The passages show Hillary Clinton was acutely aware of the cyberthreat and fuel questions about why she persisted in using a private email server. | Getty Clinton talked up dangers of email interception in leaked speech excerpts Leaked memo shows campaign's concerns about her statements on cybersecurity during paid speeches

Hillary Clinton colorfully warned audiences for some of her paid speeches about the ease with which foreign governments can intercept email communications, according to excerpts of her remarks leaked online Friday.

The passages show Clinton was acutely aware of the cyberthreat and fuel questions about why she persisted in using a private email server maintained by aides who were not experts in state-of-the-art email cybersecurity measures.


"In other countries, some of which shall remain nameless, except for Russia and China, you know that you can’t bring your phones and your computers. And if you do, good luck," Clinton said at a 2013 conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs. "We would not only take the batteries out, we would leave the batteries and the devices on the plane in special boxes. We didn’t do that because we thought it would be fun to tell somebody about. We did it because we knew that we were all targets and that we would be totally vulnerable."

The quotes came from a January 2016 research memo posted Friday by Wikileaks and apparently obtained from a personal email account used by John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman and a former White House adviser to President Bill Clinton. The memo was apparently drafted to highlight ways critics might use Clinton's comments from the paid speeches against her during her presidential campaign.

While Clinton's remarks to the Goldman Sachs summit had not been previously publicized, the memo also highlighted comments she'd made about cybersecurity and BlackBerry vulnerabilities during other paid speeches that were open to press coverage.

The campaign noted a 2014 speech at the University of Connecticut where Clinton said the State Department was "attacked every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate everything we had."

Aides also flagged another speech to a tech-related conference that year where Clinton said Russia and China were accomplished at hacking equipment brought by visitors. "They're so good, they would penetrate them in a minute, less, a nanosecond," Clinton said.

While Clinton insisted she disabled her devices when in places like Russia and China, FBI Director James Comey said in July that was not the case.

"She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries," the FBI chief said as he announced his decision not to recommend any charges in connection with Clinton's use of a private email system as secretary of state.

It's unclear who provided Podesta's emails to Wikileaks, but Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday that Russia has been behind a series of recent hacking efforts aimed at disrupting the U.S. election campaign.