WikiLeaks hacked emails reveal more about Clinton's once-private Wall Street speeches

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Clinton campaign to compare WikiLeaks dump to Watergate

Reporter for The Hill Katie Bo Williams provides insight

More hacked emails released Saturday from WikiLeaks appear to show more about Hillary Clinton’s private, high-priced Wall Street speeches including her argument that Washington lawmakers would pass the Dodd-Frank banking reform law merely for “political reasons.”

“With political people … there was a lot of complaining about Dodd-Frank, but there was also a need to do something for political reasons,” Clinton said at a 2013 Goldman Sachs investment symposium.

“If you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing,” Clinton also said in the speech.

The speech was just one of several for Wall Street audiences and for which Clinton was paid more than $200,000, according to an analysis of her financial disclosure forms released this spring.

The Democratic presidential nominee purportedly earned roughly $1.8 million for eight speeches to big banks, including Goldman Sachs.

The hacked emails, from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and others associated with Clinton, are emerging months after Clinton’s primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, called for her to release transcripts of the speeches -- in an attempt to prove her believed ties to big banks.

Other documents in the trove released Saturday, including a transcript of the Goldman Sachs speech, appear to suggest Clinton wanted the United States to intervene in civil war-torn Syria in a more covert manner.

“My view was you intervene as covertly as is possible,” she said. “We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know, everybody can't help themselves. They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we're doing and I want credit for it, and all the rest of it.”

Also on Saturday, WikiLeaks release a 2015 email exchange from Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill and long-time Clinton aide Heather Samuelson about the State Department’s apparent plans to place a favorable story with Associated Press reporters Matt Lee and Bradley Klapper about the release of emails from Clinton confidant Sydney Blumenthal as the missives are turned over to a Republican-led congressional committee.

(Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.)

Merrill also says in the exchange that he would like the story to run during the release of a Supreme Court decision because it will distract the “news hyenas.”

The emails are thought to have been hacked by Russians and released in an attempt to influence the outcome of the Nov. 8 General Election between Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Podesta on Friday fired back at Julian Assange as his WikiLeaks group released another set of hacked emails, which have been an embarrassing distraction for the Clinton campaign.

“I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy,” Podesta tweeted, while Assange starts his fifth year at the Ecuador Embassy in the United Kingdom, amid a 2005 rape allegation in Sweden.

The tweet also included a picture of Podesta and celebrity chef Daniel Boulud recently preparing the dish at a private Clinton fundraiser.

Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin on Saturday compared the Podesta email hack to the Watergate break in.

"Four decades later, we’re witnessing another effort to steal private campaign documents in order to influence an election,” he said. “Only this time, instead of filing cabinets, it’s people’s emails they’re breaking into … and a foreign government is behind it."

Earlier this month, WikiLeaks posted what it said were thousands of emails obtained in a hack of Podesta’s personal email account.

Among those was an internal review of Clinton’s Wall Street speeches to survey the political damage her remarks could cause if they ever became public.

In what aides calculated were the most damaging passages, Clinton reflected on the necessity of "unsavory" political dealing, telling real estate investors that "you need both a public and private position."

To investment bankers from Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, Clinton admits that she's "kind of far removed" from the middle-class upbringing that she frequently touts on the campaign trail.

Podesta suggested last weekend on “Fox News Sunday” that his emails from the WikiLeaks posting were not authentic.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.