# John Podesta **John Podesta** is the Democratic Party's career institution-builder. He was [[Bill Clinton]]'s White House chief of staff, the founder of the [[Center for American Progress]], a counselor to Obama, chair of [[Hillary Clinton]]'s 2016 campaign, and Biden's climate adviser. For the right-wing information ecosystem, though, he matters for one thing: **his hacked email**. It was the raw material for the GRU's 2016 operation and for **Pizzagate**, the conspiracy theory that became the template for QAnon. ## Career - **Clinton White House.** Staff secretary, then chief of staff from 1998 to 2001, through impeachment. - **Center for American Progress (2003).** The Democrats' answer to [[Heritage Foundation]]-style policy infrastructure. - **Obama White House.** Transition co-chair in 2008 and counselor from 2014 to 2015, working on climate and executive action. - **Clinton 2016.** Campaign chair. - **Biden White House.** From 2022 he ran implementation of the [[Inflation Reduction Act]]'s clean-energy money, and from 2024 he replaced [[John Kerry]] as the lead on international climate policy. ## The hack On March 19, 2016, Podesta's personal Gmail account received a spear-phishing email disguised as a Google security alert. The Justice Department's July 2018 indictment of twelve [[GRU]] officers describes GRU Unit 26165 stealing more than 50,000 emails from the account of the Clinton campaign chairman. On Aug. 21, 2016, [[Roger Stone]] tweeted that it would "soon" be "Podesta's time in the barrel" ([[Roger Stone - Podesta's time in the barrel]]). [[WikiLeaks]] began publishing the emails on **Oct. 7, 2016**, within an hour of the *Access Hollywood* tape, and kept releasing them in daily batches until the election. See [[DNC Hack]], [[DCLeaks]] and [[Russian Election Interference]]. ## Pizzagate and Spirit Cooking The emails themselves were mostly mundane campaign business. The conspiracy ecosystem read them as code. Mentions of "pizza" and "pasta" were decoded as child-trafficking language, and a Washington pizzeria became the supposed center of a satanic ring ([[Pizzagate]]). On Dec. 4, 2016, a believer fired a rifle inside the restaurant. An email inviting his brother, [[Tony Podesta]], to a dinner by the performance artist Marina Abramović became "[[Spirit Cooking]]," the occult-ritual thread. [[Jerome Corsi]] and others carried both into what became [[QAnon]]. Podesta is one of the few people who was both the victim of a real foreign intelligence operation and the target of an invented one built from its output. ## The Podesta Group footnote His brother Tony's lobbying firm, the Podesta Group, did Ukraine-related work arranged through [[Paul Manafort]]. It came under Mueller's scrutiny and closed in November 2017. The right has used that episode for a "both sides" defense of Manafort. John Podesta had no role in the firm. See [[Heather Podesta]]. ## See also - [[Russian Election Interference]] · [[Election Interference]] · [[DNC Hack]] · [[DCLeaks]] · [[Guccifer 2.0]] · [[GRU]] - [[Roger Stone]] · [[WikiLeaks]] · [[Julian Assange]] · [[Mueller Investigation]] - [[Pizzagate]] · [[Spirit Cooking]] · [[QAnon]] · [[Jerome Corsi]] - [[Center for American Progress]] · [[Tony Podesta]] · [[Heather Podesta]] · [[Invariant]]