White Plains, New York (CNN) WikiLeaks released Saturday what appear to be transcripts of Hillary Clinton's three paid speeches to financial heavyweight Goldman Sachs.

The remarks, which were hacked as part of an extensive breach of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's email account, show Clinton commenting on Wall Street's role in financial regulations, relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the damage done to US foreign policy by past WikiLeaks releases.

The Clinton campaign declined to confirm the authenticity of any of the transcripts and CNN cannot independently confirm their authenticity. But the campaign has not challenged any emails in other WikiLeaks releases and this is the second time transcripts from Clinton's paid speeches have been made public by the group.

Clinton's campaign compared the WikiLeaks hack to Watergate, the scandal that lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

"There is no getting around it: Donald Trump is cheering on a Russian attempt to influence our election through a crime reminiscent of Watergate but on a more massive scale," Glen Caplin, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said Saturday. "We're witnessing another effort to steal private campaign documents in order to influence an election."

The US government has said WikiLeaks is working with Russian operatives.

Clinton made three paid appearances for Goldman Sachs between the time she left the State Department in 2013 and when she announced her presidential campaign in early 2015.

Clinton's paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial firms were a rallying cry for Bernie Sanders supporters during the Democratic primary.

Trump has looked to seize on the WikiLeaks releases, regularly touting them at his events to the point that Democrats have argued he is condoning hacking by Russian operatives. Trump said Saturday that he almost delayed a rally in Maine because of the emails' release.

Clinton's campaign was obviously worried about the speeches, too, the hacked emails show. Staffers asked Tony Carrk, the campaign's head of research, to look into the content and present top campaign aides with comments that could prove politically troubling.

In total, Carrk highlighted five comments from the paid speeches. The comments mostly pertained to regulating the financial industry.

In an October 2013 speech to the financial firm, Clinton implied that action was necessary to curb Wall Street street abuses "for political reasons."

"There was also a need to do something because for political reasons, if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing," Clinton said.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was passed in 2010 in response to the great recession and looked to impose tighter regulations on financial institutions. While business leaders, especially those leading the financial firms, were generally against the measure, the decision was politically popular with Democrats who blamed Wall Street for the recession.

In the same speech, Clinton said that "more thought has to be given to the process and transactions and regulations so that we don't kill or maim what works, but we concentrate on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power that exists here."

In a June 2013 speech, just months after she left the State Department, Clinton said she wished the United States could intervene in Syria "covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene."

"We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know, everybody can't help themselves," she said. "They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we're doing and I want credit for it, and all the rest of it."

In a bit of irony, the WikiLeaks release also brought to light Clinton's reaction to a past release from the group that exposed Democratic cables that cast foreign leaders in a negative light.

Clinton joked that she embarked on the "Clinton Apology Tour."

"It was painful," Clinton said. "Leaders who shall remain nameless, who were characterized as vain, egotistical, power hungry, corrupt. And we knew they were. This was not fiction. And I had to go and say, you know, our ambassadors, they get carried away, they want to all be literary people. They go off on tangents. What can I say. I had grown men cry. I mean, literally."

On Russian relations, Clinton said she wishes she could "continue to build a more positive relationship with Russia."

Clinton added that Putin has rejected some of their attempts to work together "out of hand."

Clinton collected at least $1.8 million for at least eight speeches to big banks, according to figures released by Clinton's campaign and tax documents she released earlier this year.

And while the transcripts show a more blunt, less reserved Clinton, much of what the former secretary of state said to Goldman Sachs and other groups appear generally in line with some of what she has said publicly.

In another 2013 speech, Clinton dismissed the idea that President Barack Obama would have been able to accomplish more if he had schmoozed with Republicans in Congress more often.

"I know that he spent a lot of time early on in the first term with the Republicans in trying, as you recall ... it turned out that the Republicans' side, particularly in the House, couldn't deliver," she said.

Clinton's campaign has so far declined to comment on specifics in the releases, in part, because they don't want to validate any of the hacks. Instead, Clinton's top aides have dismissed the releases as partisan efforts by the Russian government to elect Trump president.

But the releases, which have come daily for the last week, are impacting Clinton's campaign by forcing her aides to constantly comment on emails written long before Clinton ran for president.

And, for possibly this reason, Clinton told Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, at an event in October that she wished the presidential election was shorter.

