Watch Hillary Clinton skewer ‘corrupt’ Trump amid impeachment inquiry
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, but her campaign against him has found renewed energy thanks to the House of Representatives’ recently announced impeachment inquiry.
“I believe strongly that this particular incident has had such a huge impact because we’ve known for a long time that he was a corrupt businessman who cheated people, and we’ve known that he and his campaign asked for aid from Russia — we’ve known that,” Clinton told Stephen Colbert on Monday’s “The Late Show.”
“But to see him in the office of the president, putting his own personal and political interests ahead of the national security of our country just pierced through whatever confusion or denial people had,” Clinton added. “And at that point, Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi rightly said, ‘This is something we have to investigate,’ and that’s what’s going on.”
While appearing on Colbert’s show with her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, to promote their new joint effort, “The Book of Gutsy Women,” the former secretary of State spent the first half of her visit talking about Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine and the White House’s alleged cover-up (“Your fault for coming on Ukraine week,” Colbert joked).
“If the founders had said, ‘Look, no matter how bad a president is, there will be another election,’ we would have lived with that,” she said. “Instead, they said, ‘There may come a time when the president has subverted the Constitution, has abused power, has taken actions that put the nation at risk, and therefore, we’ve got to have a remedy between elections,’ and that’s what’s being looked at now.”
At one point, the left-leaning host’s audience began to chant, “Lock him up!” with enthusiasm reminiscent of pro-Trump rallies, whose attendees have called for Clinton to be locked up on multiple occasions.
After the crowd quieted, Clinton also shared her thoughts on a whistleblower’s claim that the Trump administration allegedly attempted to conceal the commander in chief’s phone call with the leader of Ukraine after he asked President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.
“The transcript of the phone call was put out by the White House, and the whistleblower has a depth of understanding that needs to be taken seriously,” Clinton said. “That’s why they immediately tried to limit the extension of that phone call to be shared with other people, why they put it on a highly classified system that is used for the most important secrets — like the Osama bin Laden raid. Because, even though there was nothing classified in it, the president’s behavior was, at least, embarrassing, if not illegal and impeachable.”
House Democrats issued a subpoena to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, as part of the impeachment inquiry into whether Trump sought to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election.
Colbert also prompted Chelsea Clinton about Trump’s continued vilification of her mother — a subject the health activist took seriously before turning it into an ad for “The Book of Gutsy Women,” deeming her mom one of her “original gutsy women.”
“I think, some days, he thinks about her even more than I do, which is saying a lot because I think about her a lot,” Chelsea quipped. “I do feel a need to protect her because I do worry about her, given what we continue to see at his rallies, like the rabid ‘Lock her up!’ chants. Years later, that it’s still his ‘greatest hit’ is troubling to me. And I’m so proud of my mom.”
The Democratic mother-daughter duo’s literary ode to their favorite female figures hit shelves Monday.
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