Hillary Clinton did not even have to dance around responding to the Federal Election Commission fines this week, because she was not asked, but she did tell Sunday’s “Meet the Press” that President Joe Biden has done an “excellent” job.
“I think that the performance with respect to Ukraine has been excellent,” Clinton told host Chuck Todd. “And one of the smartest things that have been done was releasing classified intelligence to prevent the false-flag kind of operations that [Vladimir] Putin was counting on.
“And also let’s remember Putin has been quite effective in impacting public opinion, particularly in the last decade or so, both in the United States and in Europe.
“And this was largely stymied by releasing that intelligence. I think a lot of lessons have been learned, but there is a lot of good accomplishments to be putting up on the board.”
Despite the “hand-wringing” among Democrats, Clinton defended Biden and said Democrats in the midterms are on the correct side of “reality.”
“I always thought the best politics is doing the best job you can do, and there are a lot that Democrats can talk about in the upcoming midterms,” Clinton continued to Todd. “I’m aware that midterms are always difficult for the party in power, but we’ve got to start there and do a better job of telling it, and for those who say it hasn’t gone far enough, that’s always the chorus in Democratic Party politics.”
Republicans are even more divided and operating outside of “reality,” Clinton claimed.
“I would add that in Republican Party politics, you have an even greater disconnect,” she said. “Unfortunately, most of that party has now gone to the extreme and are saying and doing things that have no basis in reality.
“So we’ve got a good case to make if we get our focus in the right place.”
The messaging for the midterms needs to improve, Clinton added, suggesting the results are fine, if not “excellent.”
“Democrats in office and out need to be doing a better job of making the case, and, frankly, standing up to the other side with their craziness and their calls for impunity and nuttiness that we hear coming from them,” Clinton said.
“I don’t think the average American, frankly, wants to be governed by people who live in a totally different reality.”
The remarks are ironic because Republicans have argued that Biden’s multiple crises in Ukraine, inflation, energy demands, and supply chain woes are not an example of a great job by the administration.
Former President Donald Trump argued Saturday night in his Save America rally in Washington Township, Michigan, that Putin would have never dared to invade Ukraine while he was in the White House, making Clinton’s claim of an “excellent” flimsy, if not an alternate view of reality.
Clinton’s appearance comes following a week in which her 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee were fined a combined $113,000 for lying about the funding of the now-discredited Steele Dossier that alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia and led to a nearly three-year federal investigation.
No evidence of any collusion or conspiracy was found by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The issue stems from the Clinton campaign and DNC combined paying more than $1 million for former British intelligence official Christopher Steele to produce the report of unsubstantiated rumors and innuendo and funneled it to its contacts within the FBI. The campaign paid the money to the Democratic Party-linked Perkins Coie law firm, claiming it was for “legal services,” but the funds were in turn used to pay Fusion GPS and ultimately Steele, the FEC said.
That has had additional repercussions as special counsel John Durham’s team also this week argued before a federal judge to deny a former Perkins Coie partner use of the lawyer-client privilege claim in his defense for lying to federal investigators about the original source of the dossier and his clients.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew DeFilippis told the judge, in a hearing regarding former Perkins principal Michael Sussmann’s request to dismiss the indictment, that it was struggling with the basis of several of the privilege claims.
The trial is scheduled to begin May 16 in Washington, but if denied, it could result in more exposure to criminal charges within the campaign, DNC, and related figures.
via newsmax
