Twitter Poll 72% Find Hillary Clinton “Not Trustworthy”

(Newswire.net — February 9, 2016) —Hillary Clinton’s refusal to publicly release transcripts from her speaking engagements with a litany of big banks have intensified in recent days. These speeches came while Clinton was out of public office, occurring after she resigned from her post as the Secretary of State in 2013 but before she launched her presidential election bid in 2015.

Initially, Clinton attempted to laugh off these remarks, as she did when asked by a reporter about them last month. The issue popped up again during the last democratic debate, when moderator Chuck Todd inquired about the transcripts. Clitnon told Todd that he intended to look into releasing the transcripts. Another MSNBC reporter, Andrea Mitchell, hit on the topic again the next day, with Clinton’s response evolving from humorous to stern in tone. “I said I would look into that,” Clinton told her, echoing the same answer she gave to Todd the previous night.  

On that Sunday, Clinton was again asked about the transcripts by ABC reporter George Stephanopoulos. Clinton, at this point, pointed out the hypocrisy of this line of questioning only being directed at her. “At some point…these rules need to apply to everybody. There are a bunch of folks, including my opponent who’s given speeches to groups, people on the other side who have given speeches to groups…if this is now going to be a new standard, then it should be applied to everybody.” Clinton’s communications director echoed her sentiment on MSNBC before pointing out that Bernie Sanders has been using “insinuations and innuendo” in order to increase speculation around these speeches. 

The content of these speeches have garnered a lot of speculation in part because reporters were never allowed to attend these private events, per the demands of the banks. The banks who barred reporters from these events possess a total of $10.5 trillion in capital under their management. These facts haven’t escaped Clinton’s primary opponent Bernie Sanders, who has made this a talking point in his stump speech. Referencing the average amount of money Clinton earned from these speaking engagements, Sanders states, “You got to be really, really good to get $250,000 for a speech.” Clinton’s contracts with these banks also specified that the press be barred from her private speeches unless a different agreement had been reached prior to the engagement. 

A recent Newswire poll conducted over Twitter showed that 72% of people did not find Hillary Clinton trustworthy at the time of this writing. The twelve speeches in question that Clinton made to these big banks netted her a total of $2.9 million. Goldman Sachs, who received bailout money from the Obama administration after the housing bubble collapse, was the biggest spender, paying Hillary Clinton a total of $675,000. The other banks that Clinton spoke to include Ameriprise, Apollo Management Holdings, Bank of America, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Deutsche Bank, Fidelity Investments, Golden Tree Asset Management, Morgan Stanley, and UBS. Clinton never received fewer than $150,000 for any of these speeches, and typically netted her somewhere between $225,000 and $275,000.