7 ms·

Wikileaks has released some important things, but they should be embarrassed that they thought the personal emails of Hillary's campaign staff saying sometimes

Wikileaks has released some important things, but they should be embarrassed that they thought the personal emails of Hillary's campaign staff saying sometimes silly things to each other was at all newsworthy. It was sensational, sure, but it revealed nothing important or even interesting. Anyone who spends a moment considering the question would expect campaign operatives to gripe about their opponents in over the top terms, to use unthoughtful language and spitball dumb ideas to their boss. Turns out the Clinton campaign did these things. The DNC emails showing that they preferred a solid Member of the Democratic Party win the nomination over someone who has not spent decades supporting the party should surprise and upset no one. And without the context of seeing Trump's campaign staff's emails or the RNC's emails in a similar perspective, the release of so much pointless but unflattering material related to Hillary and the Democrats does a major disservice to the public.

mattnewton 10y ago
I disagree with you about the DNC emails, they go above and beyond preference into outright campaign strategy coordination and undermine the whole idea of the primary process. I think if they could have had and released the emails sooner the behavior could have been addressed and that would have been a service to Democrats and the public. It's awful medicine sure, but something has to wake the patient up. I have not read the subsequent email leaks so I don't have an opinion on whether they were worth releasing or not. For what it is worth, I think their effect on the election was overblown and people who distrusted Hillary would have continued to do so in the absence of such weak evidence.
- dsharlet 10y ago
  > I disagree with you about the DNC emails, they go above and beyond preference into outright campaign strategy coordination and undermine the whole idea of the primary process. What exactly do you think the primaries are? They are not official elections. The democratic party (and the republican party) exist to help the candidates they want to support get elected. Note the mere existence of superdelegates. Primaries are designed to allow people to have some influence on the party's choice (and to get the electorate feeling invested in the party's choice of candidate... obviously the DNC messed that up), but really, the primaries are designed to maximize exposure for the candidates to help them in the general election. Trump is the perfect example of why the parties want some control over who they lend their name to in the general election. I'm sure that the emails flying around the RNC while they had a chance of influencing Trump's election put the DNC to absolute shame. Bernie was not even a democrat at all prior to this election. Bernie has been an independent for his whole political career. He joined the democratic party just for this election, and he's now an independent again. It seems absurd to expect party support with that context. I think Bernie made a deliberate choice to run in the Democratic primary (despite not being a Democrat) to avoid the spoiler effect in the general election, knowing that it was unlikely he would get DNC support. I respect him a lot for that decision. Don't get me wrong, I would have been very happy if Bernie won (especially over Trump), but this idea that the DNC is a rotten institution that deserves an organizational death penalty for working with Clinton over Bernie is ridiculous.
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    I understand how the DNC has been in the past but that doesn't tell us how it should be in the future. Primaries are supposed to generate winning candidates, not lend support to people because of their longtime service to the party. Maybe you disagree, but I bet the majority of democrats do not. The vote matters because it is like a massive poll of who will energize the base the most. And the emails show the methodologies used weren't good. If we care about getting democratic candidates in the White House, we should care about fixing those methodologies.
  - xnull2guest 10y ago
    This is perfectly spot on. However, I'd argue that it took the DNC leaks for people en masse to understand this. People broadly thought that they had a legitimate say in the candidate promoted by the party affiliation. Today, people still haven't really figured out that there are very narrow ideological differences between the two parties that control the entire electoral process. It's very obvious, of course, but it takes things like "shocking" leaks that show the emperor is naked.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
feklar 10y ago
There was plenty of relevant info in those leaks, such as Obama's 2008 cabinet being chosen by a Citibank executive https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-r...
- cldellow 10y ago
  I mean, I guess, but (a) it's old news and (b) you could call him a Citibank executive, or you could call him the Chief of Staff in Bill Clinton's Treasury Department. That article mentions Froman's October 6, 2008 email. Here's an October 27, 2008 CBS story that talks about the role Froman was playing in the transition: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/whos-really-backing-barack-obama/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/whos-really-backing-barack-obama... Here's the Treasury Department's announcement of the staff change, including Froman as Chief of Staff: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CDIR-1997-06-04/pdf/CDIR-1997-06-04-DEPARTMENTS-13.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CDIR-1997-06-04/pdf/CDIR-1997-... I guess the new news is that we see a bit of how the sausage is made, but my assumption was always that the inner circle of advisors has a lot of clout in deciding who staffs the positions. I don't really see this email as damning one way or the other--what am I missing?
  - xnull2guest 10y ago
    > you could call him a Citibank executive, or you could call him the Chief of Staff in Bill Clinton's Treasury Department You could point to a revolving door of administration between the private and public sector, along with public-private partnerships that launder would-be-illegal acts between public and private sectors. It's a pretty big deal to have anyone besides a president elect choose their cabinet, much less an oligarchic figure.
ovibos 10y ago
Regardless of how (in)significant you think the material they release is, there's no such thing as too much transparency.
- Mikeb85 10y ago
  This 100x. Either the US is a democracy or it isn't.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > there's no such thing as too much transparency Should military plans be transparent? Your private health records? Rape victims' names? Should the President be able to receive confidential advice - if not, they may receive much less good advice and make worse decisions. EDIT: Reworded it to remove the hyperbole
  - dpc59 10y ago
    If everyone's military plans were transparent maybe we'd have a chance for world peace.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    > Should military plans be transparent? Yes when they contradict lies told to the people to help sell a war. Secrecy is a privilege that officials need to earn. In the US there is widespread abuse of power when officials make unflattering information top secret so it won't be released to the public. That's what the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs showed us. Obviously some things should be kept secret, but in the US we have way too much government secrecy and it's used as a tool to help officials abuse power.
colordrops 10y ago
It's really bizarre how your comment has made it to the top of this thread, considering that it seems that the prevailing opinion here on HN is supportive of wikileaks. Your claim that the leaks are not newsworthy is absurd in the extreme, and your judgement is in question. There are hundreds of items of greater interest and importance in those mails than in a good portion of news stories published by most major news outlets. You are either grossly misinformed or purposefully misleading readers.
- revelation 10y ago
  The sentiment seems to have switched ever since they released any democrats material. It's the result of the two party system, where "if this isn't helping my party it must be because you are against me" thinking trumps any logical thought. I don't care for either color of political party, so I can appreciate cryptographically authenticated information leaks for what they are.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    > "if this isn't helping my party it must be because you are against me" thinking trumps any logical thought. Well put. Seemingly party loyalists are so blind to the idea that someone could actually care about principles (like transparency) that everything is a sinister plot against their faultless leader.
- 75j 10y ago
  It is bizarre. GP is, as you said, "either grossly misinformed or purposefully misleading readers". There is plainly illegal activity in those emails, and massive evidence of electoral fraud. But whatever, it was the blue team that did it, so they get a pass. This is why it's actually good that Trump was elected. Now suddenly everyone cares again about mass deportation, war crimes, lobbying, etc. Now that we have an out-of-the-closet fascist as president, legislation like the 2012 NDAA doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore does it blue team?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sdegutis 10y ago
I'm not sure if this is the same group of emails you talked about, but at the very least they admitted to a conspiracy to try to incite a "revolution" within the Catholic Church using pseudo-Catholic lay organizations with morally progressive agendas. That doesn't seem like a small thing.
- hackuser 10y ago
  That is not true; it's a wild exaggeration, part of the misinformation campaign. Whatever we may think politically, we all can agree that we don't need more of that!
  - generic_user 10y ago
    Its a very serious intrusion that was denounced by the by American Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz and others. The front organisations are real and the intent of starting a 'Catholic Spring' was descussed by Podesta and other high ranking DNC officials.
    - xnull2guest 10y ago
      https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6293 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6293 It's pretty incredible how casually members of the US government and party officials invoke the concept of galvanizing revolutionary movements. There's a concept within the US government that "it's better to convince than to conquer" but there's been a growing awareness and resistance to the emotional abuse that comes from the exhausting onslaught of ideological infiltration and astroturfed revolutionary appeal.
