NEW YORK – While the Big Media are focused on a covert audio conversation by Donald Trump from a decade ago, Wikileaks emails, mostly pertaining to her campaign manager John Podesta, released late Friday provide insight into Hillary Clinton’s highly paid insider speeches to bankers.
Among the revelations:
- She told the National Multi-Housing Council April 24, 2013 that it’s necessary for politicians to hold public positions that are actually different from their private ones — those presumably held for actual governance: “But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. so, you need both a public and a private position. You just have to sort of figure out how to — getting back to that word, ‘balance’ — how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position. And finally, I think — I believe in evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it’s like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know, you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.”
- Clinton supports North American Union – a merger between the U.S., Mexico and Canada – similar to the European Union, she said in a paid speech to the Banco Itau: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere. I think we have to have a concerted plan to increase trade already under the current circumstances, you know, that Inter-American Development Bank figure is pretty surprising. There is so much more we can do, there is a lot of low hanging fruit but businesses on both sides have to make it a priority and it’s not for governments to do but governments can either make it easy or make it hard and we have to resist, protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade and I would like to see this get much more attention and be not just a policy for a year under president X or president Y but a consistent one.”
- In a speech to Goldman Sachs, Feb. 4, 2014, Clinton relished the fact that she had graduated from the middle class: “I’m kind of far removed from the struggles of the middle class because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy. And I am not taking a position on any policy, but I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn’t believe in mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it.”
- In another Goldman Sachs paid speech behind closed doors Oct. 24, 2013, Clinton spoke openly about her need to raise money from Wall Street for her political campaigns, ignoring issues of whether or not that compromised her as a candidate necessarily beholding to serve the corporate interests of multi-national corporations: “Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it. New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it’s also our economic center. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy.”
- The speeches show Clinton was aware Blackberries were not secure communication devices, though she used them routinely as secretary of state, including on foreign trips: During a closed-door speech at the University of Connecticut April 23, 2014, she said: “But, at the State Department we were attacked every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate everything we had. And that was true across the U.S. government. And we knew it was going on when I would go to China, or I would go to Russia, we would leave all of our electronic equipment on the plane, with the batteries out, because this is a new frontier. And they’re trying to find out not just about what we do in our government. They’re trying to find out about what a lot of companies do and they were going after the personal emails of people who worked in the State Department. So it’s not like the only government in the world that is doing anything is the United States. But, the United States compared to a number of our competitors is the only government in the world with any kind of safeguards, any kind of checks and balances. They may in many respects need to be strengthened and people need to be reassured, and they need to have their protections embodied in law. But, I think turning over a lot of that material intentionally or unintentionally, because of the way it can be drained, gave all kinds of information not only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups, and the like.” At another speech to Nexanta Aug. 28, 2014, she said: “We couldn’t take our computers, we couldn’t take our personal devices off the plane in China and Russia. I mean, probably the most frustrating part of this whole debate are countries acting like we’re the only people in the world trying to figure out what’s going on. I mean, every time I went to countries like China or Russia, I mean, we couldn’t take our computers, we couldn’t take our personal devices, we couldn’t take anything off the plane because they’re so good, they would penetrate them in a minute, less, a nanosecond. So we would take the batteries out, we’d leave them on the plane.” She added in that same speech: “When I got to the State Department, it was still against the rules to let most — or let all foreign service officers have access to a Blackberry. I mean, let’s face it, our government is woefully, woefully behind in all of its policies that affect the use of technology. When I got to the State Department, it was still against the rules to let most — or let all Foreign Service Officers have access to a Blackberry.”
- Clinton blamed Moammar Gadhafi and foreign mercenaries for the terrorism that plagues Libya after she sided radical jihadi militia aligned with al-Qaida to topple Gadhafi from power – even though he had expressed a willingness to step aside peacefully: Here is what Clinton told the Boston Consulting Group in June 20, 2013: “Now, you know, in Libya, the United Nations voted how to protect civilians. And the coalition that was put together was unprecedented. It was NATO plus the Arab League. That had never happened before. The over flights, the boat, air, sea and land efforts included Arab nations as well as Europeans, Canadians and Americans. Khadafy was told but then, you know, the lid was taken off. You have a country that had been under the thumb of Khadafy and his henchmen for 42 years. All institutions were destroyed. There was not even a military because he didn’t trust anybody since he had been a Colonel who had done a coup, so he had mercenaries, there were African mercenaries and some European mercenaries that were in his direct pay. They had really just conducted themselves as if the entire Libyan oil fortune was personally theirs.
- In remarks to Funacion TelMex Sept. 5, 2014, Clinton admitted backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: “The Muslim Brotherhood won. In the beginning we said they won legitimately. We worked with them. We tried to persuade them, starting with President Morsi, to run an inclusive government, to make every Egyptian feel that they had a place at the table. They became much more interested in promoting their ideology, that produced a reaction. The military took over and now a general [el-Sisi] has become president. So those were very hard decisions to try to figure out how to manage on all of these fronts. But, the point I hope you take away is change for the sake of change is not going to make the difference you hope for unless you are prepared and organized to follow up on that change and politics, small “P” politics, is the way people in democracies work together to try to institutionalize the changes that you are seeking and I don’t know if we’re going to see any renewal of that kind of hopefulness in the Arab world for quite some time, because of the problems that arose as a result of overthrowing existing regimes without anything to fill the vacuum.”
- Clinton claims to have threatened China to surround it with missile defenses if China continued to allow North Korea to develop nuclear weapons and inter-continental ballistic missile systems – a bluff not kept. She told Goldman Sachs, June 4, 2013: “You know, we all have told the Chinese if they continue to develop this missile program and they get an ICBM that has the capacity to carry a small nuclear weapon on it, which is what they’re aiming to do, we cannot abide that. Because they could not only do damage to our treaty allies, namely Japan and South Korea, but they could actually reach Hawaii and the west coast theoretically, and we’re going to ring China with missile defense. We’re going to put more of our fleet in the area. So China, come on. You either control them or we’re going to have to defend against them.”
- In that same Goldman Sachs address June 4, 2013, Clinton admitted the inevitability of Saudi Arabia getting nuclear weapons: “So mutually assured destruction as we had with Europe in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s until the fall of the Soviet Union is much harder to do with the gulf states and it will be unlikely to occur because they will think that they have to defend themselves. And they will get into the business of nuclear weapons, and these are — the Saudis in particular are not necessarily the stablest regimes that you can find on the planet. So it’s fraught with all kinds of problems.”
The leaked emails also reveal for the first time that the Clinton Foundation held a meeting at Goldman Sachs headquarters June 6, 2014.
