‘Morning Joe’: Clinton’s Connections to Banks ‘Highlight’ Her ‘Elizabeth Warren Problem’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

BRZEZINSKI: “The banks issue highlight what is some might call Hillary Clinton’s Elizabeth Warren problem. Her speeches and connections to the big banks leave her open the criticism maybe even more than that. Is logic, here, in terms of what has happened about special interests demonstrated by this story from Elizabeth Warren back in 2004.”
[clip starts]
WARREN: “She said “Professor Elizabeth Warren, we’ve got to stop that awful bill.” Referring to this bankruptcy bill that’s sponsored by the credit card companies. So I left, she went back to Washington and I heard later from someone who was a white House staffer that there were skid marks in the hallways when Mrs. Clinton got back as people reversed direction on that bankruptcy bill. And in her autobiography, Mrs. Clinton took that veto and she rightly should. She turned a whole administration on the subject of bankruptcy.”
UNKNOWN MALE: “And then? And then?”
WARREN: “One of the first bills that came up after she was senator Clinton was the bankruptcy bill.”
UNKNOWN MALE: “And?”
WARREN: “She voted in favor of it.”
UNKNOWN MALE: “Why?”
WARREN: “As Senator Clinton, the pressures are very different. It’s a well-financed industry. A lot of people don’t realize that the industry that gave the most money to Washington over the past few years was not the oil industry, was not pharmaceuticals, it was consumer credit products. Those are the people, the credit card companies have been giving money and they have influence.”
UNKNOWN MALE: “And Mrs. Clinton was one of them as senator?”
WARREN: “She has taken money from the groups and, more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.”
[clip ends]
BRZEZINSKI: “Well, Hillary Clinton hasn’t released transcripts of her paid speeches to Wall Street. Back in December, 2013, politico reported the following on a speech she made to Goldman Sachs. “On a recent afternoon, executives at Goldman Sachs invited a few hundred major investors to the Conrad hotel in lower Manhattan. The bankers and their guests filed into a large room and turned their eyes to hunk. Ordinarily, these masters of the universe might have groaned at the idea of a politician taking to the microphone but Clinton offered a message that plutocrats found reassuring. Declaring that the banker bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish. Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis, she told the audience in effect “We all got into this mess together and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it.” What the bankers heard her say was just what they would hope for from a prospective presidential candidate. Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to help improve the economy, it needs to stop. And, indeed, Tim o’neil who heads the bank’s asset management business introduced Clinton by saying how courageous she was by speaking at the bank. Brave, perhaps, but also well compensated. Clinton’s minimum fee for paid remarks is $200,000. Joe?”
SCARBOROUGH: “ Mika, that was just two years ago, by the way. The Elizabeth Warren clip was from 2004. This was just two years ago that she was getting paid $225,000 by Goldman Sachs and as politico reported at the time, Maggie Haberman, on the trail with her right now, reported that Hillary Clinton told the bankers exactly what they wanted to hear. Ben Smith, let me bring you in here. One can get vertigo reading that story and I guess if you’re at Goldman Sachs and you’re hearing that speech, her waving her hand and granting absolution and two years later she’s on “Meet the press” telling Chuck Todd she’s going to show those bankers a thing or two.”
SMITH: "I think there are moments when Hillary Clinton feels like she’s looking back to the ‘90s and polling from the new Democrat politics that bill Clinton ran on in 1992, that rhetoric of we can’t blame business, we have to work together, we have to — it was sort of a reaction to, like 1970s democratic politics which, in some ways, are back, and she’s now trying to adjust to, trying to get to the place where Elizabeth Warren is which is about being very confrontational with the banks but there are moments when it feels like when she’s not paying attention that she slips back into this very, very conciliatory pro-business kind of democratic politics that is not of this moment.”