Over a period of weeks, the shadowy WikiLeaks organization has been releasing hacked copies of Podesta's emails dating back years. WikiLeaks almost certainly has ties to Russian intelligence and is obviously up to no good. The requisite caveat lector thus applies. But so far, every email under scrutiny appears to be genuine.
And what a story they tell. America's greatest novelists could not have concocted a tale that so perfectly confirms dark suspicions about how the liberal elites running America really operate. Taken in total, the picture Podesta's emails present is of a man whose tentacles are adroitly moving all the levers of power. In retrospect, Podesta's casual attitude toward Clinton's email problems doesn't look oblivious—it looks prescient. Why should he worry about disgrace for Hillary Clinton when he and his friends in politics, business, and the media dictate what becomes a scandal?
Read this collection of anecdotes from Wikileaks A little bit here:
The Podesta emails, it's fair to say, have had trouble elbowing their way onto the front page. It's of course an extraordinarily strange season for politics. In any normal year, such revelations might have swamped Clinton's candidacy. But this year she benefits from the media's hopeless addiction to Donald Trump's antics.
Another reason for the relative lack of attention has to do with the reprehensible nature of WikiLeaks. There's something unseemly about poring over hacked emails, even when they are of demonstrable public interest. Few among us would see our personal and professional relationships emerge intact and undamaged if years of our emails were exposed to public scrutiny. When WikiLeaks's initial revelations centered on the Bush administration's efforts in the war on terror, the media largely characterized the organization as a white-knight whistleblower. As the years went on, there was little scrutiny of the organization's methods or ties to foreign intelligence services—even when WikiLeaks indiscriminately released information that provoked riots and protests in multiple African countries, in which hundreds were killed.
Only this year, now that WikiLeaks has attacked the Democratic party, is the organization being reevaluated. After years of tolerating WikiLeaks's founder Julian Assange's hiding out in Ecuador's embassy in London, it was the release of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speech transcripts that finally prompted enough international pressure to get the Ecuadorian government to cut off Assange's Internet access.
But the most obvious reason Podesta's emails are being downplayed is that they are embarrassing to the media. A recent NBC poll found that only 19 percent of Americans approve of the media, a rating well below that of Clinton or even Trump. And the missives in Podesta's inbox reveal good reasons for the media's reputation to be in the dumpster.
Bonus feature: Leaked Emails Offer Clues to How Clinton Would Govern
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