Hillary Clinton and Wall Street Money Front and Center in Democratic Debate

Sanders and Clinton spar on the debate stage in Durham, N.C. (Justin Sullivan/Getty)

Durham, N.H. – Well, that escalated quickly.

Hillary Clinton emerged Monday as the victor of the Iowa caucuses. But after winning by the smallest margin in history and trailing by 20 points in recent New Hampshire polls, she was anything but complacent during Thursday’s one-on-one New Hampshire debate. The former secretary of state erupted in righteous indignation after her rival, Bernie Sanders, brought up the money she’s raised from Wall Street, accusing him and his campaign of perpetrating a “very artful smear” by implicitly calling her a corporate shill.

But Thursday night also opened up a new, unexpected front for Clinton on the paid speeches she gave to Wall Street after she left office. After struggling on Wednesday to answer why she took $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs, she was asked on Thursday to release transcripts of all her paid speeches to large corporations. It’s a question that clearly caught her off guard, and one her campaign will now be forced to address.

Clinton opened the debate with a bang, pushing back furiously against Sanders’s jab at the $15 million her super PAC raised from the financial industry in the last quarter. “I really don’t think these kinds of attacks by insinuation are worthy of you,” she said, shooting daggers in Sanders’s direction. “And enough is enough. If you’ve got something to say, say it directly! But you will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received!”

Sanders didn’t say it directly – but he didn’t back down, either, even as Clinton shouted over him. “Let’s talk about why, in the 1990s, Wall Street got deregulated,” he said. “Did it have anything to do with the fact that Wall Street spent billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions? Well, some people might think, yeah, that had some influence.”

“There is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into our political system,” Sanders continued. “And in my view, it is undermining American democracy, and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors, and not the working families of this country!”

“Obviously, we’ve touched a nerve,” said moderator Rachel Maddow.

Seeing Sanders on the defensive against a fiery assault from his rival was something of a role reversal — and it wasn’t the only instance. Clinton also pushed back hard against the Vermont senator’s critique of her progressive bona fides, caustically labeling him “the self-proclaimed gatekeeper of progressivism” and saying that under Sanders’s rules, even President Obama wouldn’t be a progressive.

And Sanders seemed out of his depth later in the debate, when foreign-policy issues arose. “North Korea is a very strange situation because it is such an isolated country run by a handful of dictators, or maybe just one, who seem to be somewhat paranoid,” he said haltingly, as the split screen showed Clinton smiling smugly.

#share#But Clinton also found herself on the defensive, and on an issue where she already seems to have trouble. After one New Hampshirite asked whether Clinton would release transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs, moderator Chuck Todd decided to make the question bigger: “Are you willing to release the transcripts of all your paid speeches? In full disclosure, would you release all of them?”

“I will look into it. I don’t know the status, but I will certainly look into it,” Clinton responded cautiously. “But I can only repeat what is the fact, that I spoke to a lot of different groups with a lot of different constituents, a lot of different kinds of members, about issues that had to do with world affairs.”

Her campaign didn’t have a ready-made response to the transcript question. “She said she’ll take a look at it, and she’ll take a look at it,” Clinton campaign manager John Podesta brusquely tells National Review in the post-debate spin room. “I don’t have anything to add.”

“I don’t know what the requirements were when she signed up to give those speeches, so I think Hillary’s response was appropriate,” says New Hampshire Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Clinton surrogate. “She needs to look at what she agreed to when she gave those speeches, with respect to transcripts of what she had to say.”

When asked whether the American public has the right to know what she told Wall Street, Shaheen demurs. “Again, I think it depends on what the terms of her agreements were,” she says. “I don’t know, does Condoleezza Rice release her speeches that she gave?”

But the Sanders campaign sees an opening with the transcripts and made it clear it intends to press forward aggressively. “I think that is a question that’s going to live on further, even after this debate is over,” says Sanders campaign spokeswoman Symone Sanders. “And it’s a question that deserves to be answered.”

#related#“We think the voters of New Hampshire deserve to know,” the spokeswoman continues, asking that Clinton come to a conclusion and release the full transcripts to the public before the Granite State votes on Tuesday.

Clinton’s newfound aggression served her well on Thursday, proving to voters that she can push back against Sanders’s far-left critique and even throw a few punches of her own. But while Sanders wasn’t noticeably weakened at the end of the night, the Clinton campaign now must plug the dike on yet another issue. Whether the demand for Clinton’s paid-speech transcripts will have an impact on next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary remains unknown. But either way, it’s just one more example of how the Clinton family’s complex network of public and private interests continues to backfire in unexpected ways.