Jane Sanders said Tuesday that she would release more of her husband Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) tax returns as soon as his Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, publicizes transcripts of speeches she’s made to Wall Street firms.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer questioned Jane Sanders about the delay in making the couple’s most recent returns public.
“You’re the one who prepares the tax returns every year,” Blitzer said. “He’s counting on you to release them. You did release the 2014 tax returns. What about earlier years? How’s that looking?”
“You know, what’s interesting is we released the 2014,” Sanders replied. “Hillary Clinton hasn’t released a transcript yet.”
Though Bernie Sanders has called on Clinton to release her Wall Street speech transcripts many times before in debates and at rallies, his wife’s comments marked the first time his campaign has called for a direct tit-for-tat.
Still, Jane Sanders brushed aside the tax returns as irrelevant to the greater issues at stake in the 2016 campaign.
“Honestly, Wolf, these are not the issues that are of concern to the American people,” Sanders said. “They’re concerned about having no jobs. About bad trade policies. About foreign policies that are not making sense.”
“I implore you as a leading wonderful host of a major show, please talk about the issues that concern the American people instead of delegate math and who can win or who can lose,” she added.
The 2014 tax returns, which the Sanders campaign released earlier this month, showed that the couple earned about $205,000 that year and donated $8,350 to charity.
Hillary and Bill Clinton reported about $28 million in income that same year and donated more than $3 million to charity. Clinton’s tax returns dating back to 2007 are available on her campaign website.
Deflection —
And not even very good at it —
He already promised to release them. It is SOP for prexy candidates. Speech transcripts? that’s something new and never required of any other candidate. Jane Sanders is just plain sketchy. The whole saga of her departure as president of a small college in VT is pretty smelly too.
Jane Sanders is a tool too…
So, in order to do what all candidates in the past have done, she’s demanding that Hillary do what no other candidate has been asked to do and none are even promising to do, ever, even if Hillary does?
Can’t wait for these two to exit the stage. Bernie has completely ruined all of the good feelings I’ve had about him for years.
Great. So she wants to be Romney now? Remember him? Romney? The guy who said “I won’t release my tax returns, even though Obama released his, unless Obama releases his college transcripts?” Because that totally made sense and in no way was indicative of someone with something to hide, right?
I mean, FFS, we’ve been listening to Sanders’ supporters and surrogates insisting for months that Hillary’s failure to release “transcripts” of her speeches to whoever (because I’m sure she brings a court reporter or a shorthand secretary to every speech to do that) proves that there’s some dark and campaign crushing secret buried in them, but we’re not supposed to draw the same inference from this transparent dodge?
I mean, not that it matters, but it’s galling as hell coming from the people who are constantly holding themselves up as the moral paragons of socialist righteousness.