An Email From Lynn Forester de Rothschild to Hillary Clinton, Against Elizabeth Warren

Eric Zuesse

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/25143

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8597

[message from Lynn Forester de Rothschild (who controls many corporations and whose husband Sir Evelyn de Rothschild allegedly owns $20 billion), to Hillary Clinton, via Cheryl Mills, on how “to craft the economic message for Hillary” and warning Hillary’s campaign-staff that Elizabeth Warren deceives voters. It’s signed affectionately “Xoxo Lynn.” Lady Rothschild attacks Elizabeth Warren’s having criticized America’s rigged-by-and-for-the-rich system. Rothschild implicitly praises Bill & Hillary as heroes championing the system, and she says — using the ‘reporting’ by the Wall Street Journal instead of her own words (since she can’t supply analysis of her own) — that Elizabeth Warren is deceiving voters in order to run for the White House against Hillary. This is Lady Rothschild trying to help her friend Queen Clinton, even while having nothing really to say, other than to paste in ‘reporting’ by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, demeaning Warren as, in effect, a dishonest demagog.]

———- Forwarded message ————— 

From: Lynn Forester de Rothschild 

<lynn@elrothschild.com<mailto:lynn@elrothschild.com>> 

Date: Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 7:15 PM 

Subject: FW: Elizabeth Warren To: “Cheryl Mills (cheryl.mills@gmail.com<mailto:cheryl.mills@gmail.com>)” 

<cheryl.mills@gmail.com<mailto:cheryl.mills@gmail.com>>   

I think this blog overstates what Warren was doing, but we need to craft the economic message for Hillary so that Warren’s common inaccurate conclusions are addressed.

Xoxo Lynn 

 

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/01/07/warren-throws-four-punchs-at-the-clintons/  

[http://web.archive.org/web/20150107203730/http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/01/07/warren-throws-four-punchs-at-the-clintons/] [Rothschild is simply pasting in excerpts from that WSJ article here:]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren professes that she is not running for president, but her Wednesday speech to a major labor conference is loaded with not-terribly-veiled references to Hillary Clinton and attacks on Bill Clinton’s record as president.  The Massachusetts Democrat’s prepared remarks to the AFL-CIO’s National Summit on Wages in Washington are a lesson in progressive economic theory. In this retelling, landmark free trade deals and banking deregulation boost the fortunes of the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class [this being the WSJ’s characterization of what Warren’s message to voters is].  Criticism of the Clintons is threaded throughout Ms. Warren’s remarks. Most comes in the form of a liberal critique of Mr. Clinton’s economic record, but there is one significant shot at Mrs. Clinton as well.  Of course, Ms. Warren has insisted she isn’t running for president but has couched it in the present tense, most recently last month when she refused to rule out a run during an interview with NPR 

<http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/12/15/elizabeth-warren-again-i-am-not-running-for-president/>.  

[http://web.archive.org/web/20150101033356/http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/12/15/elizabeth-warren-again-i-am-not-running-for-president/]

Washington Wire found at least four instances in Ms. Warren’s Wednesday speech in which she takes political shots at the Clintons.  The Wal-Mart 

<http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=WMT> WMT +1.48%

<http://blogs.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=WMT?mod=inlineTicker> 

dog-whistle [the WSJ report here, again pasting in from Rothschild’s first-linked-to article, is characterizing Warren as a hate-monger who uses ‘dog-whistle’ messages to stir hatred against the rich, and de Rothschild simply is pasting that in as representing the way that Hillary should characterize Warren to be — a demagog]: 

“Corporate profits and GDP are up. But if you work at Wal-Mart, and you are paid so little that you still need food stamps to put groceries on the table, what does more money in stockholders’ pockets and an uptick in GDP do for you?”  [That Warren statement is bigotry, according to WSJ, and de Rothschild obviously views it that way too.]

Wal-Mart is a regular bogeyman for Big Labor, but it is also a particularly tough attack for Mrs. Clinton to echo, since she served on the retailer’s board of directors for six years when her husband was the Arkansas governor. The tie was regularly brought up by supporters of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents during the 2008 presidential primary campaign and remains well remembered in Iowa, where several Democrats raised it unprompted during interviews last week

<http://www.wsj.com/articles/top-iowa-democrats-slow-to-rally-around-hillary-clinton-1420418121>.  

