As I reported last month, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton draws broad financial support from the food and agriculture industries, including the fast-growing organic-foods sector. The latest WikiLeaks dump of Democratic Party emails shows that one prominent Big Organic player gets his emails answered by Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
WikiLeaks has posted a searchable database of what are purported to be Podesta’s hacked emails, though the Clinton campaign has neither confirmed nor denied they’re authentic. As Politicoreported Tuesday morning, Gary Hirshberg, the founder, chairman, and former CEO of organic-yogurt giant Stonyfield, exchanged several emails with Podesta, the WikiLeaks database suggests.
The emails, which can be found here, are from October 2015 to March 2016 and largely involve two storylines that played out simultaneously: Clinton’s hard-fought primary campaign with her Democratic challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and a battle in Congress over whether and how to label genetically modified foods, which I covered at the time. The issues intersected because Sanders quite publicly supported labeling.