Clinton's 'cut it out' to Wall St. really meant 'cut me in'

By Sarah Westwood, Sarah Westwood

Published December 20, 2015

Weeks before Hillary Clinton claimed she "went to Wall Street in December of 2007" and told big bankers to "cut it out" on the eve of the economic downturn the following year, she was accepting endorsements from the banking industry's top executives.

The claim, which Clinton made Tuesday evening during the first Democratic debate, was one of several that conflict with her political past. In another, she said she was proud to have made "enemies" of pharmaceutical and health insurance companies — both of which have supported her campaigns, paid her or her husband for speeches or donated to her family's philanthropy.

Challenged from the left by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton has been pushed to take a tougher stance against Wall Street, given the Vermont socialist's popular plan to break up the nation's largest banks.

Her comments during the debate Tuesday on how she addressed Wall Street's misbehavior in December 2007 may have been referring to a Dec. 3, 2007 letter to then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in which she proposed a 90-day freeze on home foreclosures. The Clinton campaign did not immediately return a request for comment about what specific actions she was referring to when she said she ordered Wall Street to "cut it out" that month.

In a Wall Street Journal piece titled "Friends of Hillary Clinton" that was published in Dec. 2007, a reporter laid out some of the recent success Clinton had enjoyed in courting female bank executives.