      - generic_user 10y ago
        The US has been involved in 'Color Revolutions' for a long time. There is evidence that Ukrainian revolution was in part aided by US and EU. George Soros Is also a big player in financing NGOs that work to establish phony social movements. Both Hillary and the DNC are connected to Soros Open Society Foundations. Soros is also funding BLM and other groups that are active in the protests/riots going on.
grandalf 10y ago
> they should be embarrassed I think the people who wrote some of those horrible and immature emails should be embarrassed. Why must we respect authority figures when they (clearly) have not earned it. There were so many minor things in those emails that reveal just what kind of people seek power. Disgusting.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  Yeah there was no big smoking gun, no lizard people, but there was a lot of shady deals. And most of all, I find interesting is, what wasn't there - not a lot of concern for regular people. Not a lot of "yeah we should figure out how to reach out to folks struggling with finding work, inner cities have more crime than expected we should find a way to help there.." But there was a lot of "let's take this angle, let's paint Bernie as a atheist, they'll hate him then". One illustrative example of the email about Theano and its relationship to the Clinton Foundation. Also apparently Chelsea started digging too much and at some point was under the illusion that the charity was just that, a charity. She had to be reminded how things really worked and such. And anyone who thinks Saudi Arabia is donating money to CF cure AIDS is deluded. And of course, it had to be followed through with threats to blackmail her: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/52046 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/52046
  - dmode 10y ago
    This is extremely naive. These guys are professional marketers and they are doing a job. When you build a product do you really think house best can I help my customer or how can optimize to get the best click or get the best conversion or get the best retention?
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      > When you build a product do you really think house best can I help my customer This might be a surprise but yes I do! I worked for a tech company which survived and did well for 20+ some years and the reason is because they thought and cared what the customer wanted and always put them first, even at the detriment of yearly revenue. It turns out we didn't need sales people, MBAs or much marketing either, customers were marking for us. I am bit saddened that you think this is "this is extremely naive".
generic_user 10y ago
Donna Brazile was booted from CNN for rigging the national debate. Multiple people had to resign from the DNC for sending political agitators to Trump rallies to provoke violent confrontations. Journalists across all of the mainstream media outlets were coordinating stories with the DNC and gave editorial control to the John Podesta. Those are some seriously disturbing and undemocratic acts that We should all be appalled by. Do not let your partisanship distort your vision. The things that were exposed by Wikileaks are what destroys democracy.
- grandalf 10y ago
  Exactly. These are truly disturbing things that I'm still processing and am deeply troubled by. In my opinion, the worst is the deliberate undermining of the Democratic party by HRC's loyal henchpeople to help HRC win the primary unfairly. How can someone who doesn't respect the idea of a fair party primary respect the idea of the rule of law in general?
  - generic_user 10y ago
    There are so many horrifying revelations that its hard to keep track of them all. You had Debbie Wasserman Schultz rig the primary and resign in disgrace then immediately go to work on Hillary's campaign. Million dollar 'gifts' to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments while she was the secretary of state. It just goes on and on.
    - grandalf 10y ago
      Yes, I hope someday we learn the details of which of those things were actually illegal and which were not. Schultz being immediately re-hired with no contrition or acknowledgement of wrongdoing by HRC was bizarre, I'd have thought the press would have forced some sort of statement on the subject.
- xnull2guest 10y ago
  The incredible thing is that this type of coordination is not at all unusual. It's how the US media and propaganda system works. It's how stories from US narrative pervade all corners of US media simultaneously. Plenty of people in Washington think what happened to the DNC was unfair. Because that's the way our system works. The only outcry was against the DNC because only the DNC was disclosed as participating in it. There just simply haven't been a collection of leaks yet to "shock" the American public into understanding how coordinated the media is with US government narrative.
gozur88 10y ago
Those emails were quite a bit more serious than just political sausage-making. For one thing, they contained evidence of blatantly illegal behavior, i.e. the coordination of the campaign and "independent" groups. This is particularly noteworthy because of the hypocrisy involved. Clinton has put a lot of effort into vilifying Citizens United - she was calling for more restrictive campaign laws while at the same time breaking the ones that pass constitutional muster.

