AIDS activists, bankers focus of Clinton emails

Washington — Hacked emails released Sunday by WikiLeaks show Hillary Clinton’s aides fretting over how to respond to backlash from the LGBT community after Clinton lauded Nancy Reagan for starting a “national conversation” about AIDS in the 1980s.

Activists blame President Ronald Reagan for what they consider a devastatingly slow response to AIDS.

Clinton immediately tweeted an apology after her initial remarks last March. But her aides felt the LGBT community was unsatisfied and agreed to release a more detailed response.

“I don’t want this to fester,” wrote Clinton’s campaign’s LGBT outreach director, Dominic Lowell.

An initial draft of Clinton’s statement began with stating “I made a mistake.” The line was changed to “I said something inaccurate” with the phrase “I made a mistake, plain and simple” added later.

The emails also show Hillary Clinton generally avoided direct criticism of Wall Street as she examined the causes and responses to the financial meltdown during a series of paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, according to transcripts disclosed by WikiLeaks.

Three transcripts released Saturday as part of the hack of her campaign chairman’s emails did not contain any new bombshells showing she was unduly influenced by contributions from the banking industry, as her primary rival Bernie Sanders had suggested.

Still, her soft-handed approach in the speeches was likely to act as a reminder to liberals in the party of their concerns that the Democratic presidential nominee is too close to Wall Street to be an effective check on its excesses if elected.

In October 2013, the transcripts show, Clinton told bankers she had “great relations” and worked closely with Wall Street as New York’s senator, and said “the jury is still out” on whether the Dodd-Frank financial reforms put in place after the financial crisis had been the right approach.