Wall Street speeches reveal the real Hillary

by Charles Gasparino, New York Post

The (true) story that Hillary Clinton is a liar on issues big and small, that she uses half-truths, deceptions and dissembling to cover up her reprobate behavior is an old one.

But it’s a story Hillary breathes more life into every day she moves closer to becoming president. The latest treasure trove of evidence: a WikiLeaks email dump chronicling her two-faced behavior in such dramatic tones that it should be required reading for anyone who thinks she has the temperament to lead this country. (She hasn’t denied the emails’ authenticity.)

At issue in the emails, which were apparently hacked from an aide’s account, is the disparity between her rhetoric when speaking before Wall Street types who are paying her (and whom she needs for campaign contributions), and voters she needed over the past year to win this fall’s presidential election.

Of course, it was the late, great columnist Bill Safire who caused a stir back in 1996 when he chronicled then-first lady Clinton’s manifold falsehoods over the years, from how she gamed the commodities markets by miraculously earning $100,000 in cattle futures by, she claimed, simply reading the newspaper (and not because she had a well-connected broker), or her involvement in questionable land deals as a Little Rock, Ark., lawyer while hubby Bill was governor.

Back then, Safire called her “a congenital liar,” something that brought howls of protest from the left as a wild overreach. It certainly didn’t stop Hillary from becoming a US senator, secretary of state and now likely president.

But Clinton’s old lies shouldn’t lead us to ignore the new ones. In fact, the longevity of her lying, from the so-called Travelgate fiasco in the 1990s while her husband was president to her current rationale for keeping a private email server to accept classified information, make them all the more noxious.

In between leaving the Obama administration and running for president, Clinton earned a small fortune making speeches to various corporations and lobby groups, the contents of which she tried to keep largely secret until the WikiLeaks disclosure. Her paid speeches to mega-bank Goldman Sachs are particularly intriguing.

Goldman may be among the most controversial firms on Wall Street for its role in gaming the nexus between Washington and the financial business (several of its CEOs set economic policy for Republicans and Democrats alike when her husband was president) and for its risk-taking, which made Goldman a significant contributor to the 2008 financial collapse and the Great Recession that followed.

These are all points Hillary has made both implicitly and explicitly during her campaign; she never seemed to miss an opportunity to out-class-warfare her socialist rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, with banker-bashing.

More recently, she has tried to cast her opponent, Donald Trump, a real estate developer, as a modern-day robber baron mostly over his plan to cut taxes on the wealthy (like him) as well as small-business owners.

But that’s not the Hillary who showed up at Goldman, where she called attendees at her speech, which included CEO Lloyd Blankfein, “the smartest people” for their support for her presidential ambitions and presumably paying her several hundred thousand dollars in speaking fees. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t recall Hillary evoking Lloyd’s name during any of her public speeches.

Keep in mind that on Wall Street, even the Democrats like lower taxes and smaller deficits, which is why Clinton in private sounded downright Reaganesque. She extolled “spending restraints” that don’t seem to appear anywhere in her boondoggle of an economic plan, which calls for massive tax increases and a vast expansion of government.

Wall Street also likes to influence government policy through campaign contributions. Populists on the right and left abhor this, but Clinton thinks it’s all fine and dandy, as she implored the good people at Goldman to use their wealth and privilege to sway public policy — or as she put it: “There are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy.”

Wonder what Elizabeth Warren would say about that one.

In other speeches, Clinton cheered the use of fossil fuels, one of the bête noirs of the loony left, and spoke approvingly of fracking. She said she likes nuclear power, which “deserves a role” in the country’s energy policy, and that she’s a free trader, someone who as secretary of state “help(ed) speed our recovery by opening new markets.”

I don’t seem to recall that one when she was going toe to toe with Bernie.

I could go on, but you get the point. Clinton tried to explain herself during Sunday night’s debate, crediting such presidential BS with Lincoln winning passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

But as Trump pointed out: Hillary has a long and documented record not of twisting a few elbows and making some concessions, but of outright lying, while “Honest Abe never lied.”

True that.

Also see:

Democrats, this is why you need to fear Hillary Clinton: The NY Times is absolutely right — she’s a bigger hawk than the Republicans