In a scathing email, uncovered in the WikiLeaks hacks, The Hill columnist Brent Budowsky warns Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chair John Podesta that “If there is one thing that could well bring down a Hillary Clinton candidacy it is this cycle of money issues.”
“It was not uplifting to learn in recent hours that problems with foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation continue, Hillary Clinton was still making paid speeches for hire this week, and Tony Rodham is hustling gold mining deals in Haiti,” Budowsky wrote to Podesta on March 21, 2015, referencing Clinton’s closed-door speeches to Wall Street executives and a historically rare and lucrative Haitian “gold exploitation permit” her brother had secured in the wake of the deadly 2010 earthquake.
Budowsky assures Podesta that he was the rare journalist “publicly and unequivocally supporting Hillary Clinton in multiple ways in multiple media” against claims that she sent and received classified documents from a private server while she was secretary of state.
“I am now seriously pissed off that there is a real chance that her candidacy and the Democratic Party could be destroyed by these self-created dangers that continue to proliferate the closer she gets to presumably announcing her candidacy,” Budowsky fumes.
On other occasions, Budowsky, who proudly admits to being “a columnist who supports Hillary Clinton,” has even attacked Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer’s partnership with the New York Times and other media.
“My problem would be if the NYT has some sort of partnership, relationship, with such a hard-core partisan book that makes the NYT an effective agent of, or collaborator with, a partisan political operator or operation seeking to influence an election,” Budowsky wrote in an April 2015 email to New York Times Executive Director of Communications, Danielle Rhoades.
“Clinton Cash proved two things we already knew: that Bill and Hillary Clinton raise a lot of money, and that Hillary Clinton was secretary of State,” Budowsky wrote in a May 2015 column, titled, “The Clinton Cash Con.”
However, though, in the months after Budowsky had hoped that “the Clinton Cash con will soon be forgotten, as it should be,” the book made its way to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list and its reporting was confirmed, no less, by myriad media outlets across the ideological spectrum.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson.