De Blasio on Clinton transcripts: 'I don't care about those speeches'

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio could not care less about the transcripts of Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street firms, he said on Wednesday.

"I don't care about those speeches. I care about what's in her platform," de Blasio said in an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

The left-leaning New York mayor, who endorsed Clinton last October after holding out for months, rejected the notion that her failure to release them would reflect poorly on her ability to be trusted to tackle the excesses of large financial institutions. For her part, Clinton has insisted that the speeches would not compromise her views or her work.

"Her platform would reign in Wall Street excesses, more even than Bernie Sanders would, and a lot of progressives have said that. And Paul Krugman said that," de Blasio remarked, referring to the economist and New York Times columnist.

Clinton, who received $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three separate speeches in 2013, has faced escalating pressure throughout the last two months to release the transcripts of those remarks. Bernie Sanders has explicitly called upon the former secretary of state to release her transcripts, with his campaign touting the website iwilllookintoit.com, following Clinton's earlier remark that she would "look into" releasing them. (The site shows the text "Hillary Clinton has been looking into releasing her transcripts for paid speeches to Wall St. and other special interests for," followed by a running clock showing the time since she made that comment.)

Clinton has promised to release her transcripts as long as every other candidate in the race would do the same, leading to a sarcastic response from the Sanders campaign last month. Sanders, who took home less than $2,000 in paid speeches in 2014, did not appear before any Wall Street firms, and thus had no transcripts to release, spokesman Michael Briggs said on Feb. 19.

“If you’re going to give speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street groups like Goldman Sachs and if you’re going to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for that speech, it must be a great speech and you want to share it with the American people," Sanders said on Saturday in South Carolina.

“I’m making my transcripts available," he added. "There are none.”