Hacked transcripts reveal a genial Clinton at Goldman Sachs events

In a 2013 paid speech hosted by Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton said she had not yet decided whether she would run for president again.

But she did offer some friendly advice to the bank's chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, when he asked what he would need to do to mount his own hypothetical bid.

"I think you would leave Goldman Sachs and start running a soup kitchen somewhere," Clinton said. "Then you could be a legend in your own time, both when you were there and when you left."

Clinton's campaign declined to release transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street firms during the Democratic primary contests, when her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, criticized her for accepting roughly $225,000 per speech.

But on Saturday, transcripts of three appearances at Goldman Sachs events were released by WikiLeaks, part of a trove of thousands of emails obtained by hackers who illegally breached the email account of one of Clinton's top aides.

The genial relationship she appeared to have with Blankfein and other Wall Street executives at the events would not have served Clinton well in the Democratic primary contests, when Sanders used the speeches to portray her as being too close to Wall Street.

But for Clinton, who is often criticized as overly scripted, her relaxed, off-the-cuff exchanges at these private events also revealed a side she has struggled to show voters under the intense glare of a presidential race.

While the emails released last week showed Clinton's cadre of campaign aides agonizing over jokes she should tell in public and calculating political implications, the transcripts revealed Clinton freely dispensing her own quick wit before a closed-door audience.

In one question-and-answer session with Blankfein, Clinton relayed an argument she had had as secretary of state, when she tried to convince a Chinese diplomat that his country had no more right to claim the South China Sea than the United States had to the Pacific Ocean.

"He says to me, 'We'll, you know, we'll claim Hawaii,'" Clinton told Blankfein. "And I said, 'Yeah, but we have proof we bought it. Do you have proof you bought any of these places you're claiming?'"

Blankfein interjected: "But they have to take New Jersey."

"No, no, no. We're going to give them a red state," Clinton said.

At these events, which took place in June and October 2013, Clinton repeatedly demurred when asked about her plans, but it was also clear she was contemplating the political landscape if she were to run again.

Clinton said that if she mounted a presidential campaign, she would need to begin raising money in 2014 or "early the following year." And she expressed concerns about how the news media covered campaigns.

"Our political press has just been captured by trivia," Clinton said at a CEO conference in South Carolina in which Blankfein moderated a discussion. "And so you don't want to give them any more time to trivialize the importance of the issues than you have to give them. You want to be able to wait as long as possible."

Excerpts from some of her speeches had previously been released by WikiLeaks, shortly after a recording surfaced in which her opponent, Donald Trump, made crude remarks about women. The Clinton campaign has refused to verify the authenticity of the transcripts, which came from the hacked email account of John D. Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman. The campaign has blamed the Russian government for the hack and WikiLeaks — whose founder, Julian Assange, is a critic of Clinton — for releasing the emails in a coordinated effort to help Trump, a view echoed by the Obama administration.

The emails released Saturday included a fuller version of Clinton's previously leaked answer to a question posed by Timothy J. O'Neill, a senior Goldman executive, at a symposium hosted by the firm. Asked how Wall Street banks should approach efforts by Washington to impose tougher regulation and oversight, Clinton made a show of empathy and spoke gently.

She detailed her time working with Wall Street as a senator from New York and confided that the "conventional wisdom" of blaming Wall Street banks for the financial crisis was an "oversimplification." Clinton described how banks were holding back on lending because they were "scared of regulations." She urged banks to allow greater transparency and help policymakers come up with solutions.

"We're all in this together," Clinton told the audience.

Most strikingly, Clinton did not defend the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial oversight legislation, a major achievement of President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in the wake of the crisis — and a target of Wall Street lobbying ever since. Instead, Clinton suggested that it had been passed for "political reasons" by lawmakers panicked by their angry constituents.

"I think the jury is still out on that because it was very difficult to sort of sort through it all," Clinton said of the overhaul.

Clinton took a far stronger line in public, particularly after she began her second bid for president. In a January 2016 speech in New York, amid her tough primary campaign with Sanders, Clinton vowed to defend the Dodd-Frank Act and expand financial regulation to new territory, such as hedge funds and high-frequency traders.

But most of Clinton's insights involved foreign policy and her experiences as the nation's top diplomat, including concerns about North Korea's nuclear arsenal, the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment in China and a strikingly prescient prediction about the spread of nationalism in Europe.

Clinton presented the Pentagon's argument against implementing a no-fly zone in Syria, a policy that she has advocated in her 2016 campaign. Noting that American pilots would have to enforce the no-fly zone, she said, "We're not putting our pilots at risk."

Other hacked emails suggest Clinton's campaign had deep concerns about the Wall Street transcripts being made public.

In November, as Clinton's campaign was refusing to release transcripts of her paid speeches, her speechwriter, Dan Schwerin, suggested anonymously leaking to a reporter excerpts from one particular speech he wrote for her: A 2014 address to Deutsche Bank.

In that speech, he said in the email, "I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats." He also acknowledged that it was "definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it now."

Another adviser, Mandy Grunwald, disagreed with Schwerin about releasing the 2014 speech. Referring to Clinton by her initials, Grunwald argued that the speech had not been hard enough on Wall Street.

The remarks, Grunwald said, "make it sound like HRC DOESN'T think the game is rigged — only that she recognizes that the public thinks so." Grunwald added: "They are angry. She isn't."