“You would think at this point Hillary could just kick back with a glass of Chardonnay and her laptop and just keep refreshing FiveThirtyEight.com until Election Day,” quipped Seth Meyers. “After all, she’s running against a lying, racist buffoon who doubles as Billy Bush’s wingman, and is such a menace to democracy he doesn’t even know the date of the election—Nov. 8th—as he proved at a rally yesterday.”
Indeed, Donald Trump—the aforementioned lying, racist, remarkably sexist buffoon—urged his acolytes at a rally to vote on Nov. 28. On the Trump Idiotmeter, it measured somewhere between “2 Corinthians” and “[Putin] is not going to go into Ukraine.” And since Meyers taped Wednesday’s edition of Late Night in Washington, D.C. in the late afternoon, he missed out on a string of new allegations accusing Donald “grab them by the pussy” Trump of unwelcome advances.
So, before welcoming special guest Joe Biden to the Late Night couch, Meyers shifted his focus from Trump to his rival Hillary Clinton, who’s up by double digits in several polls following the release of the infamous Access Hollywood Trump tape.
“Still, Hillary’s ties to Wall Street have caused her problems with at least one constituency—and that’s young voters,” said Meyers.
The late-night host then dedicated the entirety of his “closer look” segment to WikiLeaks’s publication of hacked emails purported to be from Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta—emails that included excerpts of closed-door speeches she gave to Wall Street banks after leaving the State Department.
“The biggest revelations in these emails are the excerpts from what are allegedly Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks. And they contain some very revealing tidbits,” said Meyers.
First, there is the “revelation” that Hillary said politicians need “public and private” personas in order to operate effectively. In the second presidential debate, Hillary confirmed the veracity of the leaked email by saying, “As I recall, that was something I said about Abraham Lincoln after having seen the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie called Lincoln.” Well, yes, that was the context of Hillary’s “public and private” comment—a comment that Team Trump and his minions over at Breitbart, Infowars, and Fox News have spun wildly out of context.
“It turns out Hillary really was telling the truth because in the actual transcript of that speech, she says, ‘…if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed… politics is like sausage being made… we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching… then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position,’” said Meyers. He added, “So I guess the real scandal is that bankers paid thousands of dollars for Hillary Clinton’s movie reviews.”
But that misconstrued comment aside, Meyers noted how the most recent batch of leaked Hillary-adjacent emails—which may have been hacked by Russia, a country that seems to have a vested interest in a Trump presidency—do reveal “a divergence, in some cases, between what Hillary told Wall Street bankers behind closed doors and what she’s said publicly.” “For example,” said Meyers, “Hillary’s insisted that she’s tough on Wall Street, and yet, when she gave paid speeches to those Wall Street banks, it seemed like she was sending them a slightly different message.”
Meyers then threw to a Podesta email wherein Hillary reportedly said at a 2013 Goldman Sachs symposium that Wall Street bankers are the ones best suited to regulate the financial industry. “There’s nothing magic about regulations… too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works?” she asked. “And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” “You went to Wall Street and told them they should regulate themselves? You think billionaires regulating themselves is a good idea? Have you met your opponent?” cracked Meyers, before confessing that Trump is “not a billionaire.” “So look: Wall Street already has incredible sway over policymaking. We don’t need to give them more influence,” he continued. “These emails underscore just how important it is for people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to keep up the pressure on Hillary if she becomes president.”