Friday morning brought the 21st release of emails from a top aide to Hillary Clinton by the internet group Wikileaks, as the email missives opened another yet another electronic window into the inner workings of the Clinton campaign and her staffers, with just ten days left until the November elections.
This latest release may have finally given us some clues on the hacking of Podesta's email account, which reports say occurred on March 19, 2016.
This email released today shows that Podesta received an email about someone trying to sign into his account:
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Credit: Jamie Dupree
If you click on the bit.ly link at the bottom of that, you get a warning not to go any further:
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Credit: Jamie Dupree
"John needs to change his password immediately," one Clinton staffer writes.
We'll see what comes out of that.
Here's some of the other items that we have seen:
1. Clinton Foundation = Clinton, Inc. The releases by Wikileaks have spurred all sorts of damaging story lines about her time as Secretary of State and the work of the Clinton Foundation, giving the Trump team the chance to gleefully tweet out stories that hold headlines like, "Grifters-in-Chief." The stories about the Foundation have garnered the most attention from major newspapers and TV networks, raising a more questions mainly about Bill Clinton and money.
2. The Clinton team struggles with emails. The Podesta emails have clearly borne out something else - that the Clinton team never thought they would still be dealing with her email server as an issue this deep into the campaign. Some of the campaign members clearly thought they had been assured that "everything was taken care of," but it didn't really seem to turn out that way, as the email server story keeps chugging with 11 days left until the election.
3. Assange claims Clinton hack attack. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange - who is holed up in the Embassy of Ecuador in London - charged on Wednesday that the Clinton campaign "attacked our servers" in an effort to stop a further release of documents. Assange offered no proof of that. If you don't know the back story here, Assange has not been a fan of Clinton's since the original release of U.S. diplomatic cables by Wikileaks in 2010. Back then, Republicans were not fans of the Wikileaks move. Now, many see it differently in the context of the 2016 campaign.
4. Clinton team worries about campaign. Some of the more mundane emails that you read in the Podesta release by Wikileaks do get into the day-to-day worries of the Clinton Campaign. "She does need to rev it up," Podesta wrote in one May 2015 email chain about Clinton, which does note empty seats at her events. It bears out something that I've seen in both 2008 and 2016, Hillary Clinton does not boil over with excitement, and there are some issues with motivating voters. But fast forward to yesterday when Clinton drew 11,000 people in a joint appearance with Michelle Obama - the internal emails about that would probably show us some excitement.
5. No current emails. That brings me to this point again, and it's an important one. One week ago today, Wikileaks tweeted directly at me and hinted that there would be emails released which were dated after March 21, 2016. That has not happened, and frankly, I think they are probably bluffing. Wikileaks has only released 28 emails from March 21 - which seems to have been when hackers grabbed the Podesta emails from his gmail account.
Donald Trump has been more than happy to latch on to any new Wikileaks release in the past three weeks. Stay tuned for what happens between now and Election Day.
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