Podesta emails

In March 2016, the personal Gmail account of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff and chair of Hillary Clinton's 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, was compromised in a data breach accomplished via a spear-phishing attack, and some of his emails, many of which were work-related, were hacked. Cybersecurity researchers as well as the United States government attributed responsibility for the breach to the Russian cyber spying group Fancy Bear, allegedly two units of a Russian military intelligence agency.
Some or all of the Podesta emails were subsequently obtained by WikiLeaks, which published over 20,000 pages of emails, allegedly from Podesta, in October and November 2016. Podesta and the Clinton campaign have declined to authenticate the emails. Cybersecurity experts interviewed by PolitiFact believe the majority of emails are probably unaltered, while stating it is possible that the hackers inserted at least some doctored or fabricated emails. The article then attests that the Clinton campaign, however, has yet to produce any evidence that any specific emails in the latest leak were fraudulent. A subsequent investigation by U.S. intelligence agencies also reported that the files obtained by WikiLeaks during the U.S. election contained no "evident forgeries".
Podesta's emails, once released by WikiLeaks, shed light on the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, suggested that CNN commentator Donna Brazile had shared audience questions with the Clinton campaign in advance of town hall meetings, and contained excerpts from Hillary Clinton's speeches to Wall Street firms. Proponents of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory falsely claimed the emails contained coded messages which supported their conspiracy theory.

Data theft

Researchers from the Atlanta-based cybersecurity firm Dell SecureWorks reported that the emails had been obtained through a data theft carried out by the hacker group Fancy Bear, a group of Russian intelligence-linked hackers that were also responsible for cyberattacks that targeted the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, resulting in WikiLeaks publishing emails from those hacks.
SecureWorks concluded Fancy Bear had sent Podesta an email on March 19, 2016, that had the appearance of a Google security alert, but actually contained a misleading link—a strategy known as spear-phishing. The link—which used the URL shortening service Bitly—brought Podesta to a fake log-in page where he entered his Gmail credentials. The email was initially sent to the IT department as it was suspected of being a fake but was described as "legitimate" in an e-mail sent by a department employee, who later said he meant to write "illegitimate".
SecureWorks had tracked the activities of Fancy Bear for more than a year before the cyberattack, and in June 2016, had reported the group made use of malicious Bitly links and fake Google login pages to trick targets into divulging their passwords. However, the hackers left some of their Bitly accounts public, allowing SecureWorks to trace many of their links to e-mail accounts targeted with spear-phishing attacks. Of this list of targeted accounts, more than one hundred were policy advisors to Clinton, or members of her presidential campaign, and by June, twenty staff members had clicked on the phishing links.
On December 9, 2016, the Central Intelligence Agency told U.S. legislators that the U.S. Intelligence Community had reached the conclusion that the Russian government was behind the hack and had given to WikiLeaks a collection of hacked emails from John Podesta.

DCLeaks submission to WikiLeaks

On September 15, 2016, the DCLeaks Twitter account sent WikiLeaks a DM about a possible submission, saying they had gotten no response on the secured chat. The WikiLeaks account responded "Hi there" without further elaboration but did not receive a response. The same day, the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter account sent DCLeaks a DM saying that WikiLeaks was trying to contact them and to arrange to speak through encrypted email. Analysis of the metadata on the Podesta emails show a creation date of September 19, 2016. The Mueller Report concluded that this might have been when the emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.

Authenticity

A declassified report by the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and National Security Agency noted that, "Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries."
Cybersecurity experts interviewed by PolitiFact believe that while most of the emails are probably unaltered, it is possible the hackers inserted some doctored or fabricated material into the collection.
Jeffrey Carr, CEO of the cybersecurity company Taia Global, stated: "I've looked at a lot of document dumps provided by hacker groups over the years, and in almost every case you can find a few altered or entirely falsified documents. But only a few. The vast majority were genuine. I believe that's the case with the Podesta emails, as well." Jamie Winterton of the Arizona State University Global Security Initiative stated, "I would be shocked if the emails weren't altered," noting the longstanding Russian practice of promoting disinformation.
Cybersecurity expert Robert Graham described the contents of some of the emails as authentic by using the DomainKeys Identified Mail contained in these emails' signatures. However, not all of the emails have these keys in their signature, and thus could not be verified with this method.

