InsideSources

The Obama administration’s well-documented relationship with Google had no small impact on the last eight years, clearing regulatory hurdles for technologies like self-driving cars and A.I., using custom-made software to help the president get re-elected and opening the first high-traffic revolving door between the White House and one of Silicon Valley’s giants. Now peeks inside Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president via the leaked emails of campaign chair John Podesta suggest Google could be unseated by one of its competitors — Apple — in a future Democratic White House.

WikiLeaks’ latest dump of emails hacked from Podesta include more correspondence between Apple higher-ups and Clinton staffers, with the back-and-forth led chiefly by Podesta, who reportedly tops Clinton’s short list for chief of staff, and Lisa Jackson, a former EPA administrator under President Obama and Apple’s vice president of environmental policy and social initiatives.

Jackson works closely with Apple CEO Tim Cook, a policial novice, according to chatter between Clinton staffers who say she’s taken a lead role in steering Cook through Washington.

“Tim loves HRC – not very political but Lisa has been getting him to start being more active,” finance director for the Clinton campaign Dennis Cheng wrote to Podesta last June. “They’ve done a few fundraisers for Senate candidates. Would be great if Tim would host an event and also be helpful to other ways – personal endorsement, etc?”

The email preceded a meeting between Cook and Podesta where staffers urged caution for fear of putting too much pressure on the Apple CEO.

“Tim’s office requested a 1:1 meeting today, which was a nice way of saying ‘no staff,'” campaign fundraiser Lindsay Roitman wrote on a email chain including Podesta. “I think this is one we should proceed cautiously. He’s supportive but new to this so I think we shouldn’t come on too strong.”

More emails show the beginning of a revolving door with Podesta pitching multiple contacts to Jackson for jobs at Apple, while others document multiple meetings between the two and frequent back-and-forth on a number of technology and business issues addressed by the former secretary of state.

In one exchange, Podesta walked back Clinton’s support for withholding patents for ransom from companies in exchnage for taxes on their overseas assets (which Apple has many of). In another, Podesta convinced Jackson to take a public stance with the campaign after Clinton voiced her opposition to government-mandated backdoors into products featuring encrypted communciations like the iPhone.

“I wanted to reach out to say thanks for the principled and nuanced stance the secretary took last night on encryption and the tech sector,” Jackson wrote to Podesta after Clinton said “the back door is the wrong door” during the Dec. 19 Democratic presidential debate.

“I would not go that route,” Clinton said in response to a question about whether she would weaken encryption in exchange for greater surveillance of Americans’ communciations for the sake of national security. The question came after the San Bernardino ISIS-inspired shooting in December, during the early stages of the FBI’s fight with Apple to unlock the iPhone of one of the shooters.

“I don’t know enough about the technology,” she said, “but I’ve got enough confidence in our tech experts, and maybe the back door is the wrong door. I understand what Apple and others are saying about that.”

Clinton’s stance came after Jackson organized a briefing on the issue between Apple and Clinton staffers.

“Leadership at Apple certainly noticed and I am sure that is true though out the Valley,” Jackson continued in the letter to Podesta (which he forwarded to Clinton), adding encryption doesn’t preclude Apple from assiting law enforcement with access to metadata and “other very useful categories of data,” something she said the company does “thousands of times every month.”

“Lisa, Thanks. We are trying to hold the line in a crazy environment,” Podesta replied. “Thought any more about whether you could play a public role with us?”

“Yes I can,” Jackson responded. “Am happy to.”

The relationship bore exactly the kind of fruit the Clinton camp was hoping for. In August, Cook hosted a fundraiser for Clinton in California, also attended by Jackson, where ticket costs ranged from $2,700 to $50,000. Cook even made the short list of vice presidential picks for Clinton alongside Bill Gates and others.

Portions of Clinton’s technology platform already borrow heavily from Apple and Cook, who hammering away on Apple’s chief political issue earlier this year, said the choice between privacy and security painted by the FBI is a false one.

