benghazi and Podesta, who by the way said Hillary Clinton has terrible instincts on WikiLeaks described him as the man who kept him – Podesta – out of jail,” Trump said. “These are the people that want to run our country, folks. The spread of political agendas into the Justice Department – there’s never been a thing like this that has happened in our country’s history – is one of the saddest things that has happened to our country.”
Kadzik, who went to Georgetown Law School in the 1970s with Podesta, is also currently involved in the investigation into the newest emails (from a laptop belonging to Huma Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner) to surface that could be tied to Clinton’s private email server.
The Clinton campaign declined to comment on this or any of the emails stolen from Podesta’s account.
March 2015: State Department press aide coordinated with Clinton advisers on response to news story on private email server.
Ahead of the New York Times’ March 2015 report that broke open Clinton’s use of a private email account during her tenure as a secretary of state, a State Department aide gave Clinton advisers the agency’s official response to the newspaper.
In a March 2015 email, State Department press aide Lauren Ashley Hickey, writing from her personal gmail account, told Clinton spokesperson Nick Merrill and two other advisers that Jen Psaki -- who was, at the time, a State Department spokeswoman -- had “just cleared” a reply to the Times. Including the official statement in the email, Hickey also seemed to agree to an edit the campaign asked for, saying, “Yes on your point re records - done below.” The specific change requested is unclear from the email.
But State Department spokesman John Kirby explained Wednesday that the department’s attempts to “provide accurate information to the media” on their questions about Clinton and her time at the State Department has “at times required communicating with her representatives to ensure accuracy.”
November 2015: Clinton said in a speech to Deutsche Bank that there were hourly attempted hacks on personal emails during her tenure at the State Department.
In a transcript of Clinton’s speech to Deutsche Bank on October 7, 2014, the former secretary of state said there were attempted hacks against the State Department system and “personal accounts” on an “hourly” basis during her tenure at the State department.
“We were attacked every hour of every day and not only through the State Department system, but also through individual, personal accounts, just really fishing for anything they could get. And we knew it. And they knew we knew it,” Clinton said in the transcript.
The document was attached in a Nov. 2015 email from Dan Schwerin, Clinton’s director of speechwriting, to John Podesta and other campaign officials.
Of the speech itself, Schwerin said that he “wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats.”
“It’s definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it now, but it’s much more than most people would assume she was saying in paid speeches,” Schwerin noted.