I wish they hadn’t waited until the last minute. That wasn’t very strategic of them.
These should have been trickling out every 2 days in October so that the voters would have time to contemplate them — and so that the media couldn’t sit on them until after the election.
On the day before the election, WikiLeaks released the 34th email batch of its Podesta Emails series. This latest leak included 888 emails written to or from Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chairman John Podesta.
Much of the latest emails’ content repeats from previous WikiLeaks releases, because entire email threads are not always released at once.
In one leaked email, dated August 21, 2015 and with the subject line “Needy Latinos and 1 easy call,” John Podesta writes to Hillary Clinton, “A few calls you might consider making.”
Podesta then names Fedrico Pena, Bill Richardson and South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges. The first two are presumably the “needy Latinos.”
Pena, former secretary of the US Department of Transportation under President Bill Clinton, was covered extensively in the email. Podesta goes on to say that Pena’s “Cabinet stints ripped up his family,” and that Pena “gave everything to the cause and no time to his family, he went through a messy divorce in the late 90’s and was left really down and felt like no one reached out to him then so he felt pretty cut off from Clinton World.”
Podesta, passing along all of this information after speaking with former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, gives Clinton four steps in completing a call with Pena, writing, “1) you really enjoyed seeing Cindy at the Chambers event and appreciate her support. 2) ask him how he’s been doing 3) ask about his views on the race and what she should be doing in Colorado 4) ask that he consider publicly supporting you.”
On Richardson, a former governor of New Mexico and US Ambassador to the UN under President Clinton, Podesta writes that a recent phone call between Bill Clinton and Richardson went well, “not withstanding the fact that [Richardson] can be a dick.”
“He had a good conversation with the President and has been good in his interviews since,” Podesta says of Richardson, telling Hillary that a call to Richardson ahead of his upcoming appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press might seal an endorsement.