HRC Campaign and the Pied Piper Strategy (2016 election)

So I ran across this earlier through a friend and wasn't sure if the email he had sent me via image was legit so I did a little bit of research.

I'm surprised that this hasn't been talked about more on here. I did a search and I did see that one of the users that posts here very infrequently referenced it here briefly:
https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/display.aspx?sp=84425992&s=2&p=84425961#84425992

Anyway, to make a long story short, here is a Salon article which is an unquestionably left wing rag that actually posted this shortly after the election of Trump in 2016:

quote:

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What was not often acknowledged in Trump's heated race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, however, was how her campaign fueled his rise to power.

An email recently released by the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks shows how the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party bear direct responsibility for propelling the bigoted billionaire to the White House.

In its self-described "pied piper" strategy, the Clinton campaign proposed intentionally cultivating extreme right-wing presidential candidates, hoping to turn them into the new "mainstream of the Republican Party" in order to try to increase Clinton's chances of winning.

The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee called for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right." Clinton's camp insisted that Trump and other extremists should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media outlets should be told to "take them seriously."

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This text passage alone is disturbing enough if for no other reason than the part in bold. We know that Clinton has been fed debate questions and such but it seems pretty clear here that the DNC thinks they can just straight up give marching orders to the media. While the above text is disturbing the email from Wikileaks below is much more disturbing and I'll list a few reasons why that should seem pretty obvious.



A few things stand out immediately to me:

1. This is in April of 2015 when the DNC primary process was still open. This assumes an end goal of rigging it for Hillary (we pretty much knew that already but this is pretty damning)

2. We don't know who the email came from but it's a clear group email to all people within the DNC and it certainly originated within that organization (or at least I think that's a reasonable assumption - EDIT - corrected, it was actually a Clinton staffer and not a DNC member)

3. It's unclear but certainly implied that this tactic was used against Romney in 2012. The big question might be, was that tactic employed with complicity by members in the media? If so that's obviously pretty incorrigible.

I don't care where you sit politically but this looks like blatant domestic interference on the part of the media of our democratic process. And it would certainly explain a lot of the vitriol from the media because this plan completely backfired.

What's perhaps more disturbing is if this is all legitimate it was twice used by incumbent parties to influence the media to try to produce outcomes for individual politicians. Not even for an ideological agenda but for individuals.

Pardon me, upon further inspection, there is a "from" in the email per this link
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120

And this is the original Salon article on the matter

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/