Days before Hillary Clinton broke with the Obama administration by announcing her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a senior adviser to her campaign warned that such a move would be a “huge flip flop,” according to a hacked email published by WikiLeaks.
Veteran Democratic campaign operative Ron Klain emailed Clinton’s top policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, on Oct. 3, 2015, to recommend that she stick with supporting the 12-nation trade agreement that would be finalized in Atlanta later that week.
“FWIW, she has to be for TPP. She called it the ‘gold standard’ of trade agreements,” Klain advised. “I think opposing that would be a huge flip flop.”
He added, “She can say that as president she would work to change it. She can that it can be better. But I think she should support it.”
Sullivan responded by agreeing with Klain, but noted that “others (including on this email!) feel strongly to the contrary.”
Four days later, in an interview with PBS’s Judy Woodruff, Clinton said she was “not in favor” of the trade deal because of her concern that it wouldn’t “meet the high bar” she had set in terms of having an agreement “that would create good American jobs, raise wages and advance our national security.”
Klain’s explicit acknowledgement that opposing TPP would mark a “huge flip flop” from Clinton is in stark contrast to what the former secretary of state and her campaign aides have since said when confronted about her evolution on trade.
Clinton denied describing the trade deal as the “gold standard” of trade agreements when Donald Trump brought it up during the first presidential debate last month, telling her Republican opponent that his claim was “not accurate.” And her campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, followed suit in a round of interviews the following morning.
“I think what happened, Wolf [Blitzer], was at the time that she made those comments that you just played, that deal was still being worked on, and she was expressing her hope that the deal would live up to being the gold standard,” Fallon said, to which the CNN anchor responded: “She didn’t say ‘hope’ in that statement.”
In addition to Klain’s assessment, the fact-checking site Politifact determined in 2015, after reviewing Clinton’s previous remarks about TPP, that her “reversal” on the trade deal was a “full flop.”
