Hillary Clinton Wall Street speech attendee says Clinton sounded 'like a Goldman Sachs managing director'

Clinton speech attendee says she sounded like Goldman Sachs employee.

(Image credit: DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)

published 9 February 2016

Before Hillary Clinton was railing on big banks in a race for the Democratic presidential nomination against notoriously anti-Wall Street candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), she was getting paid by the big banks to give talks. Now, those private talks are threatening to make a second — and very public — appearance as the push grows for Clinton to release transcripts.

While some argue that the remarks are nothing but the "boilerplate, happy talk that highly paid speakers generally offer to their hosts," others worry that Clinton's speech, if released, could easily be taken out of context by Sanders, who has already been slamming her for her Wall Street connections.

According to one attendee at Clinton's October 2013 speech to Goldman Sachs executives and tech industry leaders, Clinton's remarks then were a far cry from what she's saying on campaign trail now. "It was pretty glowing about us," the attendee told Politico of the speech. "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." Clinton, Politico reports, got $225,000 for the talk, during which she not once criticized Goldman or Wall Street over the financial crisis.