Tim Kaine dismissed newly leaked transcripts from Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to elite financial firms as illegitimate, saying he has “no way of knowing” whether the comments contained in the speeches are real.
“I have no way of knowing the accuracy of documents dumped by this hacking organization,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.
Transcripts from Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and the Brazilian bank Unibanco Itau were leaked on Friday when WikiLeaks published thousands of emails from the former secretary of state’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
Excerpts found in the leaked emails showed Clinton had said in one speech that her dream “is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders” and touted her separate policy prescriptions in private and public in another speech.
Asked whether Clinton had actually said such things and favors open borders, Kaine claimed the leaked emails were tied to Russian hackers and couldn’t be taken as “gospel truth.”
“But is it accurate?” Tapper pressed again.
“I have no way of knowing that. I have no way of knowing,” Kaine responded.
“Well you could ask her,” Tapper said of Clinton, to which Kaine admitted he had not yet done because “the documents are in the thousands.”
Tim Kaine struggles to answer a question on hacked emails https://t.co/oBUxrGAB59 #CNNSOTU https://t.co/hy8zsAnX7v— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 9, 2016
