What Hillary said in her lucrative speeches remains a mystery

As a speaker paid by the Internet firm Salesforce.com, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had nothing but praise in 2014 for the cloud computing company and its innovative CEO, Marc Benioff, a Democratic Party bundler and big supporter of the Clinton Foundation, according to a pirated video of the session posted on YouTube.

Hiring Clinton was a way to get a noted public official with clear 2016 presidential ambitions to hold court with company officials and tout the firm’s accomplishments. As the video shows, Clinton praised Salesforce for its generous philanthropy, including donations to the Clinton family foundation, and said its aggressive hiring was helping “accelerate our economic recovery.”


Clinton’s casual speaking style, with quips about her wardrobe of pantsuits, was such a hit among the cloud computing set that Salesforce hired her twice in 2014, for a total price of $450,000, according to records released last week by the Clinton presidential campaign.

But a speech from Clinton or her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was rarely a simple one-time transaction for companies and foreign interests that sought their services.

The Clintons earned more than $25 million in 2014 from speech income, and a second list released by the Clinton Foundation this week showed that an additional $12 million or more was directed to the family charity after 2001 from 97 speeches made by Bill, Hillary or Chelsea Clinton to various universities, businesses and foreign entities. The Clintons have offered no explanation for how they decided which speech earnings to donate to their charity and which to take as income.

The lists offer a glimpse into complex relationships the Clintons have with numerous special interests that hired them as speakers, all of which could pose ethical questions as Hillary Clinton makes a run for the White House. Clinton has guarded herself from some criticism by keeping the speech texts private and signing contracts in which her remarks must be closely held.

Multiple Clinton campaign representatives didn’t reply to a request for comment.

The Clintons’ relationship with Salesforce did not end with her two highly paid speeches. The multibillion-dollar companywhich has made Benioff an icon in Silicon Valley, has a list of issues before the federal government and spent over $400,000 in each of the past three years on federal lobbying. While Clinton served as secretary of state, Salesforce.com lobbied her agency on international cybersecurity issues, cloud computing and other issues, lobbying records show.

The Salesforce Foundation committed $6 million for a Clinton Global Initiative employment program in 2014 and separately gave six figures to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The company itself gave the foundation between $25,000 and $50,000.

Benioff was one of several billionaires who contributed to a Hillary Clinton super PAC in 2013, encouraging her to run for the Democratic nomination. According to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks money and politics, Benioff “bundled” $466,180, mostly for Democratic candidates, from 1990 through 2012. And his company’s political action committee gave $41,700 to congressional candidates — slightly more to Republicans than Democrats — during the 2014 cycle.

In response to questions, Salesforce representatives referenced a company website blog post that described the secretary’s appearance. Most big-name conference speakers, like Al Gore and Arianna Huffington, have allowed their speeches to be published online.

Clinton earned another $225,000 speaking last April in Las Vegas to the annual convention of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade association that represents over 1,600 companies. The speech is now remembered more for a security breach when a woman in the audience threw a shoe at Clinton as she offered her thoughts on recycling.

ISRI spends hundreds of thousands on lobbying every year, according to Open Secrets. During Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, ISRI spent over $1 million lobbying various branches of the U.S. government every year but one.

Of keen interest to ISRI are various EPA regulations and bills about electronics recycling and metal theft. The organization is also invested in climate change legislation that would promote recycling.

And ISRI’s political action committee spent over $90,000 during the 2014 election cycle, giving to candidates from both parties.

Like Clinton’s speech to Salesforce, the former secretary of state’s speech to ISRI isn’t available online, nor would ISRI provide a video upon request. The speech given by ISRI’s 2015 convention speaker, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, appears on the company’s YouTube page, but Bill Clinton’s 2009 speech to the same group does not.

Such is the case for almost all of Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches from 2014: Although most were given to massive audiences, almost none are available in their entirety online.

What’s clear is that most, if not all, of the companies and organizations that hired Clinton to speak in 2014 have issues before the federal government.

Among them are tech firms like Xerox, eBay and Qualcomm, trade associations like the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers and the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, and speeches made through event production companies like the Canadian firm tinePublic Inc.