Hillary Clinton papers reveal a third of top backers linked to financial industry

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/31/hillary-clinton-third-top-backers-financial-industry

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A third of Hillary Clinton’s top backers made their money from the financial services industry, according to Guardian analysis of new campaign finance disclosures released on Friday.

Related: Hillary Clinton aides' Wall Street links raise economic policy doubts

The list of donors to Priorities USA, a super Pac which allows unlimited contributions, includes well-known financiers such as George Soros as well as a clutch of less well-known hedge fund managers and investment advisers.

Together, eight donors whose family wealth can be traced back to the finance industry accounted for $4.8m of the $15.6m total raised in the first half of the year and nine of the 28 donations worth at least $100,000.

The second-largest source of funds for Priorities USA, which is the largest of three political action committees supporting Clinton’s bid for president, was the media industry, which is represented by famous Hollywood names such as Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Several of these were also donors to Barack Obama, but Clinton’s historic reliance on money from Wall Street has been a particular source of criticism from supporters of leftwing rival Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren.

Separately, Clinton disclosed on Friday evening that she and her husband earned $28m in personal income last year and have paid nearly $44m in federal taxes since 2007.

The deluge of last-minute legal disclosures that landed just as Washington began emptying for the weekend also included medical records and more than 2,200 pages of controversial emails dating from Clinton’s time as secretary of state that had been stored on a private computer server.

In a statement, Clinton sought to defend her family’s wealth as not incompatible with her campaign’s claim to stand up for “everyday Americans” against the monied interests of Republicans.

“We’ve come a long way from my days going door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund and earning $16,450 as a young law professor in Arkansas – and we owe it to the opportunities America provides,” she said.

The medical records declared her to be in “excellent physical condition and fit to serve as president”, having fully recovered from a concussion she sustained in December 2012 after fainting.