Hillary Clinton revealed Wednesday why she gave speeches to Goldman Sachs when she served as Secretary of State, telling a California audience,”They paid me.”
Clinton was discussing the role of tech in the 2016 election at Recode’s Code Conference and was asked by journalist Walt Mossberg, “Why did you do those?”
Clinton responded by asking him, “Why do you have Goldman Sachs here?”
When fellow journalist Kara Swisher noted that Goldman Sachs pay them, Clinton responded, “They paid me.”
Clinton received as much as $225,000 for speeches to the Wall Street firm, and she came under heavy criticism in the Democratic primary, as opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) attacked her decision and questioned whether she’d be able to get tough on banks as a result.
At the conference, Mossberg followed up.
“You’re not somebody who needs the money for next week’s shopping and you knew you might run, so why do it?”
Clinton went on to say that she gave a lot of speeches to a lot of different people and pivoted to her 2008 primary campaign, where she said she warned about the looming mortgage crisis.
She then implied that sexism was to blame for the criticism she took over the speeches.
“Men got paid for the speeches they made, I got paid for the speeches I made,” she said, before admitting that the speeches became “part of the background music” of the campaign.
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY