Weeks before Hillary Clinton claimed she “went to Wall Street in December of 2007” and told big bankers to “cut it out” on the eve of the economic downturn the following year, she was accepting endorsements from the banking industry’s top executives.
The claim, which Clinton made Tuesday evening during the first Democratic debate, was one of several that conflict with her political past. In another, she said she was proud to have made “enemies” of pharmaceutical and health insurance companies — both of which have supported her campaigns, paid her or her husband for speeches or donated to her family’s philanthropy.
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Challenged from the left by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton has been pushed to take a tougher stance against Wall Street, given the Vermont socialist’s popular plan to break up the nation’s largest banks.
Her comments during the debate Tuesday on how she addressed Wall Street’s misbehavior in December 2007 may have been referring to a Dec. 3, 2007 letter to then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in which she proposed a 90-day freeze on home foreclosures. The Clinton campaign did not immediately return a request for comment about what specific actions she was referring to when she said she ordered Wall Street to “cut it out” that month.
In a Wall Street Journal piece titled “Friends of Hillary Clinton” that was published in Dec. 2007, a reporter laid out some of the recent success Clinton had enjoyed in courting female bank executives.
Clinton had appeared at a fundraising rally in an auditorium at JPMorgan Chase, hosted by an executive vice president at the bank who was also a major bundler, the report said. She also enjoyed support from the upper echelon of Ernst & Young, including the firm’s top pharmaceutical executive.
In April of that year, John Mack, the CEO of Morgan Stanley, publicly backed Clinton despite being a registered Republican. Clinton welcomed his endorsement as a symbol of her ability to bridge the partisan divide.
She also accepted an endorsement from Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, in August.
Between July and September of 2007, just a few months before the Democratic candidate said she told big banks to clean up their act, Clinton reportedly raised more campaign cash from Wall Street firms than did Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani combined.
At the debate Tuesday, Clinton also railed against financial services firms that take big risks but face little accountability. The most infamous example of such a firm, Lehman Brothers, paid her husband $150,000 for a single speech in April 2007, according to her financial disclosure form from that year. Merill Lynch paid her husband $175,000 for a speech on Nov. 30, 2007, just one day before Clinton said she “took on” the likes of Merill Lynch.
Wall Street firms don’t appear to have abandoned their 2008 candidate of choice in the 2016 primary. Executives from Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are among Clinton’s top 10 donors in the campaign so far, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Two of Clinton’s stated “enemies” from the debate, a list that included “Iranians” and “Republicans,” have also been friendly to Clinton.
Clinton’s 2008 campaign was among the top 10 recipients of donations from the pharmaceutical industry, one of the enemies Clinton claimed she was proud to make.
Pfizer, a major drug company, has given at least $1 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Health insurance companies, another purported Clinton foe, have also given heavily to the Clinton Foundation. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Humana, Aetna and Kaiser Permanente have each donated to the charity, donor records show.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobbying group that represents some of the largest health insurance companies, paid Bill Clinton $175,000 for a speech in 2010.
