Transcripts of Clinton's Wall Street Talks Released in New Wikileaks Dump (reuters.com)

Emily Stephenson and Luciana Lopez, reporting for Reuters: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's full remarks to several Wall Street audiences appeared to become public on Saturday when the controversial transparency group Wikileaks dumped its latest batch of hacked emails. The documents showed comments by Clinton during question-and-answer sessions with Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and Tim O'Neill, the bank's head of investment management, at three separate events in 2013 in Arizona, New York and South Carolina. Some excerpts of Clinton's speeches had already been released. For more than a week, Wikileaks has published in stages what it says are hacked emails from the account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman. Clinton came under fire for months for not releasing full details of her paid speeches to big business audiences, as opponents accused her of a cozy relationship with bankers and other members of the U.S. financial system.

Comments

Re:Too Late

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you live so far under a rock that you don't know how power dynamics work? I am confident that Trump ignores when women don't "let him", making it seem in his mind that they intentionally "let him". You are applying (terrible) rationality onto a largely irrational person.

Re:Why is nobody mentioning the content

[tlhIngan]

It's strange that the news is almost entirely about the release of the remarks and, at least in linked article, no mention of what those remarks are. Could it be that the remarks aren't actually interesting or even newsworthy?

More the likely. Also look at the day it's released - I mean, it wasn't released on a day known for big news. Similar to the Friday Afternoon Dump, you release on these days when it's really bad for you, the releaser.

These leaks themselves aren't terribly interesting. So the only thing Wikileaks is cashing in on is goodwill based on earlier leaks that news of leaks is news itself.

And if you're curious, it's likely a political play by Assange - apparently Ecuador is going to have a presidential election and the current president, Rafael Correa, is not running for another term. This scares Assange because it could easily mean the end to his asylum, and if he's handed over to the US, he'd rather be under a president Trump than Clinton. Perhaps hoping he'd at least get a pardon or something out of it. That's the political play, at least

Re:Too Late

[tburkhol]

So, when he said "they let you do it" there's actually no "they let you" in that sentence?

The quote is "When you're a star, they let you." Like you "let" your boss call you an idiot. "When you're a star," you can use your fame and money to abuse people, because they know they can't fight back. "When you're a star," people will let you do things that they would never consent to.

Apparently many here aren't paying attention to

[waspleg]

REAL journalists:

These are all from the last week or so and mostly from the hacked emails. Oldest first. Yes these people go after Trump too but as far as I'm concerned has no chance in hell anyway.

Hillary Clinton Sympathized with Goldman Sachs over financial reform.

What Major Donors like Goldman Sachs want from the Democratic Party (they also fucking hate Elizabeth Warren - shock.)

Hillary Clinton repeatedly Praised Wal-Mart in paid speeches This bitch knows who signs her checks and kisses heavy amounts of ass accordingly.

Clinton aide PLANTED ANTI-BANK COMMENTS in a paid speech to throw off reporters.

Democrats trying to work out how to pass huge corporate tax cuts. If you read it's essentially the same thing Trump wants. Remember: same corporate hand, different puppets.

BONUS: Hillary Clinton's encryption proposal impossible. Because she wanted secure communication between people that could still be monitored by the gov't.

For the record I think Bernie Sanders / Elizabeth Warren would have been the dream team. Fuck Hillary and Trump both.

PS. In case you didn't know The Intercept = Glenn Greenwald = Snowden's choice for disclosure. They're good guys.

Re:Quick, blame the Russians somehow!

[Rei]

Right. The US intelligence services are so dumb as to base decisions entirely on what time zone an attack took place. Got it. I love how they're considered both omniscient and omnipotent with their fingers in every last system, and yet utter morons at the same time.

Concerning "the leaks are still the leaks": the overwhelming majority of people, 99.999%, are not actually reading "the leaks". They're reading random excerpts selected out of massive volumes of text designed to try to make Clinton look bad. Virtually nobody is reading context or anything else that was said. IMHO, they're very interesting geopolitical discussions, if you're at all wonkish.

Note that even in these full versions, the leakers carefully "highlighted" the gotchas to make sure you don't miss them. And it's also funny what they decided would be a gotcha and what wouldn't. For example, they highlighted the section where she discussed being forced to go on a "Clinton Apology Tour" due to the Manning leaks, from one leader to the next who had been characterized by any embassy in less than flattering terms - even though these people actually were as corrupt and whatnot as the embassy memos described. But they didn't see fit to highlight her joke about giving a red state to China right before that:

(Context: negotiations with China over the South China Sea)

SECRETARY CLINTON: "... I think that -- you know, one of the greatest arguments that I had on a continuing basis was with my Chinese counterparts about their claim. And I made the point at one point in the argument that, you know, you can call it whatever you want to call it. You don't have a claim to all of it. I said, by that argument, you know, the United States should claim all of the Pacific. We liberated it, we defended it. We have as much claim to all of the Pacific. And we could call it the American Sea, and it could go from the West Coast of California all the way to the Philippines. And, you know, my counterpart sat up very straight and goes, well, you can't do that. And I said, well, we have as much right to claim that as you do. I mean, you claim it based on pottery shards from, you know, some fishing vessel that ran aground in an atoll somewhere. You know, we had conveys of military strength. We discovered Japan for Heaven sakes. I mean, we did all of these things.

MR. BLANKFEIN: These are more technical conversations than I thought they would be.

(Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Yes, yes. And then he says to me, well, you know, we'll claim Hawaii. And I said, yeah, but we have proof we bought it. Do you have proof you brought any of these places you're claiming? So we got into the nitty-gritty of --

MR. BLANKFEIN: But they have to take New Jersey.

(Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: No, no, no. We're going to give them a red state.

(Laughter and applause.)

(That said, she does however have a number of good things to say about most of her Republican colleagues - she only seems to have a trouble with the Tea Party and the sort of candidates they push / pressure they put on moderate candidates to tag to their line, and goes into a number of times where the pressure they've put on their congressmen had a negative impact on US relationships with other countries)

In general, though, while yes there are political angles in there that one can take, most of it is purely policy talk, in a great level of depth. Very much worth a read.