In a secret speech at securities law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd in San Diego on September 4, 2014, Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton bragged that she “represented and worked with” so many on Wall Street and “did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper.”
In another secret speech, Clinton admitted that the policy she advocated with respect to Syria would involve mass killings of civilians. “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians,” she stated.
Secret documents and emails containing these and other revelations were published by Wikileaks and The Intercept in recent days. The latter remarks were revealed as the United States threatens to escalate its military intervention in Syria under the pretext of protecting civilian lives.
In one remarkably Machiavellian speech, Clinton frankly admitted that she has “both a public and private position” on certain policy issues, and that she only reveals the “private position” when she is engaging in “back room discussions.” In other words, she consciously lies to and deceives the public, pursuing an entirely different agenda in secret negotiations within the American establishment.
“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,” Clinton said.
Perhaps one example of this distinction is provided by Clinton’s public and private positions with respect to Syria. While the US State Department uses the pretext of civilian casualties in Syria to ratchet up tensions with Russia, Clinton’s “private position” acknowledges that her own plan will “kill a lot of Syrians.”
Other emails confirm the corrupt ties between the Clinton campaign and the media, which involve undisclosed payments to pundits appearing on cable news programs. An internal list of contemptuously-labeled media “surrogates” contains those media personalities that could be relied upon to produce favorable coverage of the campaign.
The list of the “surrogates” deemed “reliable” by the Clinton campaign includes Maureen Dowd, Wolf Blitzer, David Brooks, Gail Collins, Rachel Maddow, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopolous and others. A similarly incriminating list of “progressive helpers” includes Judd Legum of ThinkProgress and the “Correct The Record” Super PAC run by David Brock.
Other documents published by The Intercept reveal secret “off-the-record” cocktail parties held by the Clinton campaign that were attended by journalists from ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, the Daily Beast, GPG, Huffington Post, MSNBC, NBC, T he New Yorker, the New York Times, People, Politico, Vice and Vox.
Invitees of these cocktail parties, where the reporters were briefed on how to present the Clinton campaign to the population in the most favorable light, apparently included Diane Sawyer (ABC), George Stephanopolous (ABC), Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) and Gail Collins ( New York Times ), among many others. The publication of these documents by The Intercept should forever reduce the credibility of these “news organizations” and “journalists” to zero.
The Clinton campaign responded to these revelations with its standard answer to all exposures of corruption and criminality on the part of the Democratic Party or Clinton personally—blame it on Russia. Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin declared that the revelations “removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy.”
The response of former Democratic Party presidential contender and so-called “socialist” Bernie Sanders to these revelations stands out as particularly craven and absurd. Sanders—who once rallied support based on his denunciations of the “billionaire class,” but who now functions as a Clinton campaign sideshow—reaffirmed his support for Clinton in a statement released Saturday: “Whatever Secretary Clinton may or may not have said behind closed doors on Wall Street, I am determined to implement the agenda of the Democratic Party platform, which was agreed to by her campaign.”
During the Democratic Party primary elections, Sanders made an issue of the millions of dollars in “speaking fees” Hillary and Bill Clinton had accumulated, which currently totals around $153 million. Exposing the fraudulent nature of his entire presidential bid, Sanders now admits that he will support Clinton no matter what she said or did.
Of course, only the very naive could believe for a moment that the enormous “speaking fees” accumulated by Clinton and her husband were paid for the speeches themselves. Instead, the designation of these sums as “speaking fees” more probably represents what is known in the criminal underworld as money-laundering. In other words, the corrupt flow of cash to the Clintons for services dutifully rendered to the financial aristocracy was disguised as “speaking fees” for taxation and accounting purposes.
In one secret Wall Street speech, Clinton candidly admitted that she is “far removed” from the middle-class interests that she has sought to rally behind her campaign, reassuring her rich patrons that her lifestyle and social outlook more closely mirror theirs.
Clinton stated that she is “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 a secret speech at Goldman Sachs on October 24, 2013, Clinton brushed off the conception that rampant corruption, speculation and criminality at Wall Street had led to the economic crash of 2008. Defending Wall Street, Clinton claimed that all this was a “misunderstanding.”
Speaking as though she was an attorney retained to confidentially advise all billionaires regarding their interests, Clinton pointed with concern to the perception “that somehow the game is rigged” as well as the way that hatred of Wall Street was becoming “politicized.”
In the same secret speech to Deutsche Bank on October 7, 2014, Clinton pointed to popular hostility to Wall Street as “a problem for all of us”—using the word “us” to refer to financial aristocrats and their political servants. She reassured the bankers in attendance that any measures or regulations implemented by Congress or the Obama administration would be designed to restore “public trust” in the financial system. In other words, they would be toothless and they would leave the privileges and prerogatives of the financial elite intact.
In her secret speeches, Clinton also reiterated her support for the Obama administration’s policy that the banks would continue to be allowed to “regulate” themselves. In a secret speech to the Goldman Sachs Alternative Investments Symposium on October 24, 2013, Clinton declared: “The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” Translation: “The Obama administration and I will do nothing to halt your illegal practices or impede the flow of the world’s money into your pockets.”
Behind closed doors, Clinton also spoke frankly of her need for vast sums of money to fund her campaign. “I think I raised $250 million or some such enormous amount,” she said, describing her previous presidential bid, “and in the last campaign President Obama raised $1.1 billion.” In that speech, made to General Electric’s Global Leadership Meeting in Boca Raton, Florida on January 6, 2014, Clinton admitted that the US Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision ushered in a “wild west” period of unlimited corporate bribes in elections.
Documents released by The Intercept on Saturday detail the corrupt relations between sections of the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign, with reporters jostling each other to present themselves as the most loyal and reliable outlets for a calculated “leak” of exclusive information. “One January 2015 strategy document,” reported The Intercept, “singled out reporter Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, now covering the election for the New York Times, as a ‘friendly journalist’ who has ‘teed up’ stories for them in the past and ‘never disappointed’ them.”
The emails released over recent days appear to bolster allegations in a lawsuit filed Thursday by the campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, which claims that the Clinton campaign flouted federal election law by coordinating activity with a “super PAC” run by David Brock, which contributed $6 million to the Clinton campaign. The allegations are serious and have the potential to trigger criminal prosecutions.
In an internal Clinton campaign email released by Wikileaks, Research Director Tony Carrk urged staff to “give an extra scrub” to the transcripts of Wall Street speeches before any portions could be publicly released.