"Look, I am of the mind that we cannot have endless campaigns," said. "It is bad for the candidates. It's bad for the country. I mean, part of the reason why it's difficult to govern is because an election ends and then the next day people start jockeying." </s> WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton told bankers behind closed doors that she favoured “open trade and open borders” and said Wall Street executives were best-positioned to help reform the U.S. financial sector, according to transcripts of her private, paid speeches leaked Friday.

The leaks were the result of another email hacking intended to influence the presidential election.

Excerpts of the speeches given in the years before her 2016 presidential campaign included some blunt and unguarded remarks to her private audiences, which collectively had paid her at least $26.1 million in speaking fees. Clinton had refused to release transcripts of the speeches, despite repeated calls to do so by her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The excerpts were included in emails exchanged among her political staff, including Campaign Chairman John Podesta, whose email account was hacked. The WikiLeaks organization posted what it said were thousands of Podesta’s emails. It wasn’t immediately clear who had hacked Podesta’s emails, though the breach appeared to cover years of messages, some sent as recently as last month.

Among the emails was a compilation of excerpts from Clinton’s paid speeches in 2013 and 2014. It appeared campaign staff had read all Clinton’s speeches and identified passages that could be potentially problematic for the candidate if they were to become public.

One excerpt put Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she has retreated on significantly during the 2016 election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her “dream” is “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders” and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America “would mean for everybody in this room.”

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has made opposition to trade deals a cornerstone of his campaign.

Podesta posted a series of tweets Friday night, calling the disclosures a Russian hack and raising questions about whether some of the documents could have been altered.

“I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” Podesta wrote. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.”

Podesta’s comments came just hours after U.S. officials publicly accused the Russian government of directing cyberattacks on political organizations and American citizens in an attempt to interfere with U.S. elections.

The joint statement from the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department cited disclosures of “alleged hacked emails” on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks as being “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.”

The statement didn’t refer by name to the affected political institutions, but federal authorities are investigating cyberattacks on the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement, “It’s not hard to see why she fought so hard to keep her transcripts of speeches to Wall Street banks paying her millions of dollars secret.”

The emails released Friday included exchanges between Podesta and other Clinton insiders, including campaign manager Robby Mook. Most were routine, including drafts of Clinton speeches, suggested talking points for campaign surrogates and suggested tweets to be sent out from Clinton’s account.

The excerpts include quotes from an October 2013 speech at an event sponsored by Goldman Sachs, in which Clinton conceded that presidential candidates need the financial backing of Wall Street to mount a competitive national campaign.

“Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it,” Clinton said. “New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it’s also our economic centre. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy.”

In the same speech, Clinton was also deferential to the New York finance industry, exhorting wealthy donors to use their political clout for patriotic rather than personal benefit. She also spoke of the need to include Wall Street perspectives in financial reform.

“The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry,” Clinton said.

In an April 2013 speech to the National Multifamily Housing Council, Clinton said politicians must balance “both a public and a private position” while making deals. Clinton gave an example from the movie “Lincoln,” and the deal-making that went into passage of the 13th Amendment, a process she compared to sausage-making.

“It is unsavoury, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be,” Clinton said. “But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”

Clinton’s speeches often touched on technology and privacy. In an April 2014 speech to JPMorgan, she denounced National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden for going abroad, saying, “if he really cared about raising some of these issues and stayed right here in the United States, there’s a lot of whistleblower protections.”

But she told her audience that her time in the public eye left her sympathetic to privacy concerns.

“As somebody who has had my privacy scrutinized and violated for decades, I’m all for privacy, believe me,” she said.

Speaking on international affairs, Clinton’s comments were largely in line with her positions as secretary of state, if sometimes more blunt.

“The Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on Earth over the course of the last 30 years,” she told the Jewish United Fund at a 2013 dinner.

The speech transcripts were produced under an agreement Clinton routinely imposed on any organization that hired her to speak. The contracts, such as ones crafted by the Harry Walker Agency, required the organizations to hire, at their own expense, a stenographer who would provide the transcripts to Clinton and not keep copies for themselves.

In some cases, the contracts themselves were obtained by news organizations under public records laws because Clinton was being paid to speak by public universities or colleges.

Associated Press writers Ted Bridis and Stephen Braun contributed to this report. </s> WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton told bankers behind closed doors that she favored “open trade and open borders” and said Wall Street executives were best-positioned to help reform the U.S. financial sector, according to transcripts of her private, paid speeches leaked Friday.

The leaks were the result of another email hacking intended to influence the presidential election.

