Senator and prospective 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul addressed several Goldman Sachs executives during “a closed-door audience at the firm’s 200 West offices as part of an internal company speaker series known as Talks@GS.”
Reportedly, “Paul spoke about foreign policy, the economic recovery, and race relations, … and he was well received.”
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has also addressed the group via the event series. His wife Heidi works for Goldman in their Houston office. Goldman represents some very deep pockets politically speaking and it’s not unusual for prospective candidates to come calling.
Paul has been canvassing the New York donor set heavily as part of a widely expected presidential run in 2016. The financial sector is one of the biggest sources of campaign cash in the country, especially for Republicans, and Goldman is one of the biggest players on Wall Street. Goldman employees doled out more than $8.3 million to federal candidates and parties during the 2012 campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Monday’s event lasted 45 minutes, with Paul taking questions from John F.W. Rogers, a Goldman executive vice president and chief of staff to the board, who served in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and, at Goldman, was a top confidante to both Jon Corzine and Henry Paulson when they were CEOs.
There is a caveat, however, in Paul’s case. He has a record of saying some less then friendly things about wall Street.
During his initial 2010 campaign, Paul ran a tea-party campaign infused by more-populist rhetoric. Back then, in an interview later posted to YouTube by Luke Rudkowski, Paul hawked his efforts to audit the Federal Reserve, saying one goal would be to “expose the people through an audit–maybe like Goldman Sachs and different banks that are making a lot of money off the U.S. taxpayer through these special deals they are getting with the Federal Reserve.”