Yesterday, Politico reported that in a Wall Street speech, Hillary sounded more like "a Goldman Sachs managing director." Today, Bloomberg's Josh Green quoted a financial CEO who attended another Clinton speech as saying Hillary "lavished praise on Wall Street, said you guys are the pillar of our economy." Ruh-roh: how will the increasingly left-wing Dem electorate react to that? GOP strategist Steve Schmidt subsequently said that release of the speech transcripts could be "fatal" for Clinton's campaign.
Happy day after New Hampshire, Hillary! The MSM is not eager to sink Clinton. But the drip, drip, drip of these stories about what Hillary told people who paid her millions for her remarks threatens to swell into an irresistible torrent that will force Clinton to disclose. And when she does . . .
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: And hanging over her are the speeches that she's given to Wall Street and to big banks. And you've heard from some CEOs who were actually inside during those speeches and it's not necessarily positive [ya think?].
JOSH GREEN: This has been the big kind of simmering issue, I think has been overshadowed in the last couple of days over the whole who will/who won't win debate? Now Bernie has won. He's won by a landslide really in New Hampshire. So the question becomes, does Clinton need to make some kind of a meaningful concession to this anti-Wall Street anger coursing through the Democratic party by releasing these secret speeches?
JOE SCARBOROUGH: But you have heard and there's other reporters that we've talked to that are actually looking at the transcripts. She sounds -- one reporter said she sounds like a managing director for one of the hedge funds.
GREEN: I talked to a CEO of a financial firm who sat through one of her paid speeches in 2014 and said actually the speech itself was just about important decisions she had to make to make as Secretary of State, a lot of it promoting women, nothing controversial. What would be problematic, he said, for her, was that in her introductory remarks she lavished praised on Wall Street, said you guys are the pillar of our economy. The irony, the CEO said, is this is a crowd of Romney voters who would never vote for Hillary Clinton and it was empty flattery that wasn't going to advance her cause with that crowd.
KATTY KAY: Why did she do it? What was she trying to get out of that crowd?
GREEN: Well, when you're paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to show up and make a speech to people, I think there's just an impulse to offer some kind of praise of your audience or -- you know, something to suggest this isn't just a naked financial transaction.
JOE: She's getting paid $225,000: start there....
STEVE SCHMIDT: Democratic voters look at her character defects through the prism of all the money taken in from the Wall Street firms. So now we're going to be going into another chapter here, starting I suspect today, demanding the release of the transcripts of the speeches, demanding the release of the question and answer from the speeches. And they have disclosure issues like no candidate ever had. If you go back to the Romney campaign in 2012, the issue of the release of his taxes, John McCain's campaign in 2008, demands for release of his health records. There has never been a candidate who has faced so many different calls for disclosure of information that could be fatal if it becomes public across this wide, vast spectrum.
MIKA: Wow.
