Emails show Clinton campaign cynicism and spin

The latest supposedly hacked emails released by WikiLeaks have Hillary Clinton’s team doing damage control. Among other things, they show collusion between the Clinton campaign and several mainstream media outlets, including ABC News, CNBC, The New York Times and The Boston Globe.

Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist, said WikiLeaks only confirmed what many conservatives already believed.

“There’s no question that the media are playing a huge role in this election and they have for quite some time,” Hemingway said. “You can’t read the WikiLeaks without seeing a general environment of coziness and comfort with the Clinton campaign.”

One email from Clinton campaign manager Jennifer Palmieri to campaign chairman John Podesta discussed ways to brand Hillary Clinton for voters.

“Make a virtue of her longevity, refusal to go away, embrace all the ‘Clintonness,’ the 40 years in politics,” Palmieri wrote. “Maybe folks had Clinton fatigue at one point; now they are just seen as part of the fabric of America.”

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin said emails like that are why people have trouble believing Clinton is authentic.

“At the end of the day, she doesn’t know who she is,” Goodwin wrote. “This inauthenticity rap on her is very fair because she is so calculated about appealing to the middle class.”

Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, said the WikiLeaks documents didn’t surprise him.

“Everything we assumed or thought was the case a year and a half ago has now been confirmed by these emails,” he said.

What did surprise Schweizer was the degree to which Clinton delegated decisions to her staff.

“A lot of decisions are made without her input, and it just shows that this is a very staff-driven organization and this is not somebody who is, in a sense, calling the shots,” he said. “She’s relying on her staff [for] what to say, when to say it, and to set her policy”

One of Podesta’s emails reveals Clinton staffers’ pervasive attitude. In the hours after the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attack last December, Christopher Hayes at MSNBC tweeted, “NBC News now reporting a U.S. citizen named Sayeed Farook believed to be one of the people involved in the shooting.”

Podesta wrote to another staffer, “Better if a guy named Sayeed Farook was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.”

Gen. Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the Clinton team’s inability to say “terrorism” and “Islam” in the same sentence only strengthens our enemies.

“The people that are our enemies, they’re going to see that and they’re going to respond to that kind of stuff,” he said.

Democratic strategist Rich Fowler said he did not think the latest email revelations would affect the outcome of the election: “This email story seems to be conflated with all the other email stories coming from Hillary Clinton, so it’s not going to have the impact that folks think it will have in this upcoming election. That’s just the reality.”

Listen to Jim Henry’s report on Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails on the Oct. 18, 2016, episode of The World and Everything in It.