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Finney: Hillary Clinton Has Been 'Incredibly Transparent' About Her Wall Street Speeches

February 25, 2016

Hillary Clinton spokesman Karen Finney praised her boss for being "incredibly transparent" about her paid speeches to Wall Street Thursday on CNN.

Clinton, at a debate last month, said she would "look into" releasing the transcripts of speeches she was paid $675,000 to make to Goldman Sachs, and she moved the goalposts further this week at a CNN town hall, saying she would release private speech transcripts when everyone else had.

New Day host Alisyn Camerota asked Finney again if Clinton would look into releasing them, but Finney shrugged it off as a media-driven story that regular Americans were not talking about.

"Sure, but since this keeps coming up, why not just be transparent? Why not just release them and lead the way on that if there's nothing to hide in there?" Camerota asked.

"Her responsibility as a candidate is to talk to voters about the issues they care about, her policy ideas, her plans, what she would do," Finney said. "As she pointed out there, if everybody else is going to release their stuff, then I suppose she will too. She's been incredibly transparent already, but I think the most important thing here is this campaign is about the issues that matter to the American people."

Her Democratic primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and other critics have charged that Clinton is too cozy with Wall Street and would not effectively regulate the financial industry if she were in the White House. For his part, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's voice rose several octaves when he defended Clinton's debate dodge about releasing the transcripts.