New leak sees Clinton worry about security, staff worry about Clinton's Wall Street ties

Hillary Clinton
(Image credit: Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images)

Transcripts of closed-door speeches Hillary Clinton gave to Wall Street bankers were published by WikiLeaks Friday as attachments to leaked emails from Clinton campaign staff, sharing with the public content the Democratic nominee refused to release herself.

In comments at a 2013 conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs, Clinton expressed concern about digital security threats, particularly from China and Russia, the latter of which is officially accused of interfering with the 2016 election by leaking hacked information to sites like WikiLeaks. Clinton described disabling her devices while traveling abroad to avoid hacking, but FBI Director James Comey has since said she did no such thing.

The documents also see campaign staff discussing how to deal with off-message speech excerpts — "policy positions that we should give an extra scrub" — to avoid bad press. One quote, for example, has Clinton describing her "solid middle class upbringing" at another Goldman event. "And now, obviously, I'm kind of far removed because the life I've lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy," she adds, "but I haven't forgotten it." Clinton's staff labeled the excerpt, "CLINTON ADMITS SHE IS OUT OF TOUCH."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.