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THE EDITORIAL BOARDFEB. 25, 2016
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Peter Rant
February 27, 2016
It doesn't matter what she said in the speeches, unless of course, it's akin to the Romney's put down of half of the United States. The...
martha
February 27, 2016
The moral highground the Left is staking out grows daily more ridiculous. Woman tells rooms full of rich men what they want to hear. Gets...
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February 27, 2016
You are selecting a candidate who could be president for 'We, the People,' that includes the poor and the wealthy, the sick and the healthy,...
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“Everybody does it,” is an excuse expected from a mischievous child, not a presidential candidate. But that is Hillary Clinton’s latest defense for making closed-door, richly paid speeches to big banks, which many middle-class Americans still blame for their economic pain, and then refusing to release the transcripts.
A televised town hall on Tuesday was at least the fourth candidate forum in which Mrs. Clinton was asked about those speeches. Again, she gave a terrible answer, saying that she would release transcripts “if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans.”
In November,
she implied that her paid talks for the Wall Street firms were part of helping them rebuild after the 9/11 attacks, which “was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists.”
In a debate with Bernie Sanders on Feb. 4, Mrs. Clinton was asked if she would release transcripts, and she said she would “look into it.” Later in February, asked in a CNN town hall forum why she accepted $675,000 for speeches to Goldman Sachs, she got annoyed, shrugged,
and said, “That’s what they offered,” adding that “every secretary of state that I know has done that.”
At another
town hall, on Feb. 18, a man in the audience pleaded, “Please, just release those transcripts so that we know exactly where you stand.” Mrs. Clinton had told him, “I am happy to release anything I have when everybody else does the same, because every other candidate in this race has given speeches to private groups.”
On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton further complained, “Why is there one standard for me, and not for everybody else?”
The only different standard here is the one Mrs. Clinton set for herself, by personally
earning $11 million in 2014 and the first quarter of 2015 for 51 speeches to banks and other groups and industries.
Voters have every right to know what Mrs. Clinton told these groups. In July, her spokesman Nick Merrill
said that though most speeches were private, the Clinton operation “always opened speeches when asked to.” Transcripts of speeches that have been leaked have been pretty innocuous. By refusing to release them all,
especially the bank speeches, Mrs. Clinton
fuels speculation about why she’s stonewalling.
Her conditioning her releases on what the Republicans might or might not do is mystifying. Republicans make no bones about their commitment to Wall Street deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Mrs. Clinton is laboring to convince struggling Americans that she will rein in big banks, despite taking their money.
Besides, Mrs. Clinton is not running against a Republican in the Democratic primaries. She is running against Bernie Sanders, a decades-long critic of Wall Street excess who is hardly a hot ticket on the industry speaking circuit. The Sanders campaign, asked if Mr. Sanders also received fees for closed-door speeches, came up with two from two decades ago that were not transcribed: one to a hospital trade association, and one to a college, each for less than $1,000. Royalties from a book called “The Speech,” Mr. Sanders’s eight-hour Senate floor diatribe against President Obama’s continuation of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, were donated to the nonprofit Addison County Parent/Child Center in Vermont.
The hazards of Mrs. Clinton, a presidential hopeful, earning more than $200,000 each for dozens of speeches to industry groups
were clear from the start. Mrs. Clinton was making paid speeches when she
hired consultants to vet her own background in preparation for a run. If they didn’t flag this, they weren’t doing their jobs.
Public interest in these speeches is legitimate, and it is the public — not the candidate — who decides how much disclosure is enough. By stonewalling on these transcripts Mrs. Clinton plays into the hands of those who say she’s not trustworthy and makes her own rules. Most important, she is damaging her credibility among Democrats who are begging her to show them that she’d run an accountable and transparent White House.
