WikiLeaks released yet another batch of hacked emails from inside Hillary Clinton’s campaign Wednesday, and with them came another round of embarrassing headlines and new glimpses of internal anxiety over the candidate’s weaknesses.
Republican Donald Trump and his allies seized on the emails, which reveal comments by an aide about Catholics, a line from a paid speech in which Clinton might be seen as playing down terrorism’s threat and an internal dispute over potential Clinton Foundation conflicts of interest.
The drip-drip-drip of damaging attention is likely to continue. WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization, has released new messages from the personal email account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, for five straight days and has promised to issue tens of thousands more.
The correspondence reveals a campaign that struggled all year to improve weak areas. As far back as March, aides were aware that Clinton was resistant to the media, perhaps out of touch with regular Americans and unable to convey a clear message.
A month before Clinton launched her campaign, her aides worked to corral her well-known love for granular policy details into a message that would both capture her agenda and present a forward-looking, aspirational vision.
Nearly a year later, a similar struggle cropped up as they attempted to revise her core message.
“Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” asked Clinton adviser Joel Benenson.
Benenson contrasted the simplicity of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s anti-Wall Street message with Clinton’s multitiered slogans.
Seven months later and on the cusp of Election Day, the concerns laid out in these emails and others largely remain. Clinton has struggled to win over the liberals who gravitated to Sanders during the primary, and who remains ahead in large part due to Donald Trump’s historic weaknesses.
Hovering over the trickle of embarrassing emails are suspicions both within the Clinton campaign and in intelligence circles that Russia is behind the hack.
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