“I know people like to frame this argument is privacy versus national security. That is overly simplistic and it is not true, this is also about public safety,” Cook said. “Our job is to protect our customers … It’s not just about privacy but it’s also about public safety.”

Cook and the company expounded on its position in an open letter and FAQ sheet, which states, “We feel the best way forward would be for the government to withdraw its demands under the All Writs Act and, as some in Congress have proposed, form a commission or other panel of experts on intelligence, technology, and civil liberties to discuss the implications for law enforcement, national security, privacy, and personal freedoms. Apple would gladly participate in such an effort.”

In what may be the first of many similar technology policy positions, Clinton agrees.

“Hillary rejects the false choice between privacy interests and keeping Americans safe,” the “Protect Online Privacy as well as Security” portion of her tech platform reads. “She was a proponent of the USA Freedom Act, and she supports Senator Mark Warner and Representative Mike McCaul’s idea for a national commission on digital security and encryption. This commission will work with the technology and public safety communities to address the needs of law enforcement, protect the privacy and security of all Americans that use technology, assess how innovation might point to new policy approaches, and advance our larger national security and global competitiveness interests.”

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Apple CEO Tim Cook asked for a personal meeting with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton after she appeared to agree the government should withhold patents from large corporations until they pay taxes on money they keep offshore, emails leaked Thursday from Apple to Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta show.

The latest dump of emails hacked from Podesta and released by WikiLeaks include another from the campaign’s frequent Apple contact and former Obama EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, hours after Clinton signaled support for holding as “leverage” the patents of major corporations like Apple until they brings assests stored overseas back to the U.S. and pay taxes on them.

Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental policy and social initiatives, forwarded a news story from The Hill reporting the exchange Clinton had during a town hall in Sioux City, Iowa on Jan. 5.

“We have major corporations in this country — GE, Apple, many others — that are salting money away offshore,” someone from the audience told Clinton. “Can’t we use their patents as leverage to make them pay their taxes?”

The former secretary of state responded, “Yes, we can and we will.”

In her email to Podesta, Jackson offered to brief the campaign on the topic and said Cook could speak with either Podesta or Clinton about it.

“Hey there. Happy to brief folks up on this topic. Tim would love to speak to HRC or you as well,” Jackson wrote. The Apple VP included a link to a YouTube video in which the question and Clinton’s response can be heard clearly.

Podesta didn’t reply until the next day, saying Clinton couldn’t hear the question and that she was talking about corporate inversions — when a U.S. company merges with a foreign company and reestablishes itself overseas to avoid paying taxes in the U.S. He said the camapign had already provided the same explanation to The Wall Street Journal and CNN, and convinced them to abandon the story.

“We have been pushing back on reporters that she was talking about inversions and not patents,” Podesta wrote. “Didn’t hear the patent part of the question. She wasn’t announcing anything new and is not for patent suspensions. That has convinced WSJ and CNN not to pursue. Hope that helps and sorry for the dust up. Growing pains of bigger town halls where you can’t really hear the question.”

According to The Hill story from the previous day, that outlet also reached out to the campaign for details on Clinton’s stance but never heard back, indicating the camapign may have gone into damage control to strategize how to roll back a policy stance that would have been wildly unpopular with Clinton’s long list of Silicon Valley donors — something the campaign was forced to do repeatedly after other Clinton tech-flubs, more Podesta emails show.

Apple has come under increasing fire in recent years for storing assets abroard and avoding taxes in and outside of the U.S. The iPhone maker also has a reputation for weaponizing its patents in ongoing lawsuits with competitors like Samsung.

Earlier emails show the Silicon Valley giant offered to brief the Clinton camp on the encryption issue while FBI Director James Comey was in the midst of a campaign on Capitol Hill to convince lawmakers to step into the “going dark” debate, in which he advocated forcing Apple and others to come up with a workaround for letting law enforcment access encrypted communciations.

Other emails indicate Cook was on the short list of Clinton running mates before she named Virginia Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine.

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Former Blink-182 guitarist Tom Delonge apparently wasn’t exaggerating when he said “big things are coming” from his ongoing multimedia UFO project “To the Stars,” new emails hacked from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman and fellow UFO enthusiast John Podesta show.

