In her secret speeches to Wall Street bankers, Hillary Clinton backed free trade and claimed politicians need leeway to make backroom deals — and may have disclosed classified details of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, according to the latest e-mails disclosed by WikiLeaks.
The e-mails also revealed that back in 2015, the Clinton campaign strategized about ways to elevate Donald Trump and other “extreme” Republicans — as “Pied Piper” candidates who would ultimately be so “unpalatable,” they’d help her win.
These “Pied Piper” candidates also included Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, according to the e-mail, sent to the Democratic National Committee on April 7, 2015.
The e-mail goes on to advise the DNC to “Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in the general election.”
Other e-mails disclosing the content of her speeches to bankers and business groups show Clinton revealing insider details of how bin Laden was targeted.
“I was in the small group that recommended to the president that he go after bin Laden,” Clinton said in a 2013 speech to a Toronto business organization.
She went on: “The amount of work that was required to get a strong-enough basis of information on which to plan took more than a decade . . . and then all of a sudden putting this matrix together and saying, ‘This guy used to protect bin Laden — he has just made a phone call. He said this in the phone call. We need to figure out where he is. Then we need to follow him.’
“And that is how we found this compound in Abbottabad [Pakistan]” — where a team of Navy SEALs took out bin Laden in May 2011.
WikiLeaks asked in a tweet if Clinton’s comments revealed too much about the bin Laden hunt by mentioning the phone calls.
It’s unclear whether Clinton’s story was classified. But what she said in Toronto varies from other accounts of how the United States determined bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Many reports of the time said the United States was tipped to bin Laden’s location by a Pakistani intelligence officer; other reports say Washington tracked him down with extensive surveillance.
The leaked trove of e-mails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s account also features damning evidence of major flip-flops and doublespeak from the former secretary of state.
The leaked Clinton comment that most captured the imagination of social media Saturday came from an April 2013 speech to the National Multifamily Housing Council. Clinton said politicians must balance “both a public and a private position” while making deals.
“It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be,” Clinton said. “But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the backroom discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”
The full transcripts of the speeches were not released. But WikiLeaks included a document of excerpts from the speeches that Clinton’s campaign flagged as potential political trouble.
In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, Clinton 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.”
Trump, her Republican opponent, has made opposition to trade deals that he says hurt American workers a cornerstone of his campaign.
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