Leaks reveal Clinton's Wall Street speeches

WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton told bankers in private that she favored "open trade and open borders" and said Wall Street executives were best-positioned to help overhaul the U.S. financial sector, according to transcripts of her private, paid speeches leaked Friday.

Those paid speeches also portray Clinton as being well aware of the dangers of computer hacking and penetration, saying that diplomats would be "totally vulnerable" without extreme precautions -- despite the FBI's conclusion that Clinton was a technophobe unsophisticated in the use of computers.

The Clinton campaign declined to vouch for the authenticity of the 2,000 private emails published Friday by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, after what President Barack Obama's administration says was a Russian intrusion that obtained the data. The campaign has suggested the emails might be fake, though they apparently were pirated during the same hacking that captured emails whose release led to the resignation in July of Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

"We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange, who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton," campaign spokesman Glen Caplin said in a prepared statement, referring to the founder of WikiLeaks. Previous releases have "already proven the warnings of top national security officials that documents can be faked as part of a sophisticated Russian misinformation campaign."

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Clinton had refused to release transcripts of the speeches, despite repeated calls to do so by her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The speeches were made to private audiences that collectively paid her at least $26.1 million in speaking fees.

The excerpts were included in emails exchanged among members of her political staff, including campaign chairman John Podesta, whose email account was hacked. The WikiLeaks organization posted what it said were thousands of Podesta's emails. It wasn't immediately clear who had hacked Podesta's emails, though the breach appeared to cover years of messages, some sent as recently as last month.

Among the emails was a compilation of excerpts from Clinton's paid speeches in 2013 and 2014. One excerpt put Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she has retreated on significantly during the 2016 election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her "dream" is "a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders" and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America "would mean for everybody in this room."

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has made opposition to trade deals a cornerstone of his campaign.

Podesta posted a series of tweets Friday night, calling the disclosures a Russian hack and raising questions about whether some of the documents could have been altered.

"I'm not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump," Podesta wrote. "Don't have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked."

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement, "It's not hard to see why she fought so hard to keep her transcripts of speeches to Wall Street banks paying her millions of dollars secret."

The emails released Friday included exchanges between Podesta and other Clinton insiders, including campaign manager Robby Mook. Most were routine, including drafts of Clinton speeches, suggested talking points for campaign surrogates and suggested tweets to be sent out from Clinton's account.

The excerpts include quotes from an October 2013 speech at an event sponsored by Goldman Sachs, in which Clinton conceded that presidential candidates need the financial backing of Wall Street to mount a competitive national campaign.

"Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it," Clinton said. "New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it's also our economic center. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy."

In the same speech, Clinton also was deferential to the New York finance industry, exhorting wealthy donors to use their political clout for patriotic rather than personal benefit.

"Part of the problem with the political situation, too, is that there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives," she said.

She also spoke of the need to include Wall Street perspectives in a financial overhaul.

"The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry," Clinton said.

Three years after her speech, her campaign and pro-Clinton super PACs have raised nearly $59 million from financial investors, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Clinton appears to question the importance of the divestment of assets that financial executives often undertake to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest when they enter government service.

"You know, the divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes very onerous and unnecessary," she said.

hacking concerns

One of the newly released emails includes transcripts of numerous private remarks Clinton made about the dangers of being a victim of hacking and the backwardness of the State Department bureaucracy in adopting new technology.

Clinton noted with concern that America's global rivals, particularly Russia and China, constantly sought to penetrate the communications of U.S. diplomats while she was secretary of state.

"Every time I went to countries like China or Russia, I mean, we couldn't take our computers, 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. So we would take the batteries out, we'd leave them on the plane," Clinton said in Aug. 28, 2014, remarks.

She also told the story about removing her cellphone batteries at a Goldman Sachs event on Oct. 29, 2013.

"We didn't do that because we thought it would be fun to tell somebody about. We did it because we knew that we were all targets and that we would be totally vulnerable," Clinton said.

The excerpts contrast with the portrait of Clinton drawn in documents released by the FBI of its investigation into her use of private email servers while she was secretary of state.

One of those documents quotes Clinton's senior aide, Cheryl Mills, as telling the FBI that upon becoming secretary of state in January 2009, "Clinton was not computer savvy and thus was not accustomed to using a computer, so efforts were made to try to figure out a system that would allow Clinton to operate as she did before [the State Department]." The document said Clinton did not even have a computer in her State Department office.

At another event, Clinton said she pushed a backward bureaucracy into the modern era in terms of usage of modern communications.

"You know, when Colin Powell showed up as secretary of state in 2001, most State Department employees still didn't even have computers on their desks. When I got there they were not mostly permitted to have hand-held devices," Clinton said Jan. 6, 2014, at an event in Boca Raton, Fla., sponsored by General Electric. "I mean, so you're thinking how do we operate in this new environment dominated by technology, globalizing forces? We have to change, and I can't expect people to change if I don't try to model it and lead it."

In an April 2014 speech to JPMorgan, she denounced National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden for going abroad, saying, "if he really cared about raising some of these issues and stayed right here in the United States, there's a lot of whistleblower protections."

But she told her audience that her time in the public eye left her sympathetic to privacy concerns.

"As somebody who has had my privacy scrutinized and violated for decades, I'm all for privacy, believe me," she said.

The passages also show nuance. When Clinton describes herself as "far removed" from average Americans and their finances, she had just finished describing her growing appreciation for how "anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged." And she reminds the audience that her father "loved to complain about big business and big government."

Speaking on international affairs, Clinton's comments were largely in line with her positions as secretary of state, if sometimes more blunt.

"The Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on Earth over the course of the last 30 years," she told the Jewish United Fund at a 2013 dinner.

Asked in a June interview if her paid speeches were self-defeating, given the anger over income inequality, Clinton responded that her predecessors as secretary of state had given paid speeches, too.

"I actually think it makes sense," she said. "Because a lot of people know you have a front-row seat in watching what's going on in the world."

Information for this article was contributed by Tim Johnson of The Washington Post; by Lisa Lerer, Michael Biesecker, Chad Day, Jeff Horwitz, Ted Bridis and Stephen Braun of The Associated Press; by Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg News; and by Amy Chozick, Nicholas Confessore and Michael Barbaro of The New York Times.

A Section on 10/09/2016