Hillary Clinton and her tight inner circle of aides “locked away” research about the candidate from the rest of the campaign team, leading to a frustrated outburst from campaign manager Robby Mook after Clinton’s use of personal email was exposed last March.
“This is the problem with having big chunks of research locked away…we just don’t know what’s going to be coming at us,” Mook wrote in a March 3, 2015 email to Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.
Mook sent the email just after the campaign was apparently blindsided by the New York Times bombshell exposing Clinton’s use of a private email account as secretary of state.
Mook and Podesta appeared not to know much about Clinton’s State Department email practices. And the Clinton insiders who did know about the email setup — her lawyer, Cheryl Mills, and top personal aide, Huma Abedin — appear to have not shared information about the system with the hired campaign operatives.
After The Times story dropped, Podesta asked Mook if he had “any idea of the depth of this story.”
“Nope,” Mook wrote. “We brought up the existence of emails in reserach [sic] this summer but were told that everything was taken care of.”
“I worry we’re going to get out on a limb on certain issues (perfect example: equal pay) and not realize how hypocritical we might look later,” Mook wrote later in the email exchange.
The young Democratic operative appeared to understand that working for the Clintons carried with it some potential pitfalls, mostly centered around their penchant for secrecy.
“I hate to sound like we’re trying to get into all her dirty laundry and I completely understand all the sensitivities, but this is the big leagues and we need comms and reserach [sic] experts preparing us,” he wrote.
“Consultants are all a flutter as you can imagine! But I know that this is a special world we live in…”
The email exchange was released on Friday by WikiLeaks. The anti-secrecy website has been publishing emails illegally hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account.