The Email’s Leaking Again

The Leak


Over the past week, Wikileaks has been releasing thousands of new emails from the Clinton campaign, mostly from campaign chairman, John Podesta. Most of the prominent email chains merely reveal “how the sausage is made” during any presidential campaign. This includes subjects like how to humanize the candidate, ways to respond to attacks about the Clinton Foundation, and the announcement of her position on the Keystone pipeline. Other emails reveal shadier yet fairly predictable subjects, including a town hall question hint from a DNC official and Clinton’s aides attacking Catholicism and Evangelism.

 

The Clinton Campaign’s Response


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While there are literally tens of thousands of new emails for everyone to pore over and pick through and use to either incriminate or defend Hillary, the reality is that overall this email leak is… well, boring. The subjects highlighted in the emails simply reveal what we already know about the candidate, based on the campaign she’s been running and from the previous email dumps. The relatively tame leak gives the Clinton campaign a huge advantage to what could’ve been its demise. The campaign is taking a boring story and making it interesting again, by questioning Russia’s involvement with the Wikileaks hack and Trump’s ties to Russia. Trump’s deeply rooted ties to Russia seems to be the stuff of conspiracy theories, but the timing of the recent email leak seems, at the very least, convenient when considering Trump’s recent debacle. One of Trump’s communication advisor Jason Miller tweeted “And here… we… go” with a link to the new Wikileaks emails, clearly giddy about what the hacking would reveal. CNN reported that Clinton’s senior spokesman Glen Caplin responded:

“It is absolutely disgraceful that the Trump campaign is cheering on a release today engineered by Vladimir Putin to interfere in this election, and this comes after Donald Trump encouraged more espionage over the summer and continued to deny the hack even happened at Sunday’s debate. The timing shows you that even Putin knows Trump had a bad weekend and a bad debate.”

trump-putin

This response single handedly spins the email dump to reflect more poorly on Trump than it does on Clinton. From Caplin’s response, the audience is forced to question 1) Trump’s comments about Russian hacking, 2) Trump’s suspicious ties to Russia, and 3) Trump’s recent track record and polling. This communicative tactic successfully avoided addressing Clinton’s shortcomings and instead focused on the shortcomings of a presidential candidate who encourages and eggs on espionage against our nation. If future email dumps continue to report similar (boring) findings, the Clinton campaign should continue to use this tactic in order to detract attention away from the emails themselves and onto the way in which the emails were obtained.

2 thoughts on “The Email’s Leaking Again

  1. I agree that the email leak is boring, but I feel due to media sensation this will be a thing that follows Hillary Clinton even if she makes it to the white house. A lot of people do not trust her and this will be more ammunition to further feed people who would love to see her in jail. I wonder if the next scandal will eliminate the email controversy from peoples minds, or if it is all cumulative?

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