Excerpts of the speeches given in the years before her 2016 presidential campaign included some blunt and unguarded remarks to her private audiences, which collectively had paid her at least $26.1 million in speaking fees. Clinton had refused to release transcripts of the speeches, despite repeated calls to do so by her primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The excerpts were included in emails exchanged among her political staff, including Campaign Chairman John Podesta, whose email account was hacked. The WikiLeaks organization posted what it said were thousands of Podesta’s emails. It wasn’t immediately clear who had hacked Podesta’s emails, though the breach appeared to cover years of messages, some sent as recently as last month.

Among the emails was a compilation of excerpts from Clinton’s paid speeches in 2013 and 2014. It appeared campaign staff had read all Clinton’s speeches and identified passages that could be potentially problematic for the candidate if they were to become public.

One excerpt put Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she has retreated on significantly during the 2016 election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her “dream” is “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders” and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America “would mean for everybody in this room.”

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has made opposition to trade deals a cornerstone of his campaign.

Podesta posted a series of tweets Friday night, calling the disclosures a Russian hack and raising questions about whether some of the documents could have been altered.

“I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” Podesta wrote. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.”

Podesta’s comments came just hours after U.S. officials publicly accused the Russian government of directing cyberattacks on political organizations and American citizens in an attempt to interfere with U.S. elections.

The joint statement from the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department cited disclosures of “alleged hacked emails” on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks as being “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.”

The statement didn’t refer by name to the affected political institutions, but federal authorities are investigating cyberattacks on the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement, “It’s not hard to see why she fought so hard to keep her transcripts of speeches to Wall Street banks paying her millions of dollars secret.”

The emails released Friday included exchanges between Podesta and other Clinton insiders, including campaign manager Robby Mook. Most were routine, including drafts of Clinton speeches, suggested talking points for campaign surrogates and suggested tweets to be sent out from Clinton’s account.

The excerpts include quotes from an October 2013 speech at an event sponsored by Goldman Sachs, in which Clinton conceded that presidential candidates need the financial backing of Wall Street to mount a competitive national campaign.

“Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it,” Clinton said. “New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it’s also our economic center. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy.”

In the same speech, Clinton was also deferential to the New York finance industry, exhorting wealthy donors to use their political clout for patriotic rather than personal benefit. She also spoke of the need to include Wall Street perspectives in financial reform.

“The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry,” Clinton said.

In an April 2013 speech to the National Multifamily Housing Council, Clinton said politicians must balance “both a public and a private position” while making deals. Clinton gave an example from the movie “Lincoln,” and the deal-making that went into passage of the 13th Amendment, a process she compared to sausage-making.

“It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be,” Clinton said. “But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”

Clinton’s speeches often touched on technology and privacy. In an April 2014 speech to JPMorgan, she denounced National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden for going abroad, saying, “if he really cared about raising some of these issues and stayed right here in the United States, there’s a lot of whistleblower protections.”

But she told her audience that her time in the public eye left her sympathetic to privacy concerns.

“As somebody who has had my privacy scrutinized and violated for decades, I’m all for privacy, believe me,” she said.

Speaking on international affairs, Clinton’s comments were largely in line with her positions as secretary of state, if sometimes more blunt.

“The Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on Earth over the course of the last 30 years,” she told the Jewish United Fund at a 2013 dinner.

The speech transcripts were produced under an agreement Clinton routinely imposed on any organization that hired her to speak. The contracts, such as ones crafted by the Harry Walker Agency, required the organizations to hire, at their own expense, a stenographer who would provide the transcripts to Clinton and not keep copies for themselves.

In some cases, the contracts themselves were obtained by news organizations under public records laws because Clinton was being paid to speak by public universities or colleges. </s> Donna Brazile, the former interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, admitted for the first time on Friday that she fed Hillary Clinton a question that would be asked during a televised town hall debate last year.

Although she initially denied sending emails to a Clinton staffer about the question, the long-time Democratic Party operative now writes in Time magazine that it 'was a mistake I will forever regret.'

'[Hacked emails] revealed that among the many things I did in my role as a Democratic operative and DNC Vice Chair prior to assuming the interim DNC Chair position was to share potential town hall topics with the Clinton campaign,' Brazile writes.

'I had been working behind the scenes to add more town hall events and debates to the primary calendar, and I helped ensure those events included diverse moderators and addressed topics vital to minority communities.'

'My job was to make all our Democratic candidates look good, and I worked closely with both campaigns to make that happen. But sending those emails was a mistake I will forever regret.'

On March 12, 2016, one day before the CNN-moderated Democratic debate between Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Brazile sent an email about the death penalty to Clinton staffer Jennifer Palmieri with the subject: 'From time to time I get the questions in advance,' according to emails obtained by WikiLeaks.