The newest emails between the two dumped by WikiLeaks reveal talks between Delonge and top television and Hollywood studios including Scott Free, founded by director Ridley Scott and credited with the recent sci-fi blockbuster “The Martian,” Allison Shearmur, producer of the next installment in the Star Wars franchise “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” director Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, Netflix, Amazon and VICE News for a fictional television series based on his recently published novel “Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows,” the first of nine planned books “that will reveal fascinating secrets surrounding the true, well-documented events of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon,” according to the description on Amazon.

“Like everybody else I meet with, their faces drop halfway through the meeting and can’t believe that I am spearheading a project that has support from the shadows,” Delonge wrote. “The execs were again, blown away.”

The Feb. 23 email from Delonge to Podesta said Scott Free and director Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, revealed to be in talks with Delonge from a previously leaked email, were still digging through the novel. The guitarist also mentioned a multi-episode non-fiction documentary in the vein of Netflix’s highly-acclaimed “Making a Murderer,” for which Delonge presumably interviewed Podesta, according to an already disclosed email, but said they would have to finalize a production studio before moving forward with VICE, HBO, Netflix, or Amazon.

“I have an Amazon meeting and VICE News in next 2 weeks. Amazon, Netflix [which Delonge said wanted a “company-wide meeting on the project] are biggest TV studios now and doing the most prestigious shows, actually,” the Blink-182 founder wrote. “VICE News just raised $300 million to start doing fictional television based on non-fiction. Sounds like our model.”

In that and an earlier Feb. 16 email to Podesta, Delonge described plans he outlined with Rolling Stone for a two-part story revealing the project, the first of which was presumably published on April 27, with a second story to include a video trailer for the documentary and the foreword of a novel written by the Angels & Airwaves frontman.

“We like Rolling Stone, right?” Delonge wrote before asking Podesta to recommend reliable reporters at other outlets for follow-up coverage including Leslie Kean, a noted UFO enthusiast in contact with the Clinton adviser per more emails.

“I have gone through rules with all advisors on what can and can not be said,” Delonge wrote in reference to the Rolling Stone article on Feb. 23. “It will be tricky, because they will want to know what kind of support I am getting, and I can not and will not say anything to them — but they should get the idea that this is important and real.”

In the April 27 article following Delonge through his California-based Into the Stars production headquarters, the guitarist said the information for his multimedia effort comes from “sources within the aerospace industry and the Department of Defense and NASA.”

“That sentence, specifically, was approved for me to say,” he told the magazine.

While mainstream and social media have frequently made a joke of his obsession, the Podesta email dump by WikiLeaks –which Delonge believes will help prove the existence of UFOs — purportedly demonstrate at the very least his ability to use his celebrity status to make connections in government.

An email dated Feb. 22 reveals one source to be Rob Weiss, executive vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s highly classified Skunk Works division.

“Mr. Weiss from Lockheed SkunkWorks just emailed me asking if there were any updates,” Delonge wrote. “I am not expecting much, but if there is anything I can tell him and the General, however small, I would like to respectfully pass it along.”

Weiss previously said 80 percent of the work on advanced development programs Skunk Works does for the DOD is classified — work that includes the aviation-legendary U2 high-altitude, long-range surveillance and reconnaissance jet the SR-71 Blackbird (holder of the world record for fastest air-breathing manned aircraft since 1976), the F-117 Nighthawk stealth ground-attack aircraft and more recently, the F-22 and F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighter jets.

A new email dump Thursday has Delonge reporting to Podesta meetings last fall “with current Commanding Officers at the Air Force Space Command,” and earlier emails revealed those advisers include retired Maj. Gen. William N. McCasland, former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where Delonge claims pieces of the UFO that some believe crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 were sent.

The Sept. 24 mail from last year includes recommendations from McCasland for a “White House memo,” possibly referencing a future Clinton administration, with instructions for divulging information in coordination with DoD, DNI [Director of National Intelligence] and NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration].”

