At Thursday night's debate in New Hampshire, MSNBC moderator Chuck Todd tossed one of this week's bigger questions to Hillary Clinton, asking if she'd provide the public with a record of what she said in the numerous paid speeches she's delivered since leaving the State Department. These would include three speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, for which she received $675,000 in renumeration.
In her response, Clinton showed a tiny preview of one topic she may have addressed in those speeches, and sounded a familiar refrain:
TODD: Thank you both. Let me move on to our next question here, and in fact it comes to us through New England Cable News. Secretary Clinton, it's addressed to you, and it's about this issue of the speeches, particularly to Goldman Sachs. This is what the questioner wrote verbatim.
"I am concerned with the abuses of Wall Street has taken with the American taxpayers' money," and then she asks whether you would release the transcripts of your Goldman Sachs speeches, and then added, "Don't you think the voting public has a right to know what was said?"
But, let's make that bigger. Are you willing to release the transcripts of all your paid speeches? We do know through reporting that there were transcription services for all of those paid speeches. In full disclosure, would you release all of them?
CLINTON: I will look into it. I don't know the status, but I will certainly look into it. But, I can only repeat what is the fact that I spoke to a lot of different groups with a lot of different constituents, a lot of different kinds of members about issues that had to do with world affairs. I probably described more times than I can remember how stressful it was advising the president about going after Bin Laden.
My view on this is look at my record.
Well, Clinton does have something of a record -- or maybe it's a tendency -- of always referring back to the 9/11 terror attacks when the issue of her closeness to Wall Street comes up. As HuffPost's Ariel Edwards-Levy has reported, it came up in a big way at the Nov. 14 debate, at which Clinton gave this answer in response to her perceived closeness to Wall Street interests: "We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country."
One suspects there must be a better reason to pay Hillary Clinton $675,000 then to hear the story of how Osama bin Laden died, unless Wall Streeters really need the continual rebuking of those terrorists that badly.
Regardless, one can probably now expect Clinton's communications staff to be hounded until those transcripts are produced.
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Jason Linkins edits "Eat The Press" for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost politics podcast, "So, That Happened." Subscribe here. Listen to the latest episode below.
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