WASHINGTON ― Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that if Hillary Clinton’s speeches on Wall Street had been released earlier, the Democratic nominee for president would be Bernie Sanders.
On Friday, Wikileaks published excerpts of Clinton’s paid speeches made in private to Wall Street firms like Morgan Stanley, which show her espousing views at odds with her 2016 platform. The emails ultimately were obtained by hackers working for the Russian government, according to the FBI.
Giuliani, a Donald Trump surrogate, lamented that the excerpts were not made public during the primary and attempted to shift the focus away from recently released audio of Trump making lewd comments about sexually assaulting women.
“We’ve got two candidates that have flaws,” Giuliani said on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace. “And I do think one of the really horrible things about that is, had those come out, Bernie Sanders would be the candidate now that we’d be running against, not her, because she fought so hard to keep those secret.”
“We now know why, because if she had run the way she ran on those tapes for all those bankers, for all that ― I mean, she got paid millions of dollars for saying that stuff,” Giuliani continued.
Host Chris Wallace later pressed Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, whose emails were hacked, ultimately revealing the transcripts. Wallace quizzed Podesta specifically on Clinton’s suggestion to the Wall Street crowd that bankers are in the best position to regulate the banking industry because they know it better than anybody.
That has long been a talking point Wall Street uses to fend off regulation, though it was disproven rather dramatically by the 2008 financial crisis.
Podesta struggled to answer, suggesting that Clinton meant the opposite of what she said.
“That’s hardly a revelation,” he said. “What people on Wall Street know is how to game the system. What she wants to do is crack down on the system, make sure that there’s no one institution that’s too big to fail, and no person that’s too big to jail.”
He then noted that Sanders himself, after reading the partial transcripts, said he still supports Clinton.