Well, apparently losing the election was not enough for the Clinton Camp according to the people over at WikiLeaks. Today, they released 300 more emails from Podesta, in what is now the 36^th leak to come out. It seems to be more of the same things coming out at this point; early information, evidence of political doublespeak, and political strategizing. This batch came with some information from the Obama campaign as well, as Podesta worked with him back in 2008.

 

What does releasing these emails still really accomplish though? Of course, the WikiLeaks side of things is to give information to the public that they deserve. For Trump, this is fuel for his early fire. If you remember back during the first debate, Trump was saying he’d release his taxes when Clinton released all her emails. Video linked here

This isn’t the end of it for his side though. The Washington Post reported earlier that he still might be pursuing a legal track of prosecuting her after he is sworn into office. If you’ll remember, as the article explains as well, he said during a previous debate that he planned to appoint a special prosecutor to try her. Apparently the Republican side in general though is saying that this would probably be a bad idea, but his supporters were frequently seen at rallies shouting “Lock her up!” so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

All that these emails are doing at this point though are throwing her further under the bus after a loss and giving Trump and his supporters more tools to make their case against her.

We’ve known about Clinton’s email scandal for a long time now. It’s something that’s been held over her head pretty much this whole campaign, so calling it a “surprise” that its being used against her now isn’t exactly accurate. What really was the October Surprise that’s come up against her was the WikiLeaks release of emails that came out over the past few weeks. A Wall Street Journal article reviews the information that we’ve received so far about the Podesta leaks. There are a lot of emails that present contradictory information than the stances Clinton has taken in her campaign.

 

There is also evidence there were some disagreements between her consultants on how to handle this information getting leaked. The problem arises from having to face the media after something like this comes out. Do you attack it head on? Do you cave and apologize immediately? Is there some middle ground that should be taken instead? This is a lot to consider for people who’s job it is to craft Clinton’s public image. Their career success depends on successfully doing this.

 

Obviously we all know how this turned out. She apologized and things have pretty much played themselves out on the legal side. It’s still good to come back to it and look over all this. It’s a responsibility of the people to be informed.

One of the big issues facing Hillary with these new leaks really could be potentially straining her own internal relations with the Democratic Party as a whole. In an article published by RT, emails from columnist Brent Budowsky sent to campaign chair John Podesta in September of last year call out the Clinton campaign’s surrogate attacks on Bernie Sanders. While using the surrogates would allow her to push some of the repercussions off of herself, this revalation, as he puts it is “stupid and self-destructive” in its strategy when she has “dangerously low levels of public trust,” and Sanders being based on “cleaning up politics.”

 

People wrote a piece outlining the five biggest things to come from this leak. If you want to read about all of them, follow the link, but I’ll discuss some of them here. The first they wrote about, and one that really stands out is that they show an apparently close friendship between her and Wall Street executives. This goes against a lot of what she has said that she really stands for and hurts a lot of her legitimacy on quite a few of her claims. Its really harmful in that it basically puts her on the same level of Wall Street underground politics that people that oppose Trump believe he is a part of. At least she’s consistent on one fact though, and that’s that politicians should have “both public and private positions.” How do you trust someone that’s saying one thing and believing the polar opposite?

 

Another tidbit this article gives us is that she received advanced notice of a Town Hall debate question back in March, which is a huge advantage for a situation like that where its supposed to be devised of questions by the people to put candidates on the spot, not prepare for.

 

Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson. Two of Clinton’s staffers while she was Secretary of State. Also both the subject of a reported ‘side deal’ between them and the FBI. The deal states that the FBI could go through their laptops and collect information on all that was going on with the Clinton email controversy, but then the laptops would be destroyed and they would be provided immunity according to Fox News.

 

What people want to know is why? Why provide immunity AND destroy any evidence if nothing on there was going to be used against them? House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte wrote a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch demanding an explanation to this question. The agreement also limited all of the information that was deemed usable to be only from before January 2015 the Washington Examiner reports.

All these stipulations don’t really add up unfortunately, but there’s nothing anyone can really do about it at this point. Mills, the former Chief of Staff under Clinton, and Samuelson, a former campaign staffer and now a lawyer to Clinton, are now protected, and according to Brian Fallon, a Clinton spokesman, told reporters that they complied with authorities on what was asked of them (although it is reported that Mills walked out on her first interview because she was upset by the questions that were put to her).

 

While all of this really just raises more questions than answers, it does bring about a certain thought that everyone should be asking themselves and that is what could have potentially been hiding behind all that data, no matter what side of the politics you’re on.