mattnewton 10y ago

I disagree with you about the DNC emails, they go above and beyond preference into outright campaign strategy coordination and undermine the whole idea of the primary process. I think if they could have had and released the emails sooner the behavior could have been addressed and that would have been a service to Democrats and the public. It's awful medicine sure, but something has to wake the patient up. I have not read the subsequent email leaks so I don't have an opinion on whether they were worth releasing or not. For what it is worth, I think their effect on the election was overblown and people who distrusted Hillary would have continued to do so in the absence of such weak evidence.

dsharlet 10y ago
> I disagree with you about the DNC emails, they go above and beyond preference into outright campaign strategy coordination and undermine the whole idea of the primary process. What exactly do you think the primaries are? They are not official elections. The democratic party (and the republican party) exist to help the candidates they want to support get elected. Note the mere existence of superdelegates. Primaries are designed to allow people to have some influence on the party's choice (and to get the electorate feeling invested in the party's choice of candidate... obviously the DNC messed that up), but really, the primaries are designed to maximize exposure for the candidates to help them in the general election. Trump is the perfect example of why the parties want some control over who they lend their name to in the general election. I'm sure that the emails flying around the RNC while they had a chance of influencing Trump's election put the DNC to absolute shame. Bernie was not even a democrat at all prior to this election. Bernie has been an independent for his whole political career. He joined the democratic party just for this election, and he's now an independent again. It seems absurd to expect party support with that context. I think Bernie made a deliberate choice to run in the Democratic primary (despite not being a Democrat) to avoid the spoiler effect in the general election, knowing that it was unlikely he would get DNC support. I respect him a lot for that decision. Don't get me wrong, I would have been very happy if Bernie won (especially over Trump), but this idea that the DNC is a rotten institution that deserves an organizational death penalty for working with Clinton over Bernie is ridiculous.
- mattnewton 10y ago
  I understand how the DNC has been in the past but that doesn't tell us how it should be in the future. Primaries are supposed to generate winning candidates, not lend support to people because of their longtime service to the party. Maybe you disagree, but I bet the majority of democrats do not. The vote matters because it is like a massive poll of who will energize the base the most. And the emails show the methodologies used weren't good. If we care about getting democratic candidates in the White House, we should care about fixing those methodologies.
- xnull2guest 10y ago
  This is perfectly spot on. However, I'd argue that it took the DNC leaks for people en masse to understand this. People broadly thought that they had a legitimate say in the candidate promoted by the party affiliation. Today, people still haven't really figured out that there are very narrow ideological differences between the two parties that control the entire electoral process. It's very obvious, of course, but it takes things like "shocking" leaks that show the emperor is naked.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

feklar 10y ago

There was plenty of relevant info in those leaks, such as Obama's 2008 cabinet being chosen by a Citibank executive https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-r...

cldellow 10y ago
I mean, I guess, but (a) it's old news and (b) you could call him a Citibank executive, or you could call him the Chief of Staff in Bill Clinton's Treasury Department. That article mentions Froman's October 6, 2008 email. Here's an October 27, 2008 CBS story that talks about the role Froman was playing in the transition: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/whos-really-backing-barack-obama/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/whos-really-backing-barack-obama... Here's the Treasury Department's announcement of the staff change, including Froman as Chief of Staff: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CDIR-1997-06-04/pdf/CDIR-1997-06-04-DEPARTMENTS-13.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CDIR-1997-06-04/pdf/CDIR-1997-... I guess the new news is that we see a bit of how the sausage is made, but my assumption was always that the inner circle of advisors has a lot of clout in deciding who staffs the positions. I don't really see this email as damning one way or the other--what am I missing?
- xnull2guest 10y ago
  > you could call him a Citibank executive, or you could call him the Chief of Staff in Bill Clinton's Treasury Department You could point to a revolving door of administration between the private and public sector, along with public-private partnerships that launder would-be-illegal acts between public and private sectors. It's a pretty big deal to have anyone besides a president elect choose their cabinet, much less an oligarchic figure.

ovibos 10y ago

Regardless of how (in)significant you think the material they release is, there's no such thing as too much transparency.