Publication

On October 7, 2016, 30 minutes after the Access Hollywood tape was first published, WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of emails from Podesta's Gmail account. Throughout October, WikiLeaks released installments of these emails on a daily basis. On December 18, 2016, John Podesta stated in Meet the Press that the FBI had contacted him about the leaked emails on October 9, 2016, but had not contacted him since.
On October 17, 2016, the government of Ecuador severed the internet connection of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The Ecuadorian government stated that it had temporarily severed Assange's internet connection because of WikiLeaks' release of documents "impacting on the U.S. election campaign", although it also stated this was not meant to prevent WikiLeaks from operating. WikiLeaks continued releasing installments of the Podesta emails during this time.

Some of the emails provide some insight into the inner workings of the Clinton campaign. For example, the emails show a discussion among campaign manager Robby Mook and top aides about possible campaign themes and slogans. Other emails revealed insights about the internal conflicts of the Clinton Foundation. The BBC published an article detailing 18 "revelations" revealed from their initial review of the leaked emails, including excerpts from Clinton's speeches and politically motivated payments to the Clinton Foundation.
One of the emails released on October 12, 2016, included Podesta's iCloud account password. His iCloud account was hacked, and his Twitter account was then briefly compromised. Some were emails that Barack Obama and Podesta exchanged in 2008.

Clinton's Wall Street speeches

WikiLeaks published transcripts of three Clinton speeches to Goldman Sachs and an 80-page internal campaign document cataloging potentially problematic portions of over 50 paid speeches. During the Democratic primary campaign, Bernie Sanders had criticized Hillary Clinton for refusing to release transcripts of speeches given to financial firms, portraying her as too close to Wall Street. Donald Trump first publicly called for the transcripts during a rally on October 3, 2016, four days before their publication by WikiLeaks: "I would like to see what the speeches said. She doesn't want to release them. Release the papers, Hillary, release those papers."
In the October 2016 presidential debate, Clinton voiced her support for a "no-fly" zone in Syria. In a 2013 speech, Clinton had discussed the difficulties involved. In particular, she noted that in order to establish a no-fly zone, Syria's air defenses would need to be destroyed. Because the Assad government had located these anti-aircraft batteries in populated civilian areas, their destruction would cause many collateral civilian deaths. Clinton's staff additionally flagged comments about regulation of Wall Street, as well as her relationship with the industry, as potentially problematic.
The excerpts came up in the two subsequent presidential debates between Clinton and Trump. In one of the debates, the moderator Martha Raddatz quoted an excerpt saying that politicians "need both a public and a private position" and asked Clinton if it was okay for politicians to be "two-faced". Clinton replied, "As I recall, that was something I said about Abraham Lincoln after having seen the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie called Lincoln. It was a master class watching president Lincoln get the Congress to approve the 13th amendment, it was principled and strategic. I was making the point that it is hard sometimes to get the Congress to do what you want to do." In the third presidential debate, the moderator Chris Wallace quoted a speech excerpt where Clinton says, "My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders," and asked if she was for open borders. Clinton replied, "If you went on to read the rest of the sentence, I was talking about energy. We trade more energy with our neighbors than we trade with the rest of the world combined. And I do want us to have an electric grid, an energy system that crosses borders."

Discussions of Catholic religious activities

In 2012 Sandy Newman wrote to Podesta: "I have not thought at all about how one would 'plant the seeds of the revolution', or who would plant them." Podesta agreed that this was necessary to do as Newman suggested and wrote back to note that they had created groups like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United to push for a more progressive approach to the faith, change would "have to be bottom up".
Raymond Arroyo responded: "It makes it seem like you're creating organizations to change the core beliefs of the church," he said. "For someone to come and say, 'I have a political organization to change your church to complete my political agenda or advance my agenda', I don't know how anybody could embrace that." Professor Robert P. George added that "these groups are political operations constructed to masquerade as organizations devoted to the Catholic faith".
The leak revealed an email sent by John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The email discussed conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch's decision to raise his kids in the Catholic Church. He wrote, "Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic ... It's an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy." Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri responded: "I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable, politically conservative religion—their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelical." Supporters and members of Donald Trump's campaign called the email exchange evidence of anti-Catholic sentiment in the Democratic Party. Halpin confirmed that he had written the email, though he contested claims that it was "anti-Catholic" and said that it was taken out of context and that he had sent the email to his Catholic colleagues "to make a fleeting point about perceived hypocrisy and the flaunting of one's faith by prominent conservative leaders."