Hillary Clinton does not like being asked to release transcripts from her pricey paid Wall Street lunch speeches. Clinton was paid a whopping $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs.
In an interview with the editorial boards of two Philadelphia-based newspapers, Clinton got nasty when asked if she would release her speech transcripts. True to form, she shifted to the matter of tax returns and bemoaned double standards rather than answering the question.
Jenna Lifhits of the Washington Free Beacon writes:
“Well, I can only say this: let’s make sure everybody is already as transparent as I,” Clinton said when asked whether her refusal to release the transcripts signaled that she had “something to hide.”Clinton avoided discussing the transcripts and instead focused on the “30 years” worth of tax returns that she had released. Seeing as rival Bernie Sanders has yet to release his tax returns, Clinton claimed, she was being held to a “double standard.”“There certainly has been a double standard between me and others who run,” Clinton said. “Let’s meet the same standards. Let’s start with tax returns. That has been the standard.”
The transcript question surfaced during a Democratic debate held in February. Hillary deflected then, too. Professor Jacobson blogged:
During the MSNBC Democratic debate, Chuck Todd asked if Hillary would release the transcripts of her paid speeches, particularly the three Goldman Sachs speeches for which she was paid $675,000 total.As the question was being asked, you could see Hillary’s mental wheels spinning until she came up with the response she needed: I’ll think about it.Hillary then quickly moved on to her robotic stump speech:
We know little about what the content of the Wall Street speeches, but according to an attendee interviewed by Politico, “she sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”
“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.”
But I doubt the issue will cost Hillary any votes because nothing matters this election cycle, apparently:
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