Hillary's Emails: What She told the Wall Street Banks Behind Closed Doors

"We had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, he didn't believe in mortgages. So I lived that. 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."

That may have been what Hillary Clinton told a group of Wall Street bankers behind closed doors on February 4th, 2014. It is one of thousands of pages emails posted by Wikileaks late Friday.

The organization - headed by Julian Assange, who has made no secret of his dislike for Clinton - says the pages come from Clinton campaign chairman and longtime Democratic Party power John Podesta.

The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm - or deny - whether the emails are authentic.

One of the emails - from campaign research director Tony Carrk and addressed to several campaign officials including Podesta - purports to bea summary of potentially problematic excerpts from the speeches she gave to Wall Street bankers.

Those speeches were briefly an issue in her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders but have been made more of an issue by her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. She was paid $20 million for speeches in a three year period.

"Attached are the flags from HRC's speeches we have," Carrk writes. "There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy."

The first excerpt - from which the above quote comes - is printed under the headline: "CLINTON ADMITS SHE IS OUT OF TOUCH."

Ironically, in one speech in 2014, she talks about concerns about being hacked.

"At the State Department we were attacked every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate everything we had," she said. "And that was true across the U.S. Government."

And in another speech later that year, she said: "Every time I went to countries like China or Russia, we couldn't take our personal devices, we couldn't take anything off the plane because they're so good, they would penetrate them in a minute, less, a nanosecond."

Carrk's email also brings up other potentially troubling issues in the email such as "CLINTON TALKS ABOUT HOLDING WALL STREET ACCOUNTABLE ONLY FOR POLITICAL REASONS," "CLINTON SUGGESTS WALL STREET INSIDERS ARE WHAT IS NEEDED TO FIX WALL STREET," AND "CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY."

Other emails deal with issues ranging from Benghazi and trade to developing a rapid response website to an about to be released critical book to assessments of her opponents.

They also show the internal workings of the campaign and the fact that they saw perception problems related both to Clinton's speeches and to the Clinton Foundation.

"It's a little troubling that Goldman Sachs was selected for the foundation event," Campaign Manager Robby Mook wrote Podesta in May 2014.

In October 2015, as Bernie Sanders's campaign was gaining momentum, Caark sent an email to campaign staff with possible lines of attack against the Vermont Senator including on the issues of guns, LGBT, and ethanol. The email chain charts off with the subject line "SANDERS HITS" and evolves into "SANDERS TAR SANDS."

"Attached are some hits that could either be written or deployed during the next debate on Sanders," wrote Caark.

The disclosure from Wikileaks also includes several dealing with Benghazi.

"Who is the right person to raise a simple question of the audacity of members of congress asking others to release their emails when they don't Chief Strategist Joel Benenson wrote on March 15, 2015 as campaign officials discussed possible responses to the House committee investigating Benghazi to force Clinton to release her emails.

Months later, after Clinton spent 11 hours before the Benghazi committee, she was scheduled to give a speech to the annual Jefferson Jackson dinner in Iowa and her top advisers debated how much humor to include in her remarks.

"Is there some Apprentice joke to make?" asked campaign manager Robby Mook. "I never saw the show. I'm also the worst person to generate jokes."

Not everyone thought humor was the way to go.

"We own the high ground right now," wrote Benenson. "We should stay there."

Spokesman Jake Sullivan was of the same mind.

"I think HRC should stay above the committee - and especially above personal insults about it," he wrote. "She's got every inch of the high ground right now."

Wikileaks says that they have released 2,050 of more than 50,000 emails.

Photo Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.