Leaked emails show Hillary Clinton praising Russian President Vladimir Putin in her speeches to Wall Street firms and other groups after her tenure as secretary of state.
Clinton described how she sought a "positive relationship" with Putin and Russia in remarks to Goldman Sachs on June 4, 2013, Fox News reported.
"I would love it if we could continue to build a more positive relationship with Russia," Clinton said. "Obviously we would very much like to have a positive relationship with Russia and we would like to see Putin be less defensive toward a relationship with the United States so that we could work together on some issues."
She also talked about her meetings with Putin to various organizations throughout 2013. Speaking to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago on Oct. 28, Clinton called Putin "always interesting" during her conversations with him.
"You’re never quite sure what he’s going to do or say next, and he’s always–he walks around with, you know, a redwood chip on his shoulder defending and promoting, you know, Mother Russia. So he and I have had our interesting moments," Clinton said.
She told a story of a meeting with Putin in which they bonded over their concern for tiger habitats.
"I sat next to [Putin]. He’s an engaging and, you know, very interesting conversationalist," she told trade consultant Sanford Bernstein on May 29, 2013.
Excerpts of Clinton’s speeches have been released as part of the trove of her campaign manager John Podesta’s hacked emails that WikiLeaks has published in recent days. The document dump came after the U.S. intelligence community and Department of Homeland Security formally accused Moscow on Friday of hacking into political computer networks to influence the 2016 election.
Though Clinton praised Putin and Russia, she has strongly criticized Donald Trump for his own praise of the Russian leader during the 2016 election. Trump’s comments, however, have come since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and intervened in the Syrian civil war in September 2015.
Clinton famously met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in 2009 and hit a button in front of reporters that in English said "Reset" but in Russian accidentally said "Overload."