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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Clinton Urged to ‘Dump’ Emails as Scandal Broke

     (CN) - New emails released by Wikileaks raise suspicion about how the Clinton campaign handled the Democratic nominee's email server scandal when they learned of it, but also show staffers advocated transparency with the media when the scandal broke.
     The revelations shed light on a scandal that continues to rage, particularly in light of FBI director James Comey's letter to Congress stating that his agency is looking at emails related to Clinton's email scandal that were found on disgraced former New York congressman Anthony Weiner's computer.
     Weiner is married to Clinton top aide Huma Abedin, and apparently law enforcement found emails possibly relevant to the Clinton case when they were investigating Weiner over sexually explicit text messages sent to an underage girl.
     On Tuesday, Wikileaks unearthed how Clinton's allies dealt with the potential scandal as it broke in real time.
     "We are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later," Clinton campaign chair John Podesta wrote on March 2, 2015, as Hillary Clinton's email scandal broke.
     Podesta's emails were hacked and made available to Wikileaks, which has elected to release them in approximately 2,000-email tranches every day for the past several weeks.
     It is unclear whether Podesta is referring to the need to scrub Clinton's server in order to bury damning evidence, or to get ready to "dump" them to the FBI and Justice Department. It's an ambiguous term that both sides have interpreted to suit their ideological tastes.
     Another email shows how the entire Clinton camp began strategizing about how to massage the public and the media in the wake of the email scandal.
     The New York Times sent Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill a list of questions on March 17, 2015, that centered on Clinton's aides' use of private emails as well.
     "We're preparing a story on how Mrs. Clinton's top advisers at the State Department used their private email accounts for some of their email correspondences with her," Times reporter Mike Schmidt wrote.
     The aides included the aforementioned Abedin, along with Cheryl Mills, Phillipe Reins, Jake Sullivan and Monica Haley — all close associates of Clinton's, most of whom continue to be involved in her campaign and feature prominently in the Wikileaks email dump.
     Reines, who was named as a potential subject for the New York Times story, participated in an email chain where he defended his own and Clinton's practices.
     "There is nothing wrong with anyone having personal email addresses or her emailing someone's private account or vice versa," he wrote. "It was her practice, as well as ours, to conduct work on the .gov system. In those cases we didn't could have been for any reason, including State.gov being down."
     Many of the staffers on the chain expressed consternation only 300 emails were leaked to the New York Times and could have represented cherry-picking by someone on the Benghazi Committee.
     "If Gowdy is leaking this fact, we have to just put the emails out and say, those are they," Jake Sullivan, also named as a potential subject of the New York Times story, wrote.
     Interestingly, the staffers did not advocate a secretive approach. Instead, they favored releasing the 300 emails to the press to let them speak for themselves.
     "We should put out the 300," Sullivan wrote.

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