Hillary Clinton may not have faced an indictment from the FBI over her unsecured emails. But that doesn’t mean she has escaped public controversy. Over the past couple weeks, the whistleblower site Wikileaks has released hundreds of emails from Secretary Clinton, her campaign, and her office. Many of these emails discuss in detail the strategies of Clinton’s political team, as well as Clinton’s speeches to major Wall Street donors such as Goldman Sachs. In one such speech Clinton remarked that it was necessary for politicians to be two-faced in order to accomplish their agenda.
Such a remark might as well be the motto for Clinton’s campaign. The Wikileaks emails have revealed a politician and a staff that regularly practiced deception, equivocation, and political strong-arming. In one email, Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta boasts of their team’s strategic establishment of liberal Catholic organizations, such as Catholics for America, to endear Clinton to Catholic voters despite her radical pro-choice ideology. In another email, a former CNN staffer appears to deliver a question, scheduled for a town hall event, to the Clinton campaign well before the actual event.
In short, the emails portray a candidate who has serious issues with regards to honesty and transparency. Just this week a newly released email reveals conversations in the Clinton campaign about a strategy to “swift boat” Donald Trump, a political shorthand that usually means a series of personal and untrue attacks. While political attacks are certainly not new or unique to Hillary Clinton, the fact that such a strategy appears to have been forming months ago is troubling—especially considering the Clinton campaign’s apparent advantages with media outlets.
While we shouldn’t applaud the hacking activity of Wikileaks, the character of a presidential candidate is always relevant. The emails released by Wikileaks are part of a disturbing pattern of evasion and power politics that seems to follow Mrs. Clinton wherever she goes. While many voters are well acquainted with the moral failures of Donald Trump, the moral failures of Hillary Clinton seem to be enveloped in fog and politics. That’s not a reassuring thing for the country.