Hacked emails made public by WikiLeaks on Friday appear to include excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to financial firms.
The closed-door speeches were a point of fierce debate during the Democratic primary, during which Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) repeatedly urged the former secretary of State to release the transcripts.
{mosads}The emails, from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, have not been confirmed. Buzzfeed first reported they included speech excerpts.
According to the email dump, Clinton research director Terry Carrk sent an email to Podesta and other senior Clinton staff discussing flagged “HRC’s paid speeches we have from [the Harry Walker Agency],” which arranged many of Clinton’s speaking appearances.
“There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy,” Carrk wrote.
There are few bombshells amongst the transcript excerpts, but there are a handful of politically dicey quotes.
Amongst the comments “flagged” by the Harry Walker Agency are statements by Clinton that she is “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class and that “you need both a public and a private position.”
“We had a solid middle class upbringing… And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it,” Clinton allegedly said during a speech to Goldman Sachs and BlackRock in 2014.
“Politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, all of the back room discussions and the deals, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position,” she allegedly said in a 2013 speech before the National Multi-Housing Council.
There are also instances where Clinton expresses awareness about security concerns at the State Department, particularly with Blackberries — which she famously used during her tenure as secretary of State.
In other speeches, she appeared favorable to both free trade pacts and the Keystone Pipeline.
Clinton has struggled with the perception that she is not “trustworthy,” as well as criticism from some Sanders supporters that she is too cozy with Wall Street.
The former secretary of State has vowed to expand Dodd-Frank, the financial reform legislation passed after the 2008 crisis, to large insurance companies and hedge funds, often called the “shadow banking” sector.
But despite the backing of Sanders, Clinton has struggled to win over some millennial backers of the Independent senator.
WikiLeaks also published a trove of stolen Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails on the eve of the party’s nominating convention in July. That leak exposed the breadth of the committee’s support for Clinton at the expense of Sanders — a bitter pill for many Sanders supporters that led to the resignation of former chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Earlier on Friday, the Intelligence community officials confirmed that Russia was behind the theft of the DNC emails.
WikiLeaks, which published the stolen Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails earlier this year, has a policy to not disclose where it obtains the information that it makes public.
Although it remains unclear exactly who provided the documents to WikiLeaks, security experts have long warned that Russian intelligence is capable of selectively doctoring emails that it disseminates. Some have raised concerns that WikiLeaks is acting as a bullhorn for Russian intelligence.
The DNC has not denied the authenticity of any of the emails published in that leak.