Watergate...

Clinton’s team unleashes Watergate attack against Trump

In an essay shared with POLITICO, the campaign accuses Trump and Russia of criminal theft.

By Annie Karni

Four decades after five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is trying to frame the hacking of her campaign chairman’s email as a repeat of the most famous political scandal in American history – and to directly implicate Donald Trump.

“What did Trump know, and when did he know it?” the campaign asks in an essay that will post on Medium, a play on the famous line from the Senate’s Watergate investigation. (“What did the President know and when did he know it?” Sen. Howard Baker asked then.)

“We’re witnessing another effort to steal private campaign documents in order to influence an election,” Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin writes in an early version of the post, which was shared with POLITICO. “Only this time, instead of filing cabinets, it’s people’s emails they’re breaking into…and a foreign government is behind it.”

Clinton’s campaign has been increasingly frustrated by media coverage of campaign chairman John Podesta’s stolen emails, which are being released by the thousands every morning on Wikileaks.

Major news outlets have treated the internal correspondence of top campaign officials as a treasure trove of unfiltered information about how Clinton’s operatives navigated a thorny and prolonged primary challenge, and dealt with the almost-crippling State Department email scandal, which defined the early months of Clinton's campaign.

Private email conversations about Chelsea Clinton, where former presidential aide Doug Band accused her of acting like a "spoiled brat kid" who "hasn't found her way and has a lack of focus in her life" have had internal repercussions.

And portions of Clinton's secretive paid speeches in front of Wall Street banks -- where she touts the importance of having a "public and a private position" on contentious political issues -- could still have reverberations for the former secretary of state down the line.

But the Democrat’s campaign has argued that newsrooms should ignore the emails or at least identify them as hacked – not leaked – documents.

Clinton press secretary, and former Justice Department spokesman, Brian Fallon, first compared the Wiki release to Watergate last week in a tweet. But Saturday’s Medium post marks the start of a more deliberate push that will carry through the final three weeks of the campaign to frame the emails as part of a criminal hack – and to make the electronic files seem as compromised to the media and to voters as reading and reporting on a stolen physical document.

The campaign will lean into the suggestion that Trump or his close advisers are connected directly to the hack, which is widely believed to be tied to Russia.

“Donald Trump needs to condemn these illegal hacks and denounce Russian efforts to intervene in our election,” Caplin writes. “Why is Trump protecting Putin by lying about Russia’s role in these hacks? What did his campaign know and when did they know it? Why won’t he condemn this? With less than a month until Election Day, these are the questions we need answered — and soon.”

Podesta last week claimed Trump operatives colluded with the Russians in an effort to derail Clinton and meddle in the U.S. election. Speaking to reporters aboard the Democratic nominee’s campaign plane, he pointed to longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone as an operative who has bragged about his back-channel connection to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and said it was safe to assume Stone had advanced warning about the hack. Stone has vehemently denied the accusation.

Trump has denied any colluding with Russia and any involvement in the hack of the Democratic National Committee last summer. "I don't know Putin," he said at the second presidential debate. "I notice anything wrong happens, they like to say the Russians. She doesn't know it's the Russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking."

In the Medium post, Caplin also highlights a Yahoo! News report that a former foreign policy adviser to Trump, Carter Page, had private communications with Russian government officials.

About 10,000 emails have been released so far, and Wikileaks has said it plans to release 50,000 emails in total. So far, the Clinton campaign has not confirmed or denied the authenticity of any of the messages.

But in the post, the campaign also attempts to enter into the bloodstream the idea that emails in the Podesta dump could be “manipulated,” apparently girding for potentially sensitive information to be released in the final 24 days of the race.

“We also know that documents previously released by the Russian hackers behind Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks have been manipulated, and that we should only expect more of these dirty tricks moving forward,” Caplin writes.