The campaign’s internal damage assessment of excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches is broken into sections on various hot-button domestic and foreign policy issues. | Getty Is this what Hillary Clinton really thinks about the world? Hacked excerpts from the Democratic nominee's paid speeches show a cautious, cold-eyed realist.

In the private company of globally savvy business executives and bankers three years ago, Hillary Clinton unwound and spoke with unusual candor about world leaders and events — including the covert U.S. role in Syria and her frustration with President Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his chemical weapons “red line” in that country.

The remarks, made just months after she finished her tenure as secretary of state, are highlighted in an 80-page document prepared by her campaign staff and among thousands of hacked emails released by WikiLeaks.


The document, the campaign’s internal damage assessment of excerpts from Clinton’s paid speeches in 2013 and 2014, is broken into sections on various hot-button domestic and foreign policy issues, from energy and cybersecurity to Cuba, North Korea, Syria and terrorism. It provides only a glimpse of what Clinton said behind closed doors, as it highlights only those comments that could cause political heartburn were they ever made public.

The Clinton campaign won’t confirm the authenticity of specific documents in the WikiLeaks dump, though campaign chairman John Podesta has acknowledged that his Gmail account was hacked and said the FBI is investigating the breach. Instead, the campaign is accusing a close Donald Trump confidant of colluding with an organization, in WikiLeaks, that U.S. officials say is at least an unwitting tool of Russian intelligence, if not an outright arm of the Kremlin.

Assessed together, the excerpts portray Clinton as a nuanced analyst of world affairs, slightly more hawkish than her former boss but more often than not a defender and explainer of the president’s actions. She offered up clinical observations on everything from Vladimir Putin’s “engaging” personality to the “wicked problem” of Syria, while praising Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his worldly sophistication and political savvy.

At times Clinton distanced herself from Obama’s decisions, as when she implied, at a Goldman Sachs summit in October 2013, that Congress’s failure a year earlier to authorize a strike against the Syrian regime “spoke more about, you know, the country’s preoccupation with our own domestic situation” than it did concern for U.S. national security. While she acknowledged the difficulty of setting a course in Syria, “you can’t squander your reputation and your leadership capital,” she declared, sounding more like the president’s critics than his former top diplomat. “You have to do what you say you’re going to do,” she added, “And you’ve got to be careful not to send the wrong message to others, such as Iran.”

But if Clinton has a secret plan to solve the Syrian civil war, she didn’t share it with her well-heeled audiences. In a June 2013 speech to Goldman Sachs, she argued that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad could have appeased the early protesters in 2011 if he had “bought them off with some cosmetic changes.” But she argued that once the civil war broke out, the U.S. should have intervened in Syria “as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene,” lamenting, “We used to be much better at this than we are now.”

In the same speech, she pushed back against those “glibly” arguing for a no-fly zone, which she said would mean “you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians.” Yet two years later, as hundreds of thousands of refugees poured into the region and beyond, she would publicly advocate “a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way to take stock of what’s happening, to try to stem the flow of refugees.”

Ripped from their original context, some of the remarks could prove awkward for Clinton to defend, including her comment in an August 2013 speech that terrorism is “not a threat to us as a nation.” She went on to say that terrorism is “not going to endanger our economy or our society, but it is a real threat” and a “danger to our citizens here at home.”

Republicans have already seized on Clinton’s claim to a Toronto business group that bin Laden, the late Al Qaeda leader, was found by an intercepted phone call, not from a tipster or surveillance, as publicly reported — to accuse her once again of spreading classified information without authorization.

“The people who were the analysts and collectors and good old-fashioned spies who were gathering bits and pieces of information, some of them from cellphone conversations, I will tell you, and then all of a sudden putting this matrix together and saying, ‘This guy used to protect bin Laden. He has just made a phone call. He said this in the phone call. We need to figure out where he is. Then we need to follow him.’ And that is how we found this compound in Abbottabad [Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed],” Clinton said in the November 2013 speech. “It didn’t happen because somebody walked into our embassy and said, ‘You know, there is a suspicious compound in Abbottabad that you guys should go take a look at.’”

At times, Clinton comes across as shifting blame to others, as when she told a group of media executives in Singapore that WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of sensitive diplomatic dispatches was made possible “because the military, in their efforts to do counterinsurgency, particularly in Iraq and that region, and also in Afghanistan but not exclusively, wanted to provide their intelligence officers and even commanders with more context and texture” by creating a system for sharing State Department cables.