“The General (from Wright Patt R&D) and I talk every other day,” Delonge wrote in the Feb. 23 “Updates” email. “He and I talked on the phone the other night and he is excited, he really thinks that the DOD is going to embrace my project because I am out to show all the positive things great people have done on this topic.”

“It’s easy to poke fun about the topic from an armchair, but unless you’re invited to the meetings I have been a part of, then…no more laughing,” Delonge wrote in a Friday Instagram post. He followed up with two posts Monday showing a view of the White House from a hotel window and another of the guitarist walking in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Great meetings here in DC. Just a one day trip across the country… to talk about stuff.”

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The ongoing WikiLeaks dump of emails hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta have given insight to the candid policy positions of the Democratic nominee infamous for siding with the politically popular, and while Podesta himself rarely elaborates on his opinions — mostly sticking to one-sentence replies — a new batch of correspondence released this week suggests the former White House chief of staff will be an advocate for encryption if his camp claims victory in November.

Last May FBI Director James Comey was hitting his stride with a round of congressional testimonies warning lawmakers that moves by Apple and Google to encrypt user communications from end-to-end by default would assist terrorists and criminals in “going dark” online, making it exceedingly more difficult for agencies to surveil them and raising the chances of successful kidnappings or terrorist attacks.

At the same time Apple was mounting support from cryptologists, privacy advocates and fellow companies in the form of a letter to the White House urging President Obama to reject any government proposal mandating backdoors for law enforcement in encryption products.

On May 19 Apple’s vice president of environmental policy and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson (an administrator for the EPA during Obama’s first term) emailed a Washington Post article about the letter to Podesta, offering to brief the month-old Clinton campaign on the issue.

“Hey John,” Jackson wrote. “I know you’ve seen the article below. Huge issue out here as I am sure you know. If you ever want our tech experts to brief your folks, we’d be happy to do it.”

Podesta — a fan of Apple products according to numerous emails — gave an uncharacteristically (compared to his other emails) long reply, describing the issue as going “back to the future” of his time in the White House when then-President Bill Clinton’s administration wrestled with encryption.

“Back to the future,” Podesta replied. “I managed this issue for President Clinton after we got ourselves all tangled in knots over the Clipper Chip. Had many disagreements with Louis Freeh on the topic.”

In 1993 then-FBI Director Louis Freeh tried to promote “key escrow” solutions to access encryption, including a microchip known as a “Clipper Chip” developed by the National Security Agency for use by telecommunications companies to encrypt voice data in their phone products. The chip essentially acted as a master key for accessing encryption that would be held by the government or a third party, and it’s proposal birthed the first “Crypto Wars.”

While Congress debated an eventual update to wiretapping laws in the early 1990s, Freeh and others in law enforcement argued “the extra effort and expense will be wasted if the only thing the wiretappers can hear is the hissy white noise of encrypted phone conversations and faxes,” The New York Times reported in June 1994.

“If cryptography is not controlled, wiretapping could be rendered obsolete,” the article reads. “[Freeh] has told Congress that preserving the ability to intercept communications legally, in the face of these technological advances, is ‘the No. 1 law enforcement, public safety and national security issue facing us today.'”

Podesta’s reply to Jackson implies he was an advocate for encryption during the debates in the Clinton White House, which eventually sided against the chip and removed export barriers on encryption products (another debate that was revived last year).

Campaign staff worked against multiple terror attacks through the end of the year and into 2016 to ensure Clinton wasn’t perceived as pro-backdoor, despite the former secretary of state’s own verbal blunders and scarce knowledge on the issue.

By November Clinton described the issue publicly as a “classic hard choice” between privacy and security following ISIS-inspired terror attacks in Paris, and staffers began to worry the “Internet Freedom” agenda she championed while secretary of state in the midst of the Arab Spring, when whole countries including Egypt shut down internet access, could be used against her for promoting tools like encryption, which investigators in Paris said attackers used.

