A new Wikileaks email dump shows a senior Politico reporter allowing Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman to check his work before publication.
“Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u,” Politico senior White House reporter Glenn Thrush wrote to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Thrush also asked Podesta to keep the matter between them.
“Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f—ed up anything.”
Podesta responded that he saw “no problem here.”
It’s not uncommon in Washington for reporters to send materials to sources for fact-checking. But the language Thrush used was particularly embarrassing and led to a number of jabs at his expense on social media.
In a tweet, Thrush said he was only checking the accuracy of what he had written with Podesta, adding that he did this with all of his sources.
Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Politico, said Thrush is one of the best political reporters in the country in no “small part because he understands that it is his job is to get inside information, not appear perfect when someone illegally hacks email.”
Podesta’s emails are widely believed to have been stolen by the Russian government. Wikileaks has been releasing them on a near-daily basis.
“Cutting through the clutter, what is clear in this case is that Glenn got the chairman of the notoriously secretive Clinton campaign – who is not typically a font of detail — to confirm a bunch of inside information that he culled from other sources” Dayspring said. “I can speak with firsthand knowledge and experience that Glenn checks the validity of portions of often complex reporting with top officials and sources on both sides of the aisle.”
The story sent in advance to Podesta was published on May 1 with the headline “Hillary’s big-money dilemma.”
In the story, Podesta is mentioned several times, including this paragraph:
Podesta, people close to the campaign say, supports the Cheng-led strategy of creating an army of small- to medium-scale campaign bundlers – a “flat” fundraising structure that would give donors the sense of ownership in the campaign. Podesta jokingly refers to himself as the “Sultan of Flat,” but more than a dozen older generation Clinton fundraisers and donors interviewed over the past two weeks said they believed the new structure would eventually give way to a more conventional fundraising apparatus that would empower mega-donors on the coasts.