On Fox News Sunday, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta insisted that the Democratic nominee is perfectly consistent in her public and private views. Watch him try to claim, "there's nothing she hasn't said in private that she doesn't say in public." And, "she’s put forward the most aggressive Wall Street plan of any candidate," which draws an immediate and obvious follow-up from anchor Chris Wallace:
A paid Clinton operative asserting that she espouses the same views in front of the cameras and behind closed doors -- and that she's 'tough on Wall Street' -- has very little credibility when the candidate herself gave high-paid private speeches to Wall Street bankers in which she said exactly the opposite. And then worked very hard to hide those transcripts from voters. It's almost as if she's a say-anything, self-serving hypocrite. Team Clinton's spin on the Wikileaks release seems to be threefold: (1) Deny the bad parts, (2) question the authenticity of the content, (3) express outrage that the Russians are attempting to tip a US election. Step one failed in the clip above. Step two is questionable because email archiving systems make it easy to search for old emails. They should be able to find or not find the controversial bits relatively easily, and it's telling that they're not denying their authenticity. Step three is legitimate. Wikileaks is quite possibly a Russian front, and our intelligence community has just recently confirmed other examples of Kremlin subterfuge vis-a-vis this election. This should concern every American, even those who are happy that Clinton is taking the brunt of these attacks. If Putin were targeting the Republican candidate instead, as he may next time, these right-leaning voters would be understandably livid. The same principle applies here.
Nevertheless, this information is now in the public square, and some of it is newsworthy. One of Donald Trump's stronger moments in the first presidential debate involved hammering Clinton for talking out of both sides of her mouth on trade. And fact-checkers squealed when Mike Pence accused the Clinton ticket of favoring "open borders." As we noted on Friday, one of the hacked Wall Street transcripts Clinton was shielding from voters shows her advocating open trade and open borders -- both of which she is currently pretending to oppose:
BBC News - @HillaryClinton Wall St speeches published by Wikileaks advocate free trade & open borders https://t.co/Bgxgnyz11q
— Frances Townsend (@FranTownsend) October 9, 2016
Might Bernie Sanders have found her "open trade" remark useful during a hard-fought primary? Might the Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage out "open borders" throughout the spring, summer and fall? No wonder she refused to release these documents. She is right to call on Trump to produce his tax records, but in light of her Wall Street and Clinton Foundation opacity, she's throwing stones at glass houses. I'll leave you with Charles Krauthammer explaining why all of this would be a much bigger problem for her if not for all the Trump drama sucking up the news cycle oxygen (skip ahead to the three minute mark if you're uninterested in his analysis of Trump):
If not for the Trump/Republican crisis, Krauthammer says, "this would be utterly devastating." Trump has a massive national platform to force this issue tonight. He would also be very well served to note the ongoing implosion that has turned even Bill Clinton into a "leading Obamacare critic," as Senate Republicans are cheekily calling him, as well as the embarrassing and dangerous failures of Obama/Clinton foreign policy. To say nothing of the email scandal latest. Will he be prepared to prosecute these cases? There's a lot of material to work with.