Saturday, October 8, 2016

Bombshell: WikiLeaks Claims Release of Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Speeches

She attacked Bernie Sanders' supporters as a "basket of losers."

She sure has a lot of despised baskets of Americans. This is the real scandal, not Donald Trump's "lewd" locker room chatter.



At WSJ, "WikiLeaks Claims Clinton Speech Text":
The organization WikiLeaks on Friday released what it claimed to be Clinton campaign email correspondence revealing excerpts from paid speeches that Hillary Clinton gave in recent years, before her presidential bid.

A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to verify whether the documents are authentic.

The emails appear to show Mrs. Clinton taking a tone in private that is more favorable to free trade and to banks than she has often taken on the campaign trail. The emails also suggest she was aware of security concerns regarding electronic devices, which could feed into criticism that Mrs. Clinton was careless with national secrets when she was secretary of state.

The release marks the latest time WikiLeaks has inserted itself into this year’s presidential campaign, and it came the same day the U.S. intelligence community accused the Russian government of trying to interfere in the U.S. elections by purposefully leaking emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and other entities. The intelligence agencies alleged the hacks were directed by the most senior officials in the Russian government, with WikiLeaks one of the entities whose methods are consistent with those of a Russia-directed effort.

“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,” said Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin in a statement. “We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, whose emails were WikiLeaks’s primary target, sent several tweets on the subject late Friday.

“I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.” He added that the organization’s claim on its website that he owns the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm headed by his brother, Tony, was “completely false.”

Some of the documents in the most recent WikiLeaks release are similar in their design to documents released in recent days by DCLeaks.com, another entity that the U.S. intelligence community says has published documents stolen by the Russian government. The documents have proven difficult to authenticate.

In the two years between her time at the State Department and her presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton earned millions on the paid speech circuit, including $4.1 million from financial institutions, according to financial disclosures. This became an issue during Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign when Sen. Bernie Sanders called for her to release the speech transcripts, particularly for speeches she gave to major financial firms. At the time, Mrs. Clinton said she would “look into” releasing the transcripts but hasn’t provided them.

This past January, the WikiLeaks documents suggest, Clinton campaign research director Tony Carrk emailed excerpts of Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to senior campaign officials, including Mr. Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri, calling them the “flags from HRC’s paid speeches.”

Mr. Carrk said he had obtained the transcripts from “HWA,” an apparent reference to the Harry Walker Agency, which arranged Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches after she left the State Department in 2013.

“I put some highlights below,” Mr. Carrk wrote. “There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy.”

The more than 80 pages of transcript excerpts appear to have been broken down by a campaign official into sections titled “Awkward,” “Benghazi,” “Email,” and “Helping Corporations,” among others.

The excerpts appear to show Mrs. Clinton taking a more friendly attitude toward financial firms than she does on the campaign trail. At a 2013 speech at a Goldman Sachs event, she is shown lamenting that in Washington, “There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.” In another speech at a Goldman event, she told the room, “You are the smartest people.”

At another Goldman Sachs speech, discussing how to avoid another financial crisis, she said the “politicizing” of the financial crisis could have been avoided with greater transparency, and told the bankers, “You guys help us figure it out and let’s make sure that we do it right this time.” A year later, at a speech paid for by Deutsche Bank, she said that some element of financial reform “really has to come from the industry itself.”

On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton has issued a suite of proposals aimed at curbing some Wall Street risk-taking and holding more individuals accountable for misconduct...
More.
Posted by AmPowerBlog at 12:30 PM
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