Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich cited Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) honesty as the key to his presidential campaign in an interview on Wednesday with Democracy Now anchors Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.

“I think he’s telling the truth,” Reich said. “And I think people are responding with extraordinary enthusiasm — even many conservatives and Republicans I meet — to a truth teller.”

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Reich also said Sanders, an independent running for the Democratic Party nomination, was right in his call to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, though he actually “understated the reality” of the problems created by the influence the country’s biggest banks have.

“The five biggest banks, they used to have 10 percent of total banking assets back in 1990, now have 44 percent of total banking assets in this country,” Reich said. “I mean, they are far too big to fail. I mean, they are so large that, just because of their political clout and their scale, they are gaining more and more market share of the entire banking industry. That’s dangerous.”

According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Sanders has cut former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s lead from 34 percent to 15 percent. But Sanders has also taken the lead in polls in the early-primary state of New Hampshire.

Watch Goodman and Gonzalez’s interview with Reich, as aired on Wednesday, below.