Reply With Quote
Podesta on Rahm flipping out: 'Pressure' from shooting 'getting to him'
John Podesta suggested that the police shooting of Laquan McDonald was “getting to” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and caused him to lash out during a question about his travel plans at a POLITICO event in December.
In one of the hacked Podesta emails from WikiLeaks on Monday, Mae Podesta flagged the exchange between Emanuel and Playbook’s Mike Allen and Playbook Illinois’s Natasha Korecki.
“Did you see this super weird exchange about going to cuba?” Mae Podesta, the country director for The Clinton Foundation’s HIV/AIDS Initiative, wrote in the email to her father John, including a link to a Gawker.com story recounting the exchange.
“Woah….wtf?”
“Yes. Pressure of cop shooting getting to him,” John Podesta responded.
During the Dec. 2 breakfast, Allen asked Emanuel, “You take your young people on fascinating trips around the world, headed these holidays to Cuba. Why?”
That ticked off the Chicago mayor.
“Well, first of all, thanks for telling everybody what I’m going to do with my family,” Emanuel snapped back angrily. “You had a private conversation with me and now you decide to make that public.”
That response came after repeated questions from Korecki and Allen about the Emanuel administration’s handling of the Chicago police officer who fatally shot McDonald 16 times as the 17-year-old was walking away from police officers.
headshot placeholder
Hanna Trudo -
10/17/2016 03:43 PM EDT
Share
Tweet
Clinton aides worried about a glass house on equal pay
Clinton insider Mandy Grunwald cautioned aides against spotlighting equal pay legislation as part of the former secretary of state's broader economic message in 2015.
“I'm queasy about leading with equal pay, given last week's stories about HRC staff,” Grunwald, a communications strategist, wrote in an email to senior campaign advisers including Jake Sullivan, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin in March 2015.
The email was included in the tenth and latest installment of hacked emails from campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal account, released by WikiLeaks on Monday. The Clinton campaign is not confirming individual emails, and has warned that some messages might have been altered.
In the email, Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri echoed Grunwald’s concerns.
“Agree with many of Mandy's comments - in partic staring with equal pay, having an women's economic issue soundbite, and making GOP section edgier,” she wrote.
Grunwald’s remarks appear to be over a report first published by the Washington Free Beacon in February 2015 finding that Clinton paid female staffers 72 cents for every dollar she paid men when serving as a senator in New York.
The Washington Free Beacon analysis, however, left out data based on annual salaries and from Clinton’s political committees, creating a false pay discrepancy, according to a report by BuzzFeed published in April 2015.
The report reviewed seven years of compensation information from 2002 to 2008 and found that Clinton paid men and women equally in all offices as a senator.
Kyle Cheney
Kyle Cheney -
10/16/2016 10:52 AM EDT
Share
Tweet
Clinton team debates donations from lobbyists repping foreign interests
For five days in April 2015, the Clinton campaign seemed torn: should it accept bundled campaign donations from lobbyists for foreign governments?
"This is really a straight up political call," wrote Clinton lawyer Marc Elias in a chain that included campaign manager Robby Mook and senior aides John Podesta, Huma Abedin and Jennifer Palmieri. "One middle option is to take case by case. If, for example, they are [foreign government agents] registered for Canada, we may not case. If for N. Korea we would."
The hacked emails stolen from Podesta’s gmail account and posted by Wikileaks on Sunday show that aides were concerned about cracking down too harshly on lobbyist contributions -- for fear of being mocked, as Barack Obama was.
"Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don't really get you anything...that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result," Mook wrote. "He convinced me. So...in a complete U-turn, I'm ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks."
Palmieri jumped in, "Take the money!!"
The decision was a tricky one, according to the emails, in part because the campaign already was accepting help. At one point, adviser Dennis Cheng wrote: "We do need to make a decision on this ASAP as our friends who happen to be registered with FARA are already donating and raising." FARA refers to the federal statute requiring registration of agents for foreign governments.
"A total ban feels arbitrary and will engender the same eye-rolling and ill will that it did for Obama," Elias said.
Another adviser, Karuna Seshasai, noted that 27 prospective bundlers were FARA-registered and more were signing up "daily." They also included some prominent Clinton allies, including Podesta's brother Tony. Seshasai noted that Tony Podesta's ties to Iraq, Azerbaijan and Egypt were worth reviewing, along with other bundlers with ties to Libya and the United Arab Emirates.
Jesse Ferguson, a Clinton communications aide, suggested that the campaign should consider how much money it would forfeit if it implemented a strict ban.
"Is there anyway to ballpark what percent of our donor base this would apply to (aka how much money we're throwing away) Cost benefits are easier to analyze with the costs." he wrote.
Cheng noted that the sum might be significant -- and that it would be hard to explain how the campaign takes contributions from corporate lobbyists -- and the Clinton Foundation takes contributions from foreign governments "but now we wont."
"I feel like we are leaving a good amount of money on the table (both for primary and general, and then DNC and state parties)," he wrote.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/live-blog-up...#ixzz4NRqygxxt
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
