Sanders Campaign Press Release - Clinton's Ties to Wall Street

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday questioned Hillary Clinton's financial ties to Wall Street, including $15 million in donations to a super PAC and millions more in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and other firms after she left the State Department.

In a campaign for the White House in which Sanders has stressed the urgent need to address rising wealth and income inequality, Sanders has called on Clinton to release the transcripts of the speeches for which she was paid more than $2 million in 2014.

"You can't stand and fight for working families and the middle class if you are dependent upon big-money interests," Sanders told 5,045 supporters at Syracuse University.

Goldman Sachs is the Wall Street investment banking firm that agreed on Monday to pay up to a $5 billion fine for marketing fraudulent mortgage-backed securities before the housing bubble burst and plunged the nation into the worst recession since the 1930s.

Clinton gave three speeches to Goldman Sachs executives in 2013 before she launched her latest bid for the White House. She was paid a total of $675,000.

In a new development on the lucrative speaking fees, Yahoo News on Tuesday reported that Clinton "is plowing an increasingly large amount of her funds" into her presidential campaign.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that state and federal officials said provisions in the Goldman deal will let it pare as much as $1 billion off the fine through a combination of tax credits and incentives.