“Man this is tough,” Sara Solow, a domestic policy advisor for Clinton, wrote on an email chain discussing a press response. “Is there evidence that bad guys — not just dissidents but terrorists or whatever — have also benefitted from the technologies supported by the internet freedom agenda?”

“The bad guys could already get crypto — we helped the good guys get it,” Ben Scott, who advised Clinton on tech issues while she was secretary of state, wrote in suggested talking points.

Debate heated up last December following the San Bernardino shootings and the FBI lawsuit brought against Apple to unlock the iPhone of one of the shooters. After the third Democratic presidential primary debate, staffers went back and forth on how to spin conflicting comments Clinton made that could be construed as supporting some kind of backdoor.

“She basically said no mandatory back doors last night (‘I would not want to go to that point’). In the next paragraph she then said some not-so-great stuff — about there having to be ‘some way’ to ‘break  into’ encrypted content– but then she again said ‘a backdoor may be the wrong door,'” Solow wrote, “…she’s certainly NOT calling for the backdoor now — although she does then appear to believe there is ‘some way’ to do the impossible.”

Teddy Goff, who manages Clinton’s online presence and served as the digital director for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, added Podesta to the chain, who he described as “a fellow crypto hobbyist” (who “may be something more than a hobbyist”).

Goff said Podesta “heard nice things from friends of ours in [Silicon Valley], which is rare!” following the debate and suggested the campaign could safely say Clinton “pledged not to mandate a backdoor as president,” but warned against her use of some language making it clear she didn’t fully grasp the issue.

“[S]peaking of not understanding the technology,” Goff wrote, “there is a critical technical point which our current language around encryption makes plain she isn’t aware of. [O]pen-source unencrypted messaging technologies are in the public domain. there is literally no way to put that genie back in the bottle. [S]o we can try to compel a whatsapp to unencrypt, but that may only have the effect of pushing terrorists onto emergent encrypted platforms.”

Solow suggested the campaign “tell tech off the record” Clinton was referring to hacks of specific devices, not backdoors into encryption products broadly.

“[I]n terms of wanting a way to break in – couldn’t we tell tech off the record that she had in mind the malware/key strokes idea (insert malware into a device that you know is a target, to capture keystrokes before they are encrypted),” Solow wrote. “Or that she had in mind really super code breaking by the NSA. But not the backdoor per se?”

In early 2016 California Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren, an avid advocate for digital privacy who’s repeatedly sought to block surveillance technology via legislation, wrote to Podesta with “hope that our candidate does not leap on the side of the FBI on the encryption ruling,” and asked to speak with Clinton if she was leaning in favor of law enforcement.

As the legal battle between the Department of Justice and Apple ensued, Lofgren followed up in February with a statement she wrote for Clinton calling on the DOJ to abandon the lawsuit.

Podesta replied that while the campaign would likely “stay out” of the issue, he assured Lofgren Clinton wouldn’t “embrace” the FBI’s position.

“I think we are inclined to stay out of this and push it back to companies and [the United States Government] to dialogue and resolve,” he wrote. “Won’t embrace FBI.”

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Emails hacked from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and released by Wikileaks this week show the Democratic nominee had mixed feelings about net neutrality weeks before the Federal Communications Commission voted on the topic, and was reluctant to take a public stance despite urgings from her staff.

Last Valentine’s Day Tom Freedman — a former senior advisor to then-President Bill Clinton and a technology advisor during both of President Obama’s election campaigns — emailed Podesta to ask him if Clinton would “say something positive” ahead of the vote in roughly two weeks, adding he had “no doubt” the former secretary of state would support the FCC’s proposal to reclassify internet providers as public utilities.

“The FCC vote on net neutrality is set for Feb. 26, she’ll no doubt support the position of Title II if asked after the vote (I assume),” Freedman, now president of his own consulting firm, wrote in an email to Podesta obtained by WikiLeaks. “[W]ould it make sense to say something positive now including about her commitment to an open and accessible web? Maybe she has said something already I missed…”

Freedman’s consulting firm “works with philanthropies, nonprofits and digital companies” and follows “issues related to building a more open internet” like “net neutrality,” and in a piece for Politico last December listed net neutrality as one of a number of “significant victories” alongside SOPA/PIPA “which sets the rules of the road to keep internet companies from restricting what you can and can’t read.”

