Hillary Clinton told voters during a Nevada town hall on Thursday that she was justified in her refusal to release the transcripts of dozens of paid speeches she gave to special interest groups because other presidential candidates haven’t revealed the content of their own speeches.
“l am happy to release anything I have when everybody else does the same,” Clinton said during a town hall hosted by MSNBC Thursday.
“Every other candidate in this race has given speeches to private groups, including Sen. [Bernie] Sanders,” she argued.
Clinton has faced pressure from the left to publish the transcripts from speeches she gave in 2013 and 2014 to a variety of corporations and special interest groups, including several to big banks like Goldman Sachs.
Sanders, who only narrowly trails Clinton in the most recent spate of national and early state polls, has raised the specter of Clinton’s high-dollar speeches to suggest she could not be trusted to crack down on an industry that has paid her so well.
The former secretary of state has recently taken to accusing Sanders of delivering the same kind of speeches that have haunted her on the campaign trail.
However, Sanders does not list any income from paid speeches on his financial disclosure form. What little income he did list, a few hundred dollars in royalties from his book and an honorarium from appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show, was donated to charity, according to the disclosure.
The Sanders campaign did not return a request for comment as to what Clinton might have been referring to when she accused the Vermont senator of giving similar speeches.
Clinton, on the other hand, lists 51 paid speeches from 2014 and early 2015 on her latest financial disclosure form. The least she ever accepted to appear at an event was $100,000, and she raked in more than $300,000 for other engagements.
Clinton delivered paid speeches within a month of the official launch of her presidential campaign, filings show.
Even so, Clinton attempted earlier this month to explain controversy over her paid speeches by arguing she was not thinking about running for president when she delivered them.