The death penalty question was repeated verbatim in an email debate co-host Roland Martin sent to CNN producers the next day, and the question was asked using similar wording during the event in Columbus, Ohio.

Brazile's message was among the emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's account that were hacked by an unknown agent and then published by WikiLeaks.

The US government and the intelligence community believes that Russia was behind the hacks against Podesta, which were part of a strategy to help Donald Trump eventually win the presidency.

During an appearance on Fox News, she claimed that the hacked emails which were published by WikiLeaks were altered.

When Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly confronted Brazile on October 19 asking how she got the question in advance, Brazile said she refused to be 'persecuted' before adding: 'I am not going to try to validate falsified information.'

Clinton's campaign has refused to verify whether the hacked emails were real.

During the presidential debates, however, Clinton's answers about paid Wall Street speeches, snippets of which were cited in the hacked emails, seemed to confirm their validity.

Brazile's message to Palmieri opened with the statement: 'Here's one that worries me about HRC.'

The email then states: '19 states and the District of Columbia have banned the death penalty. 31 states, including Ohio, still have the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, since 1973, 156 people have been on death row and later set free. Since 1976, 1,414 people have been executed in the US That's 11% of Americans who were sentenced to die, but later exonerated and freed. Should Ohio and the 30 other states join the current list and abolish the death penalty?'

On the day of the debate, Roland Martin's email to CNN producers contained three questions, the last of which mirrored the exact wording in Brazile's message to Palmieri.

During Wednesday's interview with Kelly, Brazile said: 'I have my documents. I have my files. Thank god I haven't had my emails ripped off from me and stolen and given to some criminal to come back altered.'

She also said: 'As a Christian woman I understand persecution but I will not stand here and be persecuted because your information is totally false.'

'Podesta's emails were stolen. You're so interested in talking about stolen material, you're like a thief that wants to bring into the night the things that you found that was in the gutter.'

Two weeks after the network made the decision, Brazile launched a scathing attack in response, accusing CNN of besmirching her reputation.

Network head Jeff Zucker reportedly called her behavior 'disgusting' during an editorial meeting after the network announced her resignation.

Brazile maintains that the network did not provide her with the information she allegedly passed on.

'CNN never gave me a question,' she said.

'I wish CNN had given me some other things, like the ability to defend myself rather than ripping me a new one.' </s> WASHINGTON: Excerpts of Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches, including those to Wall Street, were leaked Friday, a revelation that may perpetuate criticism that she is an out-of-touch Washington insider and could create trouble for her in the final weeks of her campaign for president.

“Obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it,” Clinton told Goldman-Black Rock on Feb. 4, 2014.

In the transcripts, Clinton acknowledges that she can’t relate to everyday Americans and admits she’s created a public personality separate from who she is in private. She discusses her positions on trade, health care and Wall Street.

“Politics is like sausage being made,” Clinton told the National Multi-Housing Council on April 24, 2013. “It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”

The partial transcripts of the speeches were published by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks as part of a leak of more than 2,000 emails belonging to her campaign chairman, John Podesta. McClatchy could not verify the authenticity of the emails, and Clinton’s campaign declined to confirm their authenticity.

The release came on the same day that the Obama administration accused Russia of being behind the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers in June, and four days after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said he would begin 10 weeks of releases of what he said would be more than 1 million documents.

“Earlier today the U.S. government removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy,” Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin said. “We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange, who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton.”

Caplin said other hackers have already proven the warnings of top national security officials that “documents can be faked as part of a sophisticated Russian misinformation campaign.”

Clinton has repeatedly refused to release transcripts of her speeches, a position that became a fierce point of contention with her opponent in the primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign focused on assertions that Clinton was part of the moneyed Washington establishment. Clinton made about $21.5 million on speeches after she resigned as secretary of state in early 2013 and before she launched her presidential campaign in the spring of 2015.

Sanders’ demands for the speeches struck a nerve with Democratic Party officials, the leaked emails suggest. In one email, dated Jan. 25, 2016, Clinton research director Tony Carrk sent 25 excerpts from the speeches to several party officials, including Podesta. The subject line was “HRC Paid Speeches.”

“Team, attached are the flags from HRC’s paid speeches we have from HWA. I put some highlights below. There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with policy,” he wrote.

Some of Clinton’s speeches would have been campaign fodder for Sanders.

