‘Take the Money!!’ and other highlights from the Podesta email leak.

Throughout the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s campaign presented her as a crusading reformer who would take on powerful corporate interests and curb the role of big money in American politics.

But the recent WikiLeaks dump of campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails offers revealing snapshots that tell a somewhat different story. Top aides plot to “scare our people into giving bigger sums.” They debate whether to take cash from registered foreign agents: “Take the money!!” one senior campaign official advises. A top corporate lobbyist, pressed to “hit up” his clients for Clinton campaign coffers, asks for high-level help to advance one of those client’s interests. And there are new details about the overseas cash that rolled into the Clinton Foundation — including a $12 million commitment from the king of Morocco that Hillary Clinton personally helped facilitate.

The emails also disclose just how nervous top Clinton advisers were that Vice President Joe Biden might get into the race (Podesta himself was convinced he was getting in.) And they fretted about their own candidate’s limitations. “Almost no one knows better [than] me that her instincts can be terrible,” wrote one longtime Clinton aide.

The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm the authenticity of the emails, which the U.S. intelligence community has said were leaked as the result of a Russian cyberattack.

Here are six revealing highlights from the Podesta emails that provide a window into how the Clinton campaign operated when it thought (wrongly, as it turned out) nobody was looking.



By Michael Isikoff.
Full story at Yahoo News.