The switch to daylight savings time did not deter Wikileaks from releasing yet another batch of hacked emails from a top aide to Hillary Clinton, as time grows short for a major bombshell to emerge against the Democratic Party's nominee for President in these email releases.
Here is some of what I found in the new emails:
1. Podesta threatens to quit the Clinton campaign. Last November, John Podesta threatened to quit his post with the Clinton campaign, in a dispute over his brother, and whether Tony Podesta had contributed as much money as he should have to the effort. Tangled up in this was his brother's ex-wife - who had given a lot of money. That mention seemed to light a fuse under Podesta. "Let them know that if I ever hear a whisper of that again, I'll quit." It's one of the few times in all of these emails that Podesta shows any serious note of aggravation or anger.
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Credit: Jamie Dupree
2. Rahm Emanuel had his own private email as well. Not only did Hillary Clinton have her own email domain, but so too did the Mayor of Chicago, former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "'Rahmemail.com': WikiLeaks shows Emanuel's use of personal domain," blared the headline in the Chicago Tribune, as the Mayor exchanged several emails with Podesta about the Clinton campaign. There's nothing illegal about it, but it of course raises questions about whether Emanuel has been going around his government email. One note on this - if you dig into Wikileaks, that email address was actually first released back on October 24. But it took until just the past two days for someone to stumble on it, in the blitz of all these Podesta emails.
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Credit: Jamie Dupree
3. John Podesta and UFO's. Forget about "Spirit Cooking" and a number of other things - John Podesta had an interest in UFO's, and a lot of people wanted him to talk about that. In an email out Sunday morning, campaign spokesman Nick Merrill volunteers to reject an inquiry from Mother Jones magazine about a tweet that Podesta made on UFO's. "John would you likely me to politely decline? Or say that our non-campaign has a strict policy of not commenting on extraterrestrial activity?" Merrill wrote. Podesta got a lot of attention in February of 2015, when he tweeted that "my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the disclosure of the UFO files." It wasn't clear what files he was talking about, and that prompted this inquiry.
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Credit: Jamie Dupree
4. Still waiting for more on some interesting emails. Every day that Wikileaks drops a new batch of Podesta emails, I not only go through them, but I have a bunch of search terms that I look for. Specifically, I have a few emails that I would like to see more about; they are important ones. But oddly enough, none of those has surfaced again, after days and days of releases. As a reporter, that just sort of strikes me as odd. I'm not saying they are fakes, but when the subjects deal with the hacking of Podesta, the President sending emails to Clinton on her private email server and questions about how Hillary Clinton should address Bill Clinton's past conduct - and nothing else comes up on those specific email chains - it's puzzling to me.
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Credit: Jamie Dupree
5. Still hardly anything from Hillary Clinton. After weeks of emails from inside the Clinton Campaign, it is very obvious that Hillary Clinton used the telephone much more than email to discuss important political subjects. Just like her State Department emails, which often feature "pls print" or "ok," there are not many emails actually sent by Clinton to Podesta, and those that are sent by her are short and to the point. "Your memo reflects our discussion," she wrote in one released today. "Fyi" she said in another, sending along a link to a news story. "I think this is a great idea," she wrote in another. If there is damning information in this directly impacting Clinton, it hasn't really shown up - but some are still hoping.
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