In a speech to a symposium hosted by the investment bank Goldman Sachs on Oct. 24, 2013, Clinton indicated that Wall Street insiders knew best what sort of regulations the markets needed.

“There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry,” Clinton said.

And in a speech at the University of Connecticut on April 23, 2014, Clinton voiced deep awareness that foreign governments were intercepting State Department communications and personal emails.

“At the State Department we were attacked every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate everything we had. And that was true across the U.S. government,” Clinton said. “And we knew it was going on when I would go to China, or I would go to Russia, we would leave all of our electronic equipment on the plane, with the batteries out, because this is a new frontier. And they’re trying to find out not just about what we do in our government. They’re trying to find out about what a lot of companies do and they were going after the personal emails of people who worked in the State Department.”

According to the email, in a Jan. 6, 2014, speech to General Electric’s Global Leadership Meeting in Boca Raton, Fla., Clinton also lamented the high cost of campaigns as “so ridiculous” and described it as a “kind of free for all” that the Supreme Court allowed.

“So we’re kind of in the wild west, and, you know, it would be very difficult to run for president without raising a huge amount of money and without having other people supporting you because your opponent will have their supporters. So I think as hard as it was when I ran, I think it’s even harder now,” Clinton said.

“With today’s WikiLeaks revelations we are finding out who Hillary Clinton really is, and it’s not hard to see why she fought so hard to keep her transcripts of speeches to Wall Street banks paying her millions of dollars secret,” Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, said in a statement. “The truth that has been exposed here is that the persona Hillary Clinton has adopted for her campaign is a complete and utter fraud. How can Bernie Sanders and many like-minded Democrats continue to support her candidacy in light of these revelations?”

Analysts doubted that the excerpts would have much effect now. In New Hampshire, where the race is too close to call and Sanders still has a strong following, pollster Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, said the Clinton news wouldn’t make much difference. “Most of this is already baked into the cake,” he said.

In North Carolina, Jason Husser, director of the Elon University Poll, agreed the effect would be minimal. “While some of Clinton’s quotes certainly aren’t helpful to her,” Husser said, “they largely confirm suspicions that many in the Sanders’ coalition already begrudgingly accepted as they switched to Clinton over Trump.”

In California, Democratic consultant Bob Mulholland agreed the Clinton news would not hurt her. “With only 33 days left, most voters have concluded the candidates have warts,” he said, and have made their decisions with that in mind. </s> Hours after Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey rattled the world with the revelation he had discovered previously unknown emails related to its probe of Hillary Clinton’s private server, the former secretary of state’s campaign demanded he release the content of those messages to the public—messages reportedly found in the inbox of none other than Anthony Weiner.

Three months after determining Clinton’s use of a “homebrew” server while at the State Department had been “reckless” but not criminal, Comey penned a letter to Congress announcing his office had recovered further messages “that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” The New York Times reported the FBI had found those emails on devices belonging to former Congressman Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife, vice chairwoman of Clinton’s campaign, amid a separate investigation into the lascivious one-time mayoral candidate’s alleged sexting with a minor.

“FBI Director Comey should immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen,” demanded Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, no stranger to emails himself, in a statement to the press. “The director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining. We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July.”

Podesta also acknowledged the potential of the news to jar the impending presidential election, in which most projections currently show Clinton beating Donald Trump handily.

“It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election,” wrote Podesta.

The Clinton operative’s calls echo those made by Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.

“We call on the FBI to immediately release all emails pertinent to their investigation,” the Republican understudy tweeted earlier today. “Americans have the right to know before Election Day.”

Trump himself gloated over the findings at a rally in New Hampshire this afternoon.

“I need to open with a very critical breaking news announcement. The FBI has just sent a letter to Congress informing them that they have discovered new emails pertaining to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s investigation,” the Queens-born businessman told the roaring audience. “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.”

Trump and his fellow Republicans had previously disparaged Comey—a member of their party—and his office’s investigation into the server as somehow compromised or “rigged.”

There is at present no evidence Clinton attempted to conceal the newfound correspondence, nor that the FBI has formally reopened its investigation, nor that anything in the emails is incriminating to anyone.

A protege of Sen. Charles Schumer and a friend to the Clintons, Weiner once appeared among the rising lights of New York City politics. Then, in 2011, he accidentally posted a partially nude photo of himself on Twitter while sharing explicit images with several women.

He resigned his Brooklyn-Queens seat, but then attempted to return from the political grave with a run for mayor in 2013. He briefly led the field in the Democratic primary, until it again surfaced that he had sent even more lewd messages to three more women.

