Hillary Clinton told NPR’s Terry Gross Monday that she still hasn’t fully ruled out questioning Trump’s legitimacy as President — but she’ll wait to see what Robert Mueller uncovers in his investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian officials.
The failed Democratic presidential nominee is still on tