Politico correspondent Glenn Thrush said on CNN's Sunday edition of Inside Politics that the Wikileaks' hack of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's speech transcripts revealed "really damaging stuff."
This past Friday, WikiLeaks released a trove of emails that were hacked from Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, including transcripts from previous Wall Street speeches that Clinton has given. Clinton's Wall Street speeches have been a campaign issue since the Democratic primary when her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) challenged her to release her speech transcripts.
CNN anchor John King read an excerpt from a speech Clinton delivered in 2014 at a Deutsche Bank meeting.
"How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works?... And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry."
King then asked the panel whether the news media would be talking about Clinton "sucking up" to bankers in these transcripts had her Republican opponent Donald Trump's vulgar recording regarding women not been leaked.
"I mean [Clinton] is very fortunate that Russian intelligence and Julian Assange don't understand the difference between a primary and a general election," Thrush said.
"That's right," CNN reporter Nia-Malika Henderson interjected.
"If this had been a March surprise we might have a very different set of people standing on the debate stage tonight. I mean this is really really damaging stuff," Thrush said.
Thrush also pointed out that the most damaging excerpt from her speech transcripts was the notion that she could says things privately as a politician and say things publicly that would be different.
"Right, and that's exactly the issue that all of these women for example who are not happy about either candidate say they just simply feel that they can't trust her because they think she says whatever she thinks would suit each audience and right in that quote, you know, you have that exact thing," CNN reporter Maeve Reston said.
Henderson agreed and pointed out that these leaked transcripts don't help Clinton and that this hurts her standing with progressives and millennials who already had a distrust for Clinton during the Democratic primary.
King then highlighted another excerpt from Clinton's speech to the ITAU BBA USA Securities in 2013 where she said that her dream consists of a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.
Washington Post writer Dan Balz said that he did a Google search of Clinton advocating for an open border and said they were mostly all fact checks of Trump accusing her of supporting an open border.
"She's never said that. Now we have the evidence that she has said that," Balz said.
Thrush said that Trump needs to switch the script for Sunday's night debate against Clinton. Instead of talking about the leaked 2005 recording, Thrush said Trump needs to ask why they are talking about recording after he has already apologized and then answer every question by asking about Clinton's hacked emails.
King pointed out this strategy was similar to former president Bill Clinton in the 1992 debates when his character issues were brought up.