Bill de Blasio Says Hillary Clinton Doesn't Need to Release Her Goldman Sachs Transcripts
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On MSNBC this morning, feminist ally and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio said that he doesn’t think Hillary Clinton needs to release the transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs. “I don’t care about those speeches. I care about what’s in her platform,” he said.
In 2010, as public advocate, de Blasio convinced Goldman Sachs to change its political contribution policy to prohibit itself from taking advantage of the Citizens United ruling. The next year, de Blasio spoke at Zuccotti Park, urging then-mayor Michael Bloomberg not to interfere with the Occupy Wall Street protestors living there. He heralded the “heartfelt movement that’s speaking to what people are feeling all over this country.”
In a separate press conference that same month, however, he was more reserved. “I think it’s too amorphous now,” he told reporters. “I hope it will take more of a meaningful shape.” He continued, “My concern is that it’s not particularly organized, there’s not a particularly clear set of demands, and I hope for the benefit of the public debate that that will happen.”
Two years later, an unanticipated surge of populist, progressive sentiment, adroitly manipulated by liberal PR firm Berlin Rosen, bore de Blasio past Mayor Bloomberg’s heir apparent, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and into City Hill. (In the course of his campaign, according to contribution records, de Blasio received nearly $12,500 from employees of Goldman Sachs.)
De Blasio, who managed Hillary Clinton’s successful 2000 senate campaign, has been wandering in the wilderness of late, after taking too long to endorse his old boss’s presidential bid. However, he seems now to be working his way back into her good graces.
“Her platform would reign in Wall Street excesses, more even than Bernie Sanders would,” de Blasio said Wednesday. “A lot of progressives have said that.”