The fallen pol ultimately placed fifth in the race, well below now-Mayor Bill de Blasio. Abedin remained beside him through each humiliation.

Then, in August, the New York Post published images Weiner had apparently sent to yet another woman—one of which pictured his five-year-old son cuddled up near his visibly erect member. In the thick of the campaign season, Abedin finally announced she would leave her husband.

The situation deteriorated further for the ex-congressman when the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail published sexualized online correspondence between Weiner and a 15-year-old girl. This, reportedly, is what triggered the FBI investigation.

Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media. </s> WASHINGTON (JTA) — A renewed investigation into whether Hillary Clinton or her aides mishandled classified information reportedly arose out of the FBI probe of whether Anthony Weiner sexted with an underage girl.

James Comey, the FBI director, on Friday wrote to the chairman of congressional oversight committees that the “FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private server Clinton used when she was secretary of state.

He said the revelation came about because of an “unrelated case” but did not detail it further. The New York Times, followed by other media outlets, quoted sources as saying that the new emails were uncovered in their probe into Weiner, a former congressman who also ran for mayor of New York.

Weiner, who is Jewish and who was close to the right-wing pro-Israel community while in Congress, is married to a top aide to Clinton, Huma Abedin. They separated this summer when it was revealed that his habit of sexting, or exchanging lascivious images and narratives, which drove him out of Congress and then scuttled his bid for mayor, was continuing unabated. It was subsequently alleged that he was in a sexting relationship with a 15-year old girl in North Carolina, which led to the federal investigation.

Comey had previously closed the inquiry into the Democratic presidential nominee’s server, saying she had mishandled information by using a private server – a result of Clinton’s determination to keep some exchanges quiet – but that nothing rose to the level of a criminal complaint.

Donald Trump, Clinton’s Republican rival, seized on the revelation, praising the FBI at a rally, and saying “We must not let #CrookedHillary take her CRIMINAL SCHEME into the Oval Office” on Twitter.

John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, fired out a statement calling on the FBI to reveal more about the emails, saying the campaign was certain there was nothing in the emails that would implicate Clinton.

“It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election,” Podesta said. “The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining. We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July.” </s> Three of Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs were released Saturday by WikiLeaks, casting an awkward spotlight on the Democrat’s ties to the biggest players on Wall Street in the final stretch of the White House race.

Clinton’s campaign did not contest the authenticity of the remarks, which were part of a huge trove of documents hacked from the emails of campaign chairman John Podesta by WikiLeaks.

The campaign has blamed the Russian government for the hacks, a view shared by the US government, and accused the anti-secrecy website of seeking to help Clinton’s Republican rival for the presidency Donald Trump.

Among other issues, Clinton is shown in the speeches offering opinions on financial regulations, relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the negative effects of previous WikiLeaks releases on US foreign policy.

Clinton’s remarks are not dramatically out of step with her public remarks on the same issues, though they may read as a bit more forthright in style.

In her October 2013 address to Goldman Sachs, she suggested something had to be done to rein in Wall Street abuses “for political reasons.”

“There was also a need to do something because for political reasons, if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it’s all the fault of Wall Street, you can’t sit idly by and do nothing,” Clinton said.

Clinton made the paid speeches to the financial giant between the time she left her position as secretary of state and started her White House bid.

Her record of delivering speeches for Goldman Sachs was a campaign staple for her Democratic primary rival Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who argued that she could not be relied upon to regulate firms by which she has been paid.

Her White House rival Trump has scrambled to try to use the hacked emails against her, notably accusing Clinton aides of improperly securing inside information from the Obama administration about the investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

He has also seized heavily on other documents recently released by WikiLeaks, showing that Clinton, in private speeches to major banks in 2013 and 2014, expressed views in favor of free trade and Wall Street self-regulation that are at odds with her positions as a candidate. </s> The huge trove of hacked emails from Emmanuel Macron's campaign had barely been released online when the spotlight immediately fell on Russia hackers.

With as much as 9 gigabytes of data from the campaign having been dumped online, instant comparisons were made with the cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee and the chairman of Hillary Clinton's Democratic campaign.

US intelligence agencies said in January that Vladimir Putin, Russian President, had ordered those hacks to influence the election on behalf of Donald Trump, her Republican rival who went on to win the US presidency.

The Russian president has repeatedly denied the accusations and this week said "it has never occurred to us to interfere in other countries internal affairs".
WikiLeaks releases over 2000 emails from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman and former Counselor to the President John Podesta.