In a poll following the FCC’s February vote, Freedman got a majority of respondents — 58 percent — to agree “we need net neutrality rules to protect us from big internet service providers.”

But Clinton wasn’t ready to show public love for the new rules, even after the agency received millions of comments in support, President Obama had called for them months before and when their passage was virtually guaranteed by the FCC’s Democratic majority of commissioners.

After Podesta forwarded the email to Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan, the aide said the secretary was “ambivalent” about the issue and unwilling even to tweet her support.

“Thanks guys. We’ve talked to her about tweeting her support and she’s been a bit ambivalent. But I agree – it’s a good issue to be out front on. We’ll revisit,” Sullivan wrote back a day later.

That apparently started a slow move toward Clinton’s final position on the issue. Nine days later during a conference on women in Silicon Valley and two days before the FCC vote, Clinton gave a lukewarm endorsement, saying she would “vote for net neutrality” as she understood it at the time because FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal avoided “the worst of the utility regulations,” presumably referring to price regulation.

“I would vote for net neutrality because, as I understand it, it’s Title II with a lot of changes within it in order to avoid the worst of the utility regulations,” she said according to The Hill. “It’s a foot in the door. It’s a value statement.”

Clinton, who had yet to launch her presidential bid, said certain aspects of net neutrality could benefit from congressional input, but implied it would take too long. At the same time, she described Title II as “the only hook they’ve [the FCC] got” to justify net neutrality.

“I think that for the FCC to do what they want to do to try to create net neutrality as the norm, they have to have a hook to hang it on,” Clinton said. “So they’re hanging it on Title II.”

Months later in an October op-ed for Quartz, Clinton made a much more bold endorsement of “strong net neutrality rules,” vowing to uphold them if elected, and even supported another FCC rule later struck down in federal court that would have allowed municipal broadband providers to extend outside their territories and compete with private providers.

“Closing these loopholes and protecting other standards of free and fair competition — like enforcing strong net neutrality rules and preempting state laws that unfairly protect incumbent businesses — will keep more money in consumers’ wallets, enable startups to challenge the status quo, and allow small businesses to thrive,” she wrote.

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If you don’t know who Neera Tanden is, you should. She is not only the CEO and president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), but she is a longtime friend and adviser to Hillary Clinton.

But Tanden has come under recent scrutiny for essentially running CAP like a mini-Clinton White House instead of a center for progressive ideas, just waiting for the day the former secretary of state is inaugurated, so Tanden can take a position within her administration.

The latest WikiLeaks email dump has given people a rare inside look into the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign, and Tanden is a big player in that, showing how CAP and the campaign are very close.

Tanden first started as an associate director for domestic policy in Bill Clinton’s White House and senior policy adviser to the first lady. In 2000, she was Hillary’s deputy campaign manager and issues director for her New York Senate campaign. She also served as a policy director for Hillary’s 2008 presidential run and eventually served as a senior adviser for health reform during President Barack Obama’s presidency.

While she has no formal role with Clinton’s 2016 White House bid, she constantly stays in touch with John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, whose emails were illegally hacked and published by hacktivist group WikiLeaks this week. Podesta also previously served as president of CAP, highlighting the close relationship between Tanden and one of Clinton’s right-hand guys.

In many of the emails, Tanden offers advice or gives policy ideas to Podesta and other Clinton aides. For example, Tanden emailed Jake Sullivan, a top foreign policy adviser, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, and Podesta on June 2, 2015 to talk about the U.S. Supreme Court’s impending ruling on the Affordable Care Act.

“I think it would be helpful to have a story of how progressives and Hillary would make the Supreme Court an election issue (which would be a ready argument for liberals) if the Court rules against the government. It’s not that you wish that happens. But that would be the necessary consequence of a negative decision…the Court itself would become a hugely important political issue,” Tanden wrote in the email.

