The Intercept’s Lee Fang recently questioned Hillary Clinton about her speeches for Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, which paid her $675,000 for just three appearances. After a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, Fang asked Clinton if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. Clinton laughed and turned away.
Lee Fang talking:
since 2001, Bill and Hillary Clinton have earned over $115 million on the speaker circuit, going out to private corporations, foundations, special interest groups, and charging as much as $200,000, $300,000 per speech. I mean, this is really unprecedented in American history that you have a leading candidate of a major party enriching themselves personally from special interest groups that have been lobbying them and will be lobbying them if they do win the White House. So there’s been a lot of talk about, you know, what these speeches actually entailed.
And Hillary Clinton has defended herself, saying that she’s basically giving a boilerplate speech, she wants to have more education and more conversations, and this is healthy for our democracy. On the other hand, there have been reports that when Hillary Clinton has gone to some special interest groups—for example, she gave three speeches to Goldman Sachs, making over $600,000 from that one investment bank—that she gave a very specially tailored message, saying that she’s against all of this anti-bank populism. According to Politico, she reassured the bankers that she wouldn’t be taking the line of Elizabeth Warren or Obama really criticizing the big banks.
I believe the Clintons have said some of the money has gone to the foundation. but the vast majority of it has personally enriched them. They’ve released their personal ethics disclosures, and it’s clear that the Clintons have made a lot of money, tens of millions of dollars, as I mentioned, earning over $115 million from the speaker circuit over the last 16 years.
_____
Lee Fang
investigative reporter at The Intercept covering the intersection of money and politics.
— source democracynow.org