Amid the stream of accusations against Donald Trump, a massive revelation about his opponent has barely made headlines: Wikileaks has dropped nine rounds of emails belonging to longtime Hillary Clinton advisor John Podesta.
Highly questionable comments about race appear in the emails, occurring over nearly a decade.
Back in 2008, Team Clinton sought to use then-Senator Barack Obama’s ethnic background against him. An email from a polling firm discusses testing several lines of attack, including:
“Obama (owe-BAHM-uh)’s father was a Muslim and Obama grew up among Muslims in the world’s most populous Islamic country.”
At the first debate, Hillary Clinton rebuked Donald Trump for spreading birtherism and asked that he apologize to President Obama. One wonders when she will take her own advice and apologize for spreading the rumor that Obama was not American. This did not deter young voters from turning out in record numbers to vote for Obama in 2008.
Now that the Clinton campaign’s racist and false tactics have been exposed, it remains to be seen if young voters – social justice warriors in particular – will stay home on Election Day rather than vote for the Democrats’ deeply flawed candidate.
The campaign’s unsettling comments about race did not stop when President Obama was elected. Just last year, as the news of the San Bernardino shooting broke, John Podesta was displeased to learn that the perpetrator was a man named Sayeed Farook. Christopher Hayes of MSNBC reported the terrorist’s name. Podesta remarked, “Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk [sic] was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.”
The emails also show the Clinton campaign emailing with David Brock, head of a huge pro-Clinton SuperPAC. The candidate is not legally allowed to have any say in how SuperPAC money is spent. Campaigns are prohibited from communicating with SuperPACs in any way – but this is just another law that does not apply in Clintonland.
SuperPAC collusion is not the only potential illegal activity exposed by Wikileaks: The Clinton camp was in communication with the DOJ, and obtaining insider information from it, while the DOJ was investigating Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump and his surrogates are now implying that this calls the integrity of the entire investigation into question.
These revelations are surprising to many, but they are not the surprises that we predicted would arrive this October. Republicans, independents, and those who “felt the Bern” were all eager to read the transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches. As it turns out, the speeches did not contain anything particularly juicy.
She did tell bankers that she supports fracking as a means of achieving energy independence – a key GOP talking point that her mega-donors probably wouldn’t like. Yet in terms of “things Hillary Clinton has lied about,” the fracking one is pretty tame. For now, the most scandalous part of her Wall Street speeches is the massive sums she was paid to deliver them.
Communications reveal an outstanding level of collaboration between the media and the Clinton campaign. Reporters openly supported her, and some newspapers and networks would obtain the campaign’s permission before publishing stories about Hillary.
But to those who have been following the election across airwaves and on screens, this may come as no surprise at all.