She then suggested that the CAP Action Fund, the political advocacy arm of CAP which Tanden is also in charge of, could “get that story started. But kinda rests on you guys to make it stick.”

And it looks like Tanden did what she suggested she would do. On June 21, The Atlantic wrote a story about how the Supreme Court ruling could be one of the first policy tests for 2016 presidential candidates. Tanden is quoted saying how Democrats would respond to an overturn of Obamacare with a “much broader critique.”

“You would see really two strands of response,” she said. “One is on the Affordable Care Act itself, and the other is on the role of the courts.”

This is the clearest example from the emails highlighting the coordination of CAP and the Clinton campaign, suggesting the two entities are in lock-step with each other.

It’s not necessarily surprising that Tanden would advise Clinton’s campaign and use her organization to help Clinton, but since CAP claims to represent progressive ideas, many people would assume that the organization would not take a side in the Democratic presidential primary or would even go as far as to support Clinton’s primary rival, Bernie Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist.

While CAP never publicly said they wouldn’t get involved in the primary, the emails show there was some negative discussion about the Vermont senator and his policies.

In an email chain about supporting a $15 minimum wage, Tanden and Sullivan suggested that people who supported the wage increase — which was a significant cornerstone of Sanders’ campaign — were part of the Red Army, a name given to the Russian military during communist leadership.

“Calling the ‘Fight for $15’ minimum wage campaign a modern-day communist ‘Red Army,’ these emails reflect how Clinton and her liberal allies at CAP really feel about the disastrous economic consequences of these policies,” said Jeremy Adler, communications director for America Rising Squared, a non-profit research firm that promotes conservative policies, to The Daily Caller. “As she famously noted, Clinton will say one thing in public and another in private — unfortunately in this case she’s willing to put millions of family-supporting jobs at risk to help herself politically.”

Tanden has also received heat for saying, “What’s wrong with the people of NH?” after Sanders’s First in the Nation primary win.

This doesn’t sit well with Sanders supporters and former employees who saw CAP as an organization pushing progressive ideas, but ended up just being a political machine for Clinton.

Zaid Jilani, a former reporter for ThinkProgress — CAP’s political reporting blog — has constantly criticized his former employer on social media.

When I worked at Center for American Progress, basically Hillary's think tank, Wall Street money impacted their policy big time #DemDebate

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 15, 2015

In the email leak, some emails also pointed to coordination between ThinkProgress and the Clinton campaign.

Judd Legum, founder and editor ThinkProgress blog, fed the Clinton campaign information about Sanders during the Democratic primary.

In one example in February 2016, Legum sent Podesta a link to an NBC story about Sanders defending rapper Killer Mike, one of his highest-profile supporters.

Legum highlighted a quote from Sanders explaining why Killer Mike isn’t sexist for urging Clinton supporters to vote for Sanders.

“I don’t go around, no one has ever heard me say, ‘Hey guys, let’s stand together, vote for a man.’ I would never do that, never have,” the Vermont senator stated to which Legum added, “Needless to say, he doesn’t say that because he doesn’t have to.”

Podesta replied, “Yes — we are on it.”

The WikiLeaks emails has intensified many frustrated feelings that Sanders supporters have about the primary process being rigged by the Democratic National Committee in favor of Clinton.

The fact that CAP, who according to their online mission is “dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans, through bold, progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action,” is seen coordinating with the Clinton campaign to push her ideas and campaign, isn’t helping members of the Bernie or Bust movement join the Clinton camp.

One user on Reddit perfectly summed up the movement’s thoughts on CAP:

“I used to work for CAP until I left earlier this year. I left in part because of we were to be a progressive organization we should have been behind Sanders 110%,” the user wrote. “Instead the entire organization has been retooled to be a pseudo PAC for [Hillary] Clinton. Also, Neera Tanden is just waiting and using CAP to get herself a cabinet post in a Clinton administration.”

Tanden has not publicly responded to the email hack yet and the Clinton campaign is claiming that the Russian government is trying to influence the presidential election.