Searching WikiLeaks

I spent some time this afternoon searching The Podesta Files at WikiLeaks. John Podesta is the chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign, a former counselor to Barack Obama, Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, and former head of the Center for American Progress. The Podesta Files are the product of a hack of Podesta's various email accounts.

The Podesta Files are an inside look into the Clinton political machine and make for interesting reading. For example, the search term "gun control" shows 236 emails that discussed it. Other variants of that search term such as "gun violence" and "gun safety resulted in 344 and 120 emails respectively. Even Ladd Everitt, formerly of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (sic), is mentioned in one of the emails.

One exchange that really caught my eye - and I haven't done extensive searching yet - was between Podesta and a Robert Wolf of 32Advisors. Mr. Wolf's firm is a strategic intelligence and advisory firm. Mr. Wolf was named one of the 100 Most Important People in Finance for 2013 by Worth Magazine. He is the former Chairman and CEO of  the Wall Street firm UBS Americas. He also served on a number of advisory boards and councils in the Obama Administration. To put it bluntly, Mr. Wolf is a mover and shaker, a high flyer and rainbow rider, and the consummate insider.

From an email dated October 7, 2015 in which Podesta and Wolf are arranging a meeting:

From:john.podesta@gmail.com
To: rwolf@32advisors.com
Date: 2015-10-07 19:40
Subject:

Supposed to do a presentation in 5 minutes. Free after 8:30 but on a train.
Probably could do a few minutes at 6:30. Either work for you?
On Oct 7, 2015 5:34 PM, "Robert Wolf" wrote:

> How you looking now or tonight
>
> On Oct 7, 2015, at 12:16 PM, John Podesta wrote:
>
> Call me at 2:00 if it still works. 202-999-0738.
> On Oct 6, 2015 6:40 PM, "Robert Wolf" wrote:
>
>> John-
>>
>> Appreciate you coming back to me as I know how jammed you are. Great day
>> for the Secretary yesterday –especially gun control & Benghazi response. As
>> an fyi- my wife Carol works at Sandy Hook Promise with the woman Nicole who
>> the Secretary introduced.
>>
>> Best times for me tomorrow are 930am, 2pm or 5pm. May be best for me to
>> call you.
>>
>> Agenda:
>>
>> 1. Meeting w the Secretary & best way to interact directly with
>> her (seldom of course).
>>
>> 2. Best way forward to integrate & interact with the team
>> (economics, business, surrogate, debate…).
>>
>> 3. VP Biden update.
>>
>> Speak soon,
>>
>> RW

The Nicole mentioned is Nicole Hockley who is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Sandy Hook Promise. Mr. Wolf's wife Carol is the Senior Development Manager. I presume that means her job is to secure funding for this gun prohibitionist organization.

What intrigues me about this email stream is the linkage between gun prohibitionists, their organizations, and those in (or formerly in) high finance. We all know about Michael Bloomberg but this email string shows it goes deeper than just him.

As a totally irrelevant aside, I found my first cousin Joe Paduda mentioned in a couple of Podesta's emails from 2008. Joe runs a health care consultancy in New York and runs in the Democratic health care circles. Every family has to have a black sheep, I guess.