Donald Trump’s campaign manager said she hopes the Republican presidential nominee will read the hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager line-by-line during his speeches.
“If I’m Donald Trump today, I’m just going to stand at the podium and read from these emails to see how these Democrats and Hillary Clinton truly feel,” Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News Wednesday, the day after WikiLeaks dumped another batch of emails allegedly from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s account.
Conway said she is troubled by the idea that Democrats would stay with their party after the release of the emails, stating “I’d rather be the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. You talk loyalty, but loyalty can be blind.”
“The idea you’re going to have Democrats staying with Hillary Clinton after what’s been revealed in emails, the way they really truly feel about people, referring to Catholics, denigrating News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch because of his Catholic religion. What do all the Catholics out there feel about it?”
Staffers for then-Secretary of State Clinton appeared to ridicule “Conservative Catholicism” in a leaked 2011 email conversation, specifically targeting News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thompson.
“Ken Auletta’s latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the [Wall Street Journal], are raising their kids Catholic,” wrote John Halpin, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress in a 2011 email to current Clinton campaign staffers John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, according to documents released by WikiLeaks. Halpin has commented on what he claims are the religious roots of American progressivism. “Friggin’ Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus.”
“It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith,” Halpin argued. “They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backward gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”
Podesta served as president and CEO for the Center for American Progress until he resigned in 2011, although he still remains on the board. Podesta, a Roman Catholic who like Halpin attended the Jesuit Georgetown University, did not appear to respond to the email sent to him.
Jennifer Palmieri, current director of communications for the Clinton campaign, wrote back stating, “I imagine they think [Roman Catholicism] is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”
Conway is “disappointed” by the emails that appeared to suggest collusion between the Clinton campaign and the media. CNBC’s John Harwood appeared to send one email where he criticizes Trump after serving as moderator at one of the Republican debates last year. “I imagine that Obama feels some (sad) vindication at this demonstration of his years-long point about the opposition party veering off the rails,” he wrote. “I certainly am feeling that way with respect to how I questioned Trump at our debate.”
“If we had more complete coverage and less biased coverage, I do feel Mr. Trump would be able to get his message out in a way that would benefit the voters,” Conway said after being asked whether the email from Harwood is an indication of a wider problem in the media. “It is disappointing to read those emails and see that folks who you think aren’t giving us a fair shake truly aren’t giving us a fair shake, but there’s a reason that they’re cozying up to the Clinton folks. Listen, this cannot be — you can’t have a true, free democracy and a free and fair election … if they’re in the bag for the other team.”
