Failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed on Wednesday that Republicans skeptical of the 2020 presidential election’s results are helping Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We never thought we had to worry about domestic enemies,” Clinton told MSNBC.
“We never thought we had to worry about people who didn’t believe in our democracy,” she continued. “And sadly, what we’ve seen over the last four years—and particularly since the election—is that we have people in our own country who are doing Putin’s work.”
“You take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic,” fmr. Sec. Clinton says.
“What we’ve seen over the last 4 years, and particularly since our election in 2020, is that we have people within our own country who are doing Putin’s work.” pic.twitter.com/B5mKTYwnbo— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 16, 2021
Elected officials who publicly expressed doubts about whether the election was fair in certain states were also casting doubt on democracy in a “witting or unwitting” way, she said.
“They are doing his work to sow distrust, to sow divisiveness, to give aid and comfort to those in our country who, for whatever reason, are being not only disruptive but very dangerous,” she claimed.
“I think Biden knows he has to work on both fronts,” she added. “We have problems here at home.”
Clinton, herself, sowed doubts about the integrity of a national election on multiple occasions.
She suggested in 2016 that the presidency was stolen from her unfairly, and spent years pushing the debunked conspiracy theory that former president Donald Trump colluded with Putin to steal the White House.
“You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” she said in 2019.
She also called Trump an “illegitimate president.”
“I believe that—look there were many funny things that happened in my election that will not happen again. And I’m hoping that both the public and press understand the way Trump plays the game,” she said.
“I know he’s an illegitimate president,” Clinton continued. “I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories … there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”
Prior to the 2020 election, Clinton was roundly criticized for advising Biden that he should not concede the race “under any circumstances” but rather wage a sustained legal and public-relations battle until the outcome was forcibly reversed in Biden’s favor.
