NEW YORK -- One of Hillary Clinton’s top bundlers was grooving to a live performance by Bon Jovi and snacking on grilled salmon at a fundraiser for the former secretary of state at a converted Naval shipyard in Philadelphia last week when he got an urgent email.

At that very moment, the email said, Bernie Sanders was ripping Clinton for ditching Iowa on the eve of the caucuses to raise money from well-heeled financiers. “I forwarded it to the campaign immediately,” the bundler said. “And I think maybe they decided it wasn’t the best timing to hold these events with financial firms right now.”


Shortly after the Philadelphia event, the Clinton campaign postponed a fundraiser with BlackRock executives in New York. This week, they postponed another event in Boston with an affiliate of Bain Capital — the Democrats’ bogeyman in 2012 — that had been set for Friday.

The awkward timing of the Philadelphia fundraiser and the postponement of the other two events highlight an exquisitely difficult challenge for the Clinton campaign. It still needs money from Wall Street to keep pace with Sanders’ grassroots fundraising juggernaut. But if it takes the money, it would give Sanders and his populist supporters perfect fodder to paint Clinton as too cozy with Wall Street and beholden to financial industry interests.

“One of the problems is that she is going to need the money to get through the primary and then to still have some left because the Republicans, especially if it's Marco Rubio, are going to have tons of money to go after her,” said former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, a Clinton supporter and co-author of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. “But if she takes the money she gets hit with this McCarthyism of the left, this guilt by association, even though there is no evidence that taking this money has had any impact on her policies.”

Sanders supporters and activists on the left disagree with this assessment, saying Clinton's financial industry fundraisers and highly paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and others suggest she would be soft on Wall Street as president while Sanders would proactively bust up the big banks, impose much higher taxes on the wealthy and aggressively prosecute white-collar criminals.

They also worry that Clinton would bring Wall Street executives to top regulatory jobs, while Sanders would purge agencies of anyone with a banking background.

“Especially given her multi-hundred thousand dollar speeches to Wall Street executives the burden of proof is higher for her to show voters that she will truly hold Wall Street accountable and make the big picture changes our economy needs,” said Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “And continuing to raise big money from some of the more odious actors on Wall Street is not confidence-inducing for voters who want them held accountable.”

But one senior Democratic operative close to the Clinton campaign said if the former secretary of state gave up doing Wall Street fundraisers she would risk running out of cash in a drawn-out primary.

“Bernie's viral, grass-roots fundraising is not abating, it is increasing,” he said. “Her advantage on Super Tuesday could be in jeopardy if the campaign is in financial straits. Remember President Gephardt? He was poised to win, but ran out of money. If Bernie can maintain a financial advantage going forward it will be a serious problem for Hillary.”

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast on Thursday that Sanders, who hauled in $20 million in January, beat the former first lady in the money race for the month. “I recognized in the summer of last year when those first fundraising reports came on that Sen. Sanders was going to raise a lot of money,” Mook said. “I believe he will have the resources to push this campaign well into the spring."

That means Clinton will have to keep shaking the Wall Street money tree.

But every time the topic of Wall Street money comes up, it puts Clinton in a highly awkward position. CNN’s Anderson Cooper pressed Clinton on her $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs at a Democratic town hall on Wednesday night in New Hampshire. Clinton stumbled in her response saying, “Well I don’t know that’s what they offered,” adding that “every secretary of state that I know has done that.”

Cooper suggested others who left office and took big money for corporate speeches generally didn’t return to run for president. Clinton replied: “To be honest I wasn’t committed to running.”

Sanders kept up the attack at Wednesday night’s forum, ripping Clinton for not being a true progressive. “I do not know any progressive who has a super PAC and takes $15 million from Wall Street. That’s just not progressive,” he said. Clinton later fired back saying that by Sanders’ definition, President Barack Obama, who took millions in Wall Street money in 2008, would also not be a progressive.

That argument is not selling very well on the left. Many activists believe Dodd-Frank did not go far enough and remain bitter that the Obama Justice Department did not prosecute any high-level Wall Street executives and fear Clinton would bring more of the same. And they say her financial industry fundraisers are worrisome.

"One cause of concern over finance fundraisers is that it is difficult to imagine a candidate who relies on Wall Street fundraising empowering a Justice Department to enforce white collar criminal laws with more vigor, as Clinton has called for,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project. “If you take Wall Street's money, you might be willing to turn around and slap their wrists with a corporate fine, but are you likely to consider prosecuting them criminally should evidence of crimes emerge?"

What’s not in dispute is that Clinton lacks the luxury of pulling the plug on all her Wall Street fundraising. Her campaign ended the year with $38 million in the bank to $28 million for Sanders. But Sanders can tap into a vast network of small donors who keep pumping money into his campaign.

Clinton is much more reliant on large donors and those capable of bundling big checks. Hosts for the Philadelphia event, for instance, were asked to bundle $27,000 in contributions. The basic entrance fee was $1,000. Clinton last year raised 58 percent of her $110.4 million in primary money from donors who have now given the maximum of $2,700, according to the Campaign Finance Institute. That means she has to keep finding new sources of big checks.

The Philadelphia fundraiser, hosted by executives from Franklin Square Capital Partners, was just such an event.

The firm employs many younger finance industry professionals who are relatively new to political giving. And donors say Clinton will need to repeat such events regularly no matter the political heat coming from the left.

“A lot of people are already maxed out for the primary so you have to find new people and it gets much more difficult,” said the bundler who attended the Philadelphia event. “And she is never going to be able to avoid the fact that she has raised money from Wall Street. Even if she stopped people would just say, ‘There she goes again, being overtly political.' ”

That is the consistent message from people in the finance industry who say there is nothing wrong with raising money on Wall Street. And by stopping, these people say, Clinton would make it seem like she had done something wrong by taking the money in the first place.

“Secretary Clinton will absolutely continue to raise money in the tri-state area and some percent will definitely come from the financial services sector being that it makes up a large part of the demographic,” said investment banker Robert Wolf, who raised millions for Obama and is now backing Clinton. “To insinuate that people are giving up to $2,700 based on the idea that she will take it easy on regulations is ridiculous. Everyone knows Dodd-Frank is now entrenched into our daily business and not going away. Truth is most of the topics being discussed are who will be better for the broader economy, getting our infrastructure out of a third world level, foreign policy or the future make up of the Supreme Court.”

Taking money from Wall Street may get slightly easier for Clinton after the New Hampshire primary. She has a big lead in South Carolina, which votes Feb. 27, and in southern Super Tuesday states that vote March 1. Many of those states feature large percentages of African-American voters who remain loyal to Obama and may be less moved by attacks on Clinton’s ties to Wall Street. This is in part why the most recent financial industry fundraisers were postponed, rather than canceled.

Taking money from bankers associated with Bain Capital, the former home of Mitt Romney, may look terrible coming right before New Hampshire votes. But it will likely not be as painful in a couple of weeks.

“I understand the view that maybe she should calm down on these events right now. But she should not plead guilty to these accusations by not doing them,” said Frank. “Because there is no evidence that they have had any influence on her policies, which are as tough as anyone’s.”

