Hillary Clinton again cited 9/11 to defend her Wall Street connections Tuesday in an interview with Charlie Rose.
When Rose asked Clinton, who has received considerable campaign donations from Wall Street, whether she has "suffered from the fact that" some say she is "too close to Wall Street," Clinton invoked 9/11.
"So yes, do I know people? And did I, you know, help rebuild after 9/11? Yes, I did," she said.
She said she didn’t think her connection to Wall Street hurt her image or judgment as a presidential candidate.
As U.S. Senator of New York, Clinton said she "represented everybody from the dairy farmers, you know, to the fishermen." She also said that she has "stood for a lot of regulation on big banks and on the financial services sector."
Still, when it came to her Wall Street connections, Clinton cited 9/11 to lessen the impact. She then tried to distance herself from the big bank campaign donations she received from her policy positions.
"And did you take money from them?" Rose asked.
"Yeah," she said. "But that has nothing to do with my positions. Anybody who thinks that they can influence me on that ground doesn't know me very well."
Clinton previously used 9/11 to defend her Wall Street connections in the November 14 CBS Democratic debate. She received criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for leveraging the tragedy.
The New York Times editorial board wrote that Clinton "should have seen that Wall Street shot coming." After her reference to 9/11, they wrote, Twitter "exploded with demands to know what campaign donations from big banks had to do with New York’s recovery from 9/11."