The excerpts also show Clinton making frank assessments of the foreign leaders she dealt with as secretary of state — particularly Putin, whom she described as “engaging” and a “very interesting conversationalist.” And while she said his actions in Crimea were reminiscent of those of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, she dismissed the idea that Russian missiles posed a threat to the United States and said she would “love it if we could continue to build a more positive relationship with Russia” — but Putin often stood in the way. Still, Clinton said the Kremlin strongman was “someone who you have to deal with” and the U.S. couldn’t “just wish he could go away.”

In an October 2013 luncheon with a Jewish group in Chicago, Clinton told an anecdote about bonding with Putin at his dacha outside Moscow over, of all things, tigers. “I said, ‘You know, Mr. Prime Minister, we actually have some things in common. We both want to protect wildlife, and I know how committed you are to protecting the tiger,’” she relayed. “I mean, all of a sudden, he sat up straight and his eyes got big and he goes, ‘You care about the tiger?” Putin, she said, took him back to his “through a heavily armed door” to his “private inner sanctum” and “starts talking to me about, you know, the habitat of the tigers and the habitat of the seals and the whales.”

At a Goldman Sachs summit in October 2013, Clinton mimicked an Italian accent as she suggested that Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister infamous for his “bunga bunga” parties, had been in tears as he complained about leaked State Department cables that portrayed him as a corrupt, bumbling lecher. “I had grown men cry. I mean, literally. ‘I am a friend of America, and you say these things about me.’” (“That’s an Italian accent,” Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein quipped.)

Clinton’s assessment of Xi Jinping, the tough-minded president of China, was far more flattering. In a June 2013 speech to Goldman Sachs, Clinton praised Xi as a “more sophisticated, more effective public leader” than his predecessor, Hu Jintao. She noted that Xi had brought to heel the corrupt and nationalistic Chinese military, a development she hailed as “good news” because the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, as it is known, had grown too powerful and aggressive under Hu. “The biggest supporters of a provocative North Korea has been the PLA,” she noted.

But, in an April 2013 speech to a housing group, Clinton — when asked, “How afraid should we be of North Korea?” — cast the hostile regime in Pyongyang as more of a regional problem. “You know, right now, it’s not a direct threat to the United States,” she responded. “It is, however, a threat to our treaty allies in South Korea and Japan. It is a source of instability on the Korean peninsula that could have, you know, ramifications for the region and our interests in the region.”

Clinton was pessimistic about the U.S. ability to affect the course of events in Egypt, the scene of one of the most dramatic events of her tenure: the overthrow of aging strongman Hosni Mubarak. The Obama administration, Clinton said in an April 2013 speech for investment bank Morgan Stanley, had “highly limited” options in the wake of Mubarak’s ouster — either an unfortunate fact or self-serving spin, depending on one’s point of view.

She also shared her frustrations in trying to influence the Muslim Brotherhood government that subsequently came to power. “In the beginning, we said they won legitimately. We worked with them,” Clinton said, but the Islamist group became “much more interested in promoting their ideology” once in power. As for the more secular, digitally savvy young protesters who helped overthrow Mubarak, she dismissed them in an October 2013 speech as “political neophytes to the nth degree.” Clinton added that the July 2013 coup, which saw the Egyptian Armed Forces step in to oust the increasingly despised Brotherhood, meant “the military is going to remain in charge for as long as they choose to, really.”

Most of Clinton’s comments are coolly analytical, with the notable exception of her remorse about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, a signal event that has damaged her candidacy and exposed the existence of her private email server.

In an August 2013 speech to a business travelers’ group, Clinton said the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stephens by Islamist militants was “the worst thing that happened on my watch.” But she didn’t say what, if anything, she might have done differently.

“He really knew the country as well as any American and assessed that it was important for him not to just be behind the walls, but to get out, and, you know, really connect with Libyan leaders and citizens,” Clinton explained. “And it was just a terrible crime that he was killed doing what was really in the best interests of both the United States and Libya.”

A year later, at the Internet hardware company Cisco, she cast Stephens’ death as the unfortunate result of the Libyan government having “no capacity to deliver” security and “the people that we had contracted with” being “incapable or unwilling to do it.”

“So that was a deep regret,” she said.