WASHINGTON -- An aide to Bill Clinton worried that the former president would be found to have serious conflicts of interest if the Clinton Foundation adopted stricter operating guidelines, according to an email posted by WikiLeaks.
"WJC may have some real serious conflicts if we start to make too many rules," Justin Cooper, an adviser to Clinton after he left the White House, purportedly wrote, using the former president's initials. "It may be time to update some procedures but we can not ignore the nexus of WJC's life."
The note posted Friday on WikiLeaks is among more than 47,000 emails released so far from the personal account of John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. The campaign has blamed the Russian government for hacking attacks on Democratic organizations and individuals in an effort to sway the election and cautioned that some of the documents may be bogus or doctored.
Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and the former president declined to comment. An attorney for Cooper didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cooper's purported email was dated Nov. 17, 2011. It was a response to a message from Doug Band, another longtime Clinton aide, that was previously disclosed. Angered by Chelsea Clinton's efforts to rein in his own business dealings, Band recounted how he steered his company's corporate clients to give to the Clinton Foundation while also arranging lucrative paid speeches and consulting jobs for "Bill Clinton, Inc."
Chelsea Clinton -- whom Band in one email compared to a "spoiled brat kid" -- recruited an outside law firm to review the Clinton Foundation's governance and procedures.
Cooper played a supporting role in this year's debate over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. He helped maintain the server and answered questions about it at length before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in September. Other witnesses invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to testify.
Republican Donald Trump has attacked the Clinton Foundation for accepting money from foreign governments and said it was used by Bill and Hillary Clinton as a "pay-for-play" operation. Hillary Clinton has said the foundation did "a lot of life-saving work. I'm proud of the work that my husband started."
In another email released by WikiLeaks, a senior aide to Hillary Clinton privately dismissed FBI Director James Comey as "a bad choice" in October 2015,
Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri forwarded to colleagues a news article in which the FBI director suggested that crime could be rising because police officers were becoming less aggressive as a result of the "Ferguson effect," anti-police sentiment following unrest earlier that year in Ferguson, Mo. Comey was widely criticized over the remarks.
Palmieri wrote, "Get a big fat 'I told you so' on Comey being a bad choice." She sent the email to Podesta and to the private email address of someone who appeared to be White House spokesman Eric Schultz. Neither responded, and Palmieri did not appear to write further about the subject. Palmieri was the White House director of communications when Comey was appointed FBI director by President Barack Obama in September 2013.
The release of the email came days after Comey notified Congress that during an investigation of Clinton aide Huma Abedin's now-estranged husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, FBI agents found indications that a laptop used by Weiner contained some emails related to the FBI's earlier probe of Clinton's private computer server and emails. The disclosure roiled the presidential campaign, and last week Palmieri openly criticized Comey about the notification.
"By taking this highly unusual, unprecedented action this close to the election, he put himself in the middle of the campaign," Palmieri said of Comey.
Comey had announced in July that he was not recommending criminal charges in the investigation of Clinton's use of her private server, but the FBI director also said Clinton and her colleagues at the State Department were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."
The Palmieri email was among more than 2,000 messages newly published Thursday by WikiLeaks. The emails were hacked from Podesta's private account.
The U.S. government has said the Russian government was responsible, although WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said earlier in the day that no government or any other state parties had given the stolen emails to WikiLeaks.
Information for this article was contributed by Bill Allison and Ben Brody of Bloomberg News and by Stephen Braun and staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/05/2016