WikiLeaks has Clinton ally’s alleged email knocking MoveOn

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, October 11, 2016

By Ben Brody

Bloomberg

WikiLeaks posted almost 1,200 more emails Tuesday that it said were hacked from the personal account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, including one showing a Clinton ally seeking to enlist supporters to squelch dissent from a leading liberal group.

In a 2014 email, longtime Clinton aide Philippe Reines is seen reacting to a news report that MoveOn was preparing to spend $1 million to draft Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts into the presidential race.

“Making noise is one thing,” Reines wrote to John Podesta, who’s now chairman of Clinton’s campaign, according to the WikiLeaks release. “Spending seven figures is another. She voted for the war, you punished her already, get over it. I don’t know who funds them, but don’t we have Hollywood friends with ties to MoveOn who can tell them to cool it?”

Reines also sent the email to Jake Sullivan, who’s now a top policy adviser to the campaign, and Robby Mook, who’s now the campaign manager, according to WikiLeaks.

The Clinton campaign has blamed the leaks of Democratic groups’ documents on Russia — as have U.S. intelligence agencies — and has refused to confirm the authenticity of the emails. Podesta seemed to suggest last week that the communications may have been altered. More than 5,300 purported messages to and from his email account have been posted since Friday.

“It should concern every American that Russia is willing to engage in such hostile acts in order to help Donald Trump become President of the United States,” the Clinton campaign said in a statement in response to a release of documents on Monday.

The campaign and Reines, who advises Clinton but isn’t formally working on her White House bid, didn’t respond to calls and emails seeking comment Tuesday. MoveOn had no comment.

Warren would eventually rebuff efforts to get her into the presidential race, but she let the primary battle between Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders play out before getting behind Clinton.

Other emails show how Clinton’s aides tried to court Warren and her wing of the party, which was demanding further restrictions on Wall Street banking even before Clinton announced her presidential run in April 2015.

In January of that year, Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin wrote other top officials about a meeting he’d held with a Warren adviser.

“He was intently focused on personnel issues, laid out a detailed case against the Bob Rubin school of Democratic policy makers, was very critical of the Obama administration’s choices, and explained at length the opposition to Antonio Weiss,” Schwerin wrote.

Some liberals who say Wall Street has gained too much influence in Democratic circles have opposed Rubin, who was Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, because of his work for Citigroup. Warren would later successfully block Weiss, a Treasury official who had worked as an investment banker for Lazard Ltd., from a promotion at the department.

Schwerin also wrote that Warren’s aide “did express some flexibility on Glass-Steagall, said too big too fail is the bigger issue.” Aides to Warren didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The WikiLeaks release on Monday showed the Clinton campaign debating whether the candidate should join Warren in calling for the return of Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law barring commercial banks from underwriting corporate securities. Clinton didn’t join in the end, but she has pledged to defend the Dodd-Frank law and other Wall Street regulations.

The drip-drip of purported emails comes as Clinton has begun to establish a bigger polling lead over Republican rival Donald Trump, who is facing the fallout from the release of a 2005 tape in which he bragged about groping women. Trump and his allies have pounced on the content of the messages posted by WikiLeaks to paint Clinton as a typical untrustworthy politician.

The Trump video, which also emerged Friday, has prompted a number of prominent Republicans to distance themselves from Trump as the rift in the party deepens, including House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Among other disclosures in the latest batch of purported Clinton campaign emails:

• Internal factions, spats and worries about leaks, which helped doom Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, resurfaced as her current campaign took shape.”You got to stop this,” Podesta said in a March 2015 rebuke to Reines after he implied someone had disclosed a scheduling detail to the press. “If someone wanted to leak juicy tidbits, they have a lot more to work with than our press planning. If we are going to be at each others throats before we start, we are going nowhere.” Reines responded with a lengthy denunciation of Podesta’s “unfair” reaction. “I agree though that being at each others’ throats will get us nowhere, and if you want me to keep it to myself, ok, done,” he wrote.

• Clinton was “not in same place” as her campaign’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri on using the handover of Clinton’s private email server to the FBI “as an opportunity for her to be viewed as having take a big step to deal with the email problem,” Palmieri wrote in August 2015. It’s not clear what Clinton objected to.

• In January 2015, Mook advocated against delaying a proposed meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, viewed at the time as a possible challenger for the nomination. “I worry the later we wait the more possibility there is that he’ll get offended,” Mook wrote. “I’d rather have it leak and him feel respected than delay and he feel more pressure to run.”

• Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, who previously worked at the Justice Department appeared to have kept in touch with former colleagues there while her use of a private email server was under investigation. Emails from Fallon indicated that he was alerted when the department made a court filing in a case seeking release of Clinton’s messages and that “DOJ folks inform me there is a status hearing in the case this morning.” A Trump campaign communications adviser said Tuesday that the emails show “a level of collusion which calls into question the entire investigation into her private server.” But both of those alerts involved public information that would be available to anyone consulting the court’s docket.