Mikeb85 10y ago
This 100x. Either the US is a democracy or it isn't.
hackuser 10y ago
> there's no such thing as too much transparency Should military plans be transparent? Your private health records? Rape victims' names? Should the President be able to receive confidential advice - if not, they may receive much less good advice and make worse decisions. EDIT: Reworded it to remove the hyperbole
- dpc59 10y ago
  If everyone's military plans were transparent maybe we'd have a chance for world peace.
- grandalf 10y ago
  > Should military plans be transparent? Yes when they contradict lies told to the people to help sell a war. Secrecy is a privilege that officials need to earn. In the US there is widespread abuse of power when officials make unflattering information top secret so it won't be released to the public. That's what the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs showed us. Obviously some things should be kept secret, but in the US we have way too much government secrecy and it's used as a tool to help officials abuse power.

colordrops 10y ago

It's really bizarre how your comment has made it to the top of this thread, considering that it seems that the prevailing opinion here on HN is supportive of wikileaks. Your claim that the leaks are not newsworthy is absurd in the extreme, and your judgement is in question. There are hundreds of items of greater interest and importance in those mails than in a good portion of news stories published by most major news outlets. You are either grossly misinformed or purposefully misleading readers.

revelation 10y ago
The sentiment seems to have switched ever since they released any democrats material. It's the result of the two party system, where "if this isn't helping my party it must be because you are against me" thinking trumps any logical thought. I don't care for either color of political party, so I can appreciate cryptographically authenticated information leaks for what they are.
- grandalf 10y ago
  > "if this isn't helping my party it must be because you are against me" thinking trumps any logical thought. Well put. Seemingly party loyalists are so blind to the idea that someone could actually care about principles (like transparency) that everything is a sinister plot against their faultless leader.
75j 10y ago
It is bizarre. GP is, as you said, "either grossly misinformed or purposefully misleading readers". There is plainly illegal activity in those emails, and massive evidence of electoral fraud. But whatever, it was the blue team that did it, so they get a pass. This is why it's actually good that Trump was elected. Now suddenly everyone cares again about mass deportation, war crimes, lobbying, etc. Now that we have an out-of-the-closet fascist as president, legislation like the 2012 NDAA doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore does it blue team?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sdegutis 10y ago

I'm not sure if this is the same group of emails you talked about, but at the very least they admitted to a conspiracy to try to incite a "revolution" within the Catholic Church using pseudo-Catholic lay organizations with morally progressive agendas. That doesn't seem like a small thing.

hackuser 10y ago
That is not true; it's a wild exaggeration, part of the misinformation campaign. Whatever we may think politically, we all can agree that we don't need more of that!
- generic_user 10y ago
  Its a very serious intrusion that was denounced by the by American Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz and others. The front organisations are real and the intent of starting a 'Catholic Spring' was descussed by Podesta and other high ranking DNC officials.
  - xnull2guest 10y ago
    https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6293 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6293 It's pretty incredible how casually members of the US government and party officials invoke the concept of galvanizing revolutionary movements. There's a concept within the US government that "it's better to convince than to conquer" but there's been a growing awareness and resistance to the emotional abuse that comes from the exhausting onslaught of ideological infiltration and astroturfed revolutionary appeal.
    - generic_user 10y ago
      The US has been involved in 'Color Revolutions' for a long time. There is evidence that Ukrainian revolution was in part aided by US and EU. George Soros Is also a big player in financing NGOs that work to establish phony social movements. Both Hillary and the DNC are connected to Soros Open Society Foundations. Soros is also funding BLM and other groups that are active in the protests/riots going on.

