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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

>Nothing too substantial was revealed

There was the email, if I remember, about expressing a heartfelt desire to see a FTA stretching across the whole continent.

This was right after Hillary decided to rally against the TPP. This undermined that move and made it ring hollow.

>the existence of the emails was enough to feed into the existing narrative that Clinton couldn't be trusted

As opposed to diffing her public moves with what she said in the emails? You seriously think that the mere existence of leaked emails was enough to sway voters regardless of what was actually said in them?

Bizarre.

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> As opposed to diffing her public moves with what she said in the emails? You seriously think that the mere existence of leaked emails was enough to sway voters regardless of what was actually said in them?

Those same emails motivated someone to drive 300 miles to fire a gun in a pizza shop looking for a child sex ring in a basement that didn't exist.

How's that for bizarre?

You are conflating leaks. There was a DNC leak and a Podesta personal email leak. The Podesta leak started the fire, so to speak, while the DNC leak was attributed to Russian meddling.

I understand that there's a long American tradition on blaming shooting sprees on everything BUT easy access to guns, but hear me out:

The fact somebody concocted an utterly absurd story from the leaks and used it to justify a killing spree demonstrates very clearly that the leaks themselves weren't at all necessary for the shooting spree.

They could have concocted pizzagate out of something else. In fact, they probably would have.

And the guy clearly wanted to shoot someone up and was looking for reasons.

A large mass of swing voters can't be expected to behave as irrationally as one crazed Trump supporter with a gun.

I don't think it is unusual for a politician to be in support of a general policy while objecting to a specific implementation and/or expansion of that policy.

And yes, the existence of the emails played a role in how people voted or whether they voted regardless of the content. I mean there was the whole pizzagate thing that was obviously independent of the actual substance of the emails.

You're saying that you think swing voters were probably more influenced by harebrained conspiracy theories pushed by meth addled Trump supporters than... the truth?

That's some hubris.

I don't know what "truth" you are remarking on here and pizzagate was just the most obvious and extreme example.

Clearly there were people who were turned off by the leaks without actually reading the entire collection or even any of documents. These people were more reacting to the perception of the leaks in the zeitgeist than the actual substance of the documents they didn't read. I don't know what to say to you if we can't agree on that.

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