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Martin O’Malley, who is struggling to gain traction in the Democratic presidential field, criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “closeness” with Wall Street in some of his most aggressive comments to date about his Democratic rival.

The former Maryland governor made the comments on Concord News Radio in New Hampshire on Monday, as he discussed his views about reining in Wall Street excesses in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“My proposals go a lot further than Secretary Clinton’s,” said Mr. O’Malley, who supported Mrs. Clinton in the 2008 presidential race. “Her closeness with big banks on Wall Street is sincere, its heartfelt, long-established and well-known. I don’t have those ties. I am independent of those big banks on Wall Street.”

He noted that he would reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed during President Bill Clinton’s time in the White House, forcing banks to separate their commercial and their investment banking.

Mrs. Clinton said last week that such a reinstatement, which is supported by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, would not be the cure-all its advocates believe it would be.

But the criticism from Mr. O’Malley — a former Democratic Governors Association chairman — that she is too close to big banks is one that Mrs. Clinton’s skeptics on the Democratic left often make.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides declined to comment on Mr. O’Malley’s broadside, but they pointed to a section of her recent economic speech in which she said she would prosecute institutions and individuals for committing “fraud or other criminal wrongdoing.”