Dogged by accusations that she is too close to financial firms because of the speeches she gave to them for large honorariums, Hillary Clinton has said she will release the transcripts of those speeches on one condition: that her opponents do the same.
Clinton's argument is that to require she disclose those transcripts unilaterally would be to hold her campaign to a different standard than the others. If Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the Republican candidates release the transcripts of their speeches, then she will, too.
There's only one hitch: The other candidates may not be able to meet the Clinton standard.
Sanders, for example, has noted that he hasn't given speeches to financial firms. He can't as a senator. And now, Gov. John Kasich's presidential campaign says that he has no transcripts to make public.
"There is nothing to release," said Kasich's spokesman Rob Nichols. "We don't have anything."
The absence of transcripts is not because Kasich didn't give speeches. He did. He was part of multiple speaker bureaus while he served as managing director at Lehman Brothers and hosted "Heartland with John Kasich" on Fox News. He'd charge between $20,000 and $30,000 a pop to discuss topics like "The Battle for America's Soul," "American Values: Doing Well by Doing Good" and "The Power of Ordinary People." Nichols called it an a-la-carte arrangement in which Kasich and others advertised by the bureau would be available to different entities. Sometimes, two people would appear together to give a talk.
But Kasich spoke off the cuff at a lot of these, according to Nichols. And he didn't have a person with him to transcribe the remarks, though some of them made their way on to the Internet.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's (R) presidential campaign did not return a request for comment for this piece. But he would not have given paid speeches during his time in the Senate, and it is unlikely he gave them during his time in the Bush administration as a policy adviser or as Texas' solicitor general.
The leaves Donald Trump, who definitely has given paid speeches, and whose campaign, likewise, did not return a request for comment.
The businessman appears to be the main target of the Clinton campaign's everyone-jumps-together policy on making transcripts public. Brian Fallon, a Clinton spokesman, pointed The Huffington Post to a comment he made on Wednesday morning about the topic that referenced Trump only.
"And I think that, in a general election if Donald Trump is going to be the nominee of the Republican Party, he has given paid speeches, commanding speaking fees in excess of $400,000," Fallon remarked. "If this is going to be the new normal, where candidates on both sides of the aisle are asked to release transcripts and everyone participates in it, Hillary Clinton will be happy to join in on that."