WikiLeaks threatens to derail Clinton’s campaign
(Malaysia Outlook) – The Clinton campaign has tried to tamp down a mounting controversy over a newly disclosed, and potentially explosive, email in which the former secretary of state appeared to accuse the Saudi and Qatari governments of secretly funding the Islamic State.
On Aug 17, 2014 — eight months before she declared her candidacy for president — Clinton sent a detailed strategy for combating the Islamic State, which she referred to as ISIL, in an email to John Podesta, then a White House counselor and now her campaign chairman.
Along with a military campaign to roll back the terror group in Iraq, the Clinton email talks about confronting the Saudis and the Qataris, both key US allies, over what she refers to as governmental backing of ISIL.
The Clinton email states: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
As a basis for the assertions, Clinton in the email cites “Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region.”
The email was among thousands hacked from Podesta’s private Gmail account and released this week by WikiLeaks in what appears to be an attempt to embarrass the Clinton campaign.
The campaign has struggled to respond to the contents of the emails, insisting it does not want to authenticate material that it and the US government now believe came from a Russian state-sponsored cyber-attack.
The campaign would not say whether Clinton personally wrote the email, which reads like a position or policy paper, although it was sent from her private email account.
“These are hacked, stolen documents by the Russian government, which has weaponised WikiLeaks to help elect Donald Trump,” Glen Caplin, a senior Clinton campaign spokesman, told Yahoo News.
“We’re not going to confirm the authenticity of any specific alleged communication.”
At the same time, a campaign aide also argued that the sentiment expressed in the email “isn’t new.”
Clinton “has repeatedly called out the Saudis and Qataris for supporting terrorism,” said the aide, declining to be named.
As evidence, the aide pointed to Clinton’s remarks in a speech last November.
“And, once and for all, the Saudis, the Qataris, and others need to stop their citizens from directly funding extremist organizations, as well as schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path toward radicalization,” she said then.
