WikiLeaks has released what it claims are three complete transcripts of paid speeches Hillary Clinton gave at Goldman Sachs in 2013, all obtained via a controversial hack of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email account. The transcripts, which were of speeches Clinton gave at three separate Goldman events between June and October 2o13, were attached to an email sent to Podesta and others working on the campaign by aide Tony Carrk in late January. The authenticity of the transcripts, as with the rest of the hacked Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks, has not been verified. Excerpts from these same speeches, with Carrk highlighting what he believed were the most potentially controversial segments, had already been released via WikiLeaks on October 7, and it seems that those flagged highlights did indeed capture the most consequential parts of the speeches.
The Goldman speech transcripts were a significant political issue for Clinton during her Democratic primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders, who had accused Clinton of having too close a relationship with the banking industry, and had called on her to release her speeches so voters could see what she said behind closed doors.
Below are a couple of new, notable segments contained in the transcripts that were not excerpted or reported previously; the full transcripts are embedded below that.
Here is how Clinton responded to being thanked by a Goldman executive for being “courageous in some respects to associate with Wall Street and this environment”:
Well, I don’t feel particularly courageous. I mean, if we’re going to be an effective, efficient economy, we need to have all part of that engine running well, and that includes Wall Street and Main Street. And there’s a big disconnect and a lot of confusion right now. So I’m not interested in, you know, turning the clock back or pointing fingers, but I am interested in trying to figure out how we come together to chart a better way forward and one that will restore confidence in, you know, small and medium-size businesses and consumers and begin to chip away at the unemployment rate. So it’s something that I, you know, if you’re a realist, you know that people have different roles to play in politics, economics, and this is an important role, but I do think that there has to be an understanding of how what happens here on Wall Street has such broad consequences not just for the domestic but the global economy, so more thought has to be given to the process and transactions and regulations so that we don’t kill or maim what works, but we concentrate on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power that exists here.
Here is a section on the “apology tour” Clinton had to take as secretary of State after the WikiLeaks diplomatic-cables dump in 2010:
And here is a section that gets into Clinton’s sense of the political press:
The Transcripts:
This is the purported full transcript from Clinton’s appearance at a Goldman event on June 4, 2013, in South Carolina:
Here is the transcript from Clinton’s appearance at a Goldman event on October 24, 2013, in New York:
Here is the transcript from Clinton’s appearance at a Goldman event on October 29, 2013, in Arizona:
This post was updated to feature a few notable sections of the speeches that had not been previously reported before these transcripts were released.
