A big-money group that included some of Hillary Clinton’s top allies tested the effectiveness of attacking her 2008 rival Barack Obama for his admitted use of cocaine and his connections to Islam, hacked documents released Friday show.

In the early stages of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, a group known as Progressive Media commissioned a poll that asked more than 800 likely swing state voters about a number of possible lines of attack against Obama, but also against Clinton and the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain.


The poll results and emails discussing the questions were among a batch of documents hacked from Clinton confidant John Podesta’s personal email and released Friday by WikiLeaks. Clinton’s campaign will not confirm the authenticity of individual emails, but Podesta has acknowledged that his emails were hacked and says he is cooperating with an FBI investigation.

After the documents were released, Tom Matzzie, the veteran Democratic operative who served as president and executive director of now-defunct Progressive Media and was included on the January 2008 email chain, told POLITICO that neither the group nor the poll were geared toward boosting Clinton over Obama in the primary.

“We were an effort that was about electing the most progressive candidate and opposing whoever the Republican candidate was going to be,” he said. “We tested the vulnerabilities of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in a hypothetical matchup against John McCain,” said Matzzie, who pointed out that he and a few other folks who worked on the effort supported Obama.

Progressive Media’s team also included Podesta and others associated with the Clinton-aligned think tank he started, the Center for American Progress, as well as longtime Clinton insider Paul Begala. Podesta later went on to co-chair Obama’s transition team, and served as a counselor to the president from January 2014 to February 2015.

The poll tested several lines of attack that some Clinton backers wanted to use against Obama, but that others worried could backfire and argued should be out-of-bounds, including Obama’s admission in his 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” that during his youth he partook of illegal drugs, including “ a little blow when you could afford it .”

In one email about the poll , Begala argued that a question related to Obama’s cocaine use should not be lumped together with suggestions that Obama was too liberal, but rather should be highlighted on its own.

“I think gay adoption belongs with the ‘liberal’ hit on Obama, but ‘a little blow’ does not. ‘A little blow’ needs to be tested on its own,” Begala wrote.

Begala told POLITICO on Friday that all the possible lines of attack tested in the poll came from the group’s research firm and that the poll “was not designed to advocate the use of that kind of attack” against Obama. “Half of our team were Obama people, so we weren’t going to do anything to hurt Obama or Hillary, he said, pointing out that Progressive Media didn’t launch any attacks on Obama during the primary. Progressive Media was “a really earnest effort by a group of us — some for Hillary and some for Obama — to make sure that they didn’t destroy themselves in the primary. … You have to test negatives on both sides — the good the bad and the ugly.”

Other Clinton backers were more gung-ho about using Obama’s cocaine admission against him.

In one of the most controversial episodes of the 2008 Democratic primary, top strategist Mark Penn said “cocaine” repeatedly in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Dec. 17, 2007. “Well, I think we have made clear that the — the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising.” Penn said, after which Democratic strategist Joe Trippi accused him of deliberately injecting the issue into the media bloodstream.

Allies suggested at the time that Penn had little choice but to address the issue given the subsequent uproar. Later on, however, the book “Game Change” reported that after the appearance the “giddy” pollster seemed delighted to have had the chance to say “cocaine” repeatedly during a national TV segment about Obama.

At least some Clinton confidants suspected that Penn had the blessing of top campaign officials to launch the hit — a suspicion shared by close Clinton adviser Neera Tanden, according to another email released Friday by WikiLeaks.

On Jan. 16, 2016, she wrote in an email to Podesta that “I'm pretty sure Mark Penn didn't do his cocaine rang [sic] against Obama without some higher up approval.”

Asked about that comment, Tanden — who now heads the liberal think tank Center for American Progress — declined to confirm or deny its authenticity. “While I’m not going to do what the Russians want and validate the content of any email, it’s clear that the Russians are trying to divide us against each other to help Donald Trump become president. And we should all be concerned about that,” she wrote in an email.

Ultimately, the Progressive Media poll asked respondents whether they’d be less inclined to support Obama because he “described his former use of cocaine as using ‘a little blow.’”

The “a little blow” question was included in the poll among 10 possible attacks against Obama, and respondents were asked to choose which two would make them less likely to support him.

While there were several policy-based attacks on Obama’s record, there were other attacks that called into question his religion, (“Obama’s father was a Muslim and (Obama) grew up among Muslims in the world's most populous Islamic country”), his patriotism (“Obama did not cover his heart during the national anthem”), and his integrity (“Obama benefited from a land deal from a contributor who has been indicted for corruption ”).

The cocaine attack was rated as the least effective attack in the poll.

The attacks tested on Clinton and McCain were different than those tested on Obama.

Among the 10 possible jabs against McCain, only one question was unrelated to a specific policy position, which called out his shifting position on the Rev. Jerry Falwell and received the second-lowest rating of effectiveness. Ultimately, respondents rated McCain’s eagerness to send more troops to Iraq as their primary concern.

Additionally, the poll tested eight attacks on Clinton, which included mostly policy-related questions about taxes, immigration and terrorism — and concluded that her support of a $1.3 trillion tax hike was the most effective attack against her.

McCain never raised the specific topic of Obama's cocaine use during the general election, though he did say during the early stages of the primary season that “Obama wouldn’t know the difference between an RPG and a bong.”

In October 2008, former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, the co-chairman of McCain’s campaign, raised the cocaine use during an interview with comedian Dennis Miller.

“He ought to admit, ‘You know, I’ve got to be honest with you. I was a guy of the street. I was way to the left. I used cocaine. I voted liberally, but I’m back at the center,’” Keating said.

“We didn’t ask him to do it,” CNN quoted a McCain aide saying at the time. “He didn’t clear it with us, but obviously he’s read Sen. Obama’s books.”

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.