When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at a summit in Arizona in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising capital and helping create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks.
Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman’s workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis.
“It was pretty glowing about us,” one person who watched the event said. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”
At another speech to Goldman and its big asset management clients in New York in 2013, Clinton spoke about how it wasn’t just the banks that caused the financial crisis and that it was worth looking at the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law to see what was working and what wasn’t.
“It was mostly basic stuff, small talk, chit-chat,” one person who attended that speech said. “But in this environment, it could be made to look really bad.”
Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon dismissed the recollections as “pure trolling,” while the Clinton campaign declined to comment further on calls that she release the transcripts of the three paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, for which she earned a total of $675,000.
For what? For access, of course. Everybody wants to get a bet down on the next president of the United States, and once that bet is placed, you can rest assured that the winner is going to be expected to pay off like a slot machine. This is how utterly corrupt the electoral and governance systems of America have become.
Which is why she won’t release the transcripts:
Some people close to the campaign both want Clinton to release the remarks, because they don’t think there is anything bad about them, but worry about what will happen if she does. “If it were up to me I’d just say go ahead and release them and deal with it,” said one senior Democrat close to the Clinton campaign. “But I can understand why they don’t want to because anything can be taken out of context and blown up.”
So far, the Clinton campaign has shown no inclination to release the texts of her remarks to Goldman or anyone else. At a debate in New Hampshire last week, Clinton said she would “look into” the matter. A day after the debate, Clinton pollster Joel Benenson told reporters, “I don’t think voters are interested in the transcripts of her speeches.” On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Clinton pushed back even harder on calls to release the speech transcripts.
“Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them. We’ll all release them at the same time,” she said. “I have never, ever been influenced in a view or a vote by anyone who has given me any kind of funding.”
Which is why the best possible outcome might be this: Trump vs. Sanders. Whoever wins, tears down the whole damn thing and, four or eight years later, we get to start over.
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