[http://web.archive.org/web/20150106183400/http://www.wsj.com/articles/top-iowa-democrats-slow-to-rally-around-hillary-clinton-1420418121]

[but then, right after presenting that URL, Rothschild inexplicably pastes in actually yet another passage from her first-linked-to WSJ article:]

“Even though they don’t exist anymore, her connections to Wal-Mart, those don’t sit well,” said Jennifer Herrington, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Page County. “People still talk about it. The sense is that not much has really changed.”  Bill Clinton was just as bad as the Republicans: “Pretty much the whole Republican Party – and, if we’re going to be honest, too many Democrats – talked about the evils of ‘big government’ and called for deregulation. It sounded good, but it was really about tying the hands of regulators and turning loose big banks and giant international corporations to do whatever they wanted to do.”  Part of the Hillary Clinton argument is that her husband’s presidency presided over the economic growth of the 1990s. But here Ms. Warren takes direct aim at Mr. Clinton’s record on deregulation and harkens back to his 1996 State of the Union address and its signature line

<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=53091>, 

“The era of big government is over.”  

[De Rothschild now quotes yet again from her first-linked-to WSJ article, where it quotes from Warren’s speech to the AFL-CIO on 7 January 2015: https://www.warren.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=696:]

NAFTA was a bad deal: “Look at the choices Washington has made, the choices that have left America’s middle class in a deep hole… The choice to sign trade pacts and tax deals that let subsidized manufacturers around the globe sell here in America while good American jobs get shipped overseas.” Labor has long been sour on free-trade agreements, and Mr. Obama during the 2008 campaign said he would renegotiate it, though that never happened. Mrs. Clinton at the time also said she would seek a better NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico

<http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB120459602445109371?mod=rss_Politics_And_Policy&mg=reno64-wsj>, 

[that article, which she links to, is also here: http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/wsj_clintonnaftamemo_03042008.pdf]

[and now, Rothschild picks up yet again quoting from the first-linked-to WSJ article:]

but it becomes politically difficult for her to offer substantive critiques of her husband’s White House record.  Mr. Clinton wasn’t good for the middle class: 

“So who got the increase in income over the last 32 years? One hundred percent of it went to the top 1%. All of the new money earned in this economy over the past generation — all that growth in the GDP — went to the top. All of it.”  

Here Ms. Warren makes a potent argument that Mr. Clinton – and by association, Mrs. Clinton – had the same results for the middle class as Republican presidents. By tying the records of the Reagan, Clinton, Obama and two Bush administrations together, Ms. Warren paints herself as the outside-the-system crusader her supporters want her to be.

[All of that was actually clipped from the first-linked-to WSJ article, which reported about Warren’s speech to the AFL-CIO, both of which documents were dated 7 January 2015. None of the other URLs that Rothschild pasted into her email were actually quoted-from in her email. This email was actually obsessed with that one article, which attacked Warren’s 7 January 2015 speech to the AFL-CIO. Lynn de Forest Rothschild is apparently rabid against labor unions. This email closes with the WSJ’s snide derogation of Warren as being “someone who paints herself as the outside-the-system crusader,” and the subordinate theme is implicit there, that Warren’s supporters are the kind of people who “want her to be” that way. The WSJ drips with its monied elitism. And Rothschild’s entire email quotes only from that article, though it also provides other URLs, all of which are likewise from that one far-right, pro-aristocracy, newspaper. Rothschild thus comes across as the very personification and negative sterotype of the aristocracy.]

That’s all of the email. Here, then, is some of its context:

The New York Times reported on 22 March 2015 that Chelsea Clinton’s husband started in 2011 a hedge fund Eaglevale Partners whose “investors include hedge fund managers like Marc Lasry and James Leitner; an overseas money management firm connected to the Rothschild family; and people from Goldman Sachs, including the chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein. Some of the investors in Eaglevale have contributed campaign money to the former president and Mrs. Clinton, who is widely expected to run for president again in 2016. Some have also contributed to the family’s foundation. … In 2012, Eaglevale raised $15 million from an investment vehicle in the domain of Jacob Rothschild, who with members of his far-flung family has donated to the Clinton Foundation. The investment, financial records show, came before President Clinton spoke at a conference in Oxford that was sponsored by the Rothschild Foundation, of which Mr. Rothschild is chairman.”

Furthermore, Harper’s Bazaar’s 12 May 2014 “Portrait of a Lady: Lynn Forester de Rothschild” makes clear that Lynn and Hillary are very close, and that “Lynn’s commitment to her friend is so absolute that when Hillary dropped out of her own race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Lynn jumped ship to support the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona,” rather than to support someone (Obama) who had campaigned against Hillary. Clearly, Lynn loves Hillary not only because of shared values, but because of a personal; and even a familial, bonding. And, by the same token, it is understandable that Elizabeth Warren (and Bernie Sanders, and anyone else who would encourage the public to resist the system, which so advantages people such as themselves) would be loathsome to them.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.