Eli Lake, Columnist

In Private, Clinton Split With Obama on Iran

Leaked transcripts might have hurt the candidate in the primaries. Now they will help her pivot to the center.

October 17, 2016 at 5:09 PM EDT

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

So close, but yet so far.
Photographer: Alex Wong

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A month after President Barack Obama's historic 2013 phone call to Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani, his former secretary of state privately warned that the so-called moderate only won the election because Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Revolutionary Guard Corps allowed it.

According to a speech transcript made public this weekend by WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton on October 28, 2013, told the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago: "I believe that Rouhani was allowed to be elected by the two major power sources in Iran, the supreme leader and the clerics and the Revolutionary Guard … in part because the sanctions were having a quite damaging effect on the economy."

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