WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.: Hillary Clinton took nearly every precaution to ensure voters would never know what she told investment bankers, lobbyists and corporate executives in dozens of closed-door paid speeches before running for president.
Turns out, the Democratic presidential nominee had good reason to do so.
The private comments strike a tone starkly at odds with the fiery message she’s pushed throughout her campaign, particularly during the hard-fought Democratic primary. Some of her remarks give fresh fuel to liberals’ worst fears about Clinton, namely that she is a political moderate, happy to cut backroom deals with corporate interests and curry favor with Wall Street for campaign dollars.
The WikiLeaks organization on Friday posted what it said were thousands of emails obtained in a hack of the Clinton campaign chairman’s personal email account. Among the documents posted online was an internal review of the speeches conducted by campaign aides to survey the political damage her remarks could cause if they ever became public.
In what aides calculated were the most damaging passages, she reflects on the necessity of “unsavory” political dealing, telling real estate investors that “you need both a public and private position.” To investment bankers from Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, Clinton admits she’s “kind of far removed” from the middle-class upbringing she frequently touts on the campaign trail. She tells Xerox CEO Ursula Burns that both political parties should be “sensible, moderate, pragmatic.”
And in speeches to some of the country’s biggest banks, she highlighted her long ties to Wall Street, bantering with top executives and saying she views the financial industry as a partner in government regulation.
“Part of the problem with the political situation, too, is that there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” she said, according to an excerpt from an October 2013 discussion with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Clinton goes on to appear to question the importance of the divestment of assets that financial executives often undertake to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest when they enter government service.
“You know, the divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes very onerous and unnecessary,” she said.
Clinton’s campaign has refused to confirm — or deny — the authenticity of the thousands of emails, suggesting they were part of a Russian effort to influence the outcome of the presidential race. “I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” campaign chairman John Podesta tweeted. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.”
In an effort to keep those speeches private, strongly worded contracts prohibited unauthorized recordings, reporters were banned and, in some cases, blog posts about her remarks pulled off websites. Throughout her campaign, she has staunchly refused to release transcripts, resisting pressure from primary rival Bernie Sanders and the media to do so.
The WikiLeaks disclosures should be the kind of “October surprise” that would thrill Clinton’s opponents. Yet Republicans have found themselves largely unable to capitalize on the moment, consumed instead by the latest scandal of their nominee.
But Clinton’s private comments, now public, aren’t going away. If she wins the White House, they’ll trail her into the Oval Office, planting seeds of distrust among some of her liberal allies.
A January 2016 email from the Clinton campaign’s research director to top communications staffers includes excerpts from 15 of the more than 100 speeches she gave after leaving the State Department, appearances that netted her $21.7 million.
One passage puts Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she’s struggled with during the 2016 election. In the first general election debate, Clinton said she supports “smart and fair trade.”
But nearly three years earlier, in a talk to a Brazilian bank, she said her “dream” is “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”