grandalf 10y ago

> they should be embarrassed I think the people who wrote some of those horrible and immature emails should be embarrassed. Why must we respect authority figures when they (clearly) have not earned it. There were so many minor things in those emails that reveal just what kind of people seek power. Disgusting.

rdtsc 10y ago
Yeah there was no big smoking gun, no lizard people, but there was a lot of shady deals. And most of all, I find interesting is, what wasn't there - not a lot of concern for regular people. Not a lot of "yeah we should figure out how to reach out to folks struggling with finding work, inner cities have more crime than expected we should find a way to help there.." But there was a lot of "let's take this angle, let's paint Bernie as a atheist, they'll hate him then". One illustrative example of the email about Theano and its relationship to the Clinton Foundation. Also apparently Chelsea started digging too much and at some point was under the illusion that the charity was just that, a charity. She had to be reminded how things really worked and such. And anyone who thinks Saudi Arabia is donating money to CF cure AIDS is deluded. And of course, it had to be followed through with threats to blackmail her: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/52046 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/52046
- dmode 10y ago
  This is extremely naive. These guys are professional marketers and they are doing a job. When you build a product do you really think house best can I help my customer or how can optimize to get the best click or get the best conversion or get the best retention?
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    > When you build a product do you really think house best can I help my customer This might be a surprise but yes I do! I worked for a tech company which survived and did well for 20+ some years and the reason is because they thought and cared what the customer wanted and always put them first, even at the detriment of yearly revenue. It turns out we didn't need sales people, MBAs or much marketing either, customers were marking for us. I am bit saddened that you think this is "this is extremely naive".

generic_user 10y ago

Donna Brazile was booted from CNN for rigging the national debate. Multiple people had to resign from the DNC for sending political agitators to Trump rallies to provoke violent confrontations. Journalists across all of the mainstream media outlets were coordinating stories with the DNC and gave editorial control to the John Podesta. Those are some seriously disturbing and undemocratic acts that We should all be appalled by. Do not let your partisanship distort your vision. The things that were exposed by Wikileaks are what destroys democracy.

grandalf 10y ago
Exactly. These are truly disturbing things that I'm still processing and am deeply troubled by. In my opinion, the worst is the deliberate undermining of the Democratic party by HRC's loyal henchpeople to help HRC win the primary unfairly. How can someone who doesn't respect the idea of a fair party primary respect the idea of the rule of law in general?
- generic_user 10y ago
  There are so many horrifying revelations that its hard to keep track of them all. You had Debbie Wasserman Schultz rig the primary and resign in disgrace then immediately go to work on Hillary's campaign. Million dollar 'gifts' to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments while she was the secretary of state. It just goes on and on.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    Yes, I hope someday we learn the details of which of those things were actually illegal and which were not. Schultz being immediately re-hired with no contrition or acknowledgement of wrongdoing by HRC was bizarre, I'd have thought the press would have forced some sort of statement on the subject.
xnull2guest 10y ago
The incredible thing is that this type of coordination is not at all unusual. It's how the US media and propaganda system works. It's how stories from US narrative pervade all corners of US media simultaneously. Plenty of people in Washington think what happened to the DNC was unfair. Because that's the way our system works. The only outcry was against the DNC because only the DNC was disclosed as participating in it. There just simply haven't been a collection of leaks yet to "shock" the American public into understanding how coordinated the media is with US government narrative.

gozur88 10y ago

Those emails were quite a bit more serious than just political sausage-making. For one thing, they contained evidence of blatantly illegal behavior, i.e. the coordination of the campaign and "independent" groups. This is particularly noteworthy because of the hypocrisy involved. Clinton has put a lot of effort into vilifying Citizens United - she was calling for more restrictive campaign laws while at the same time breaking the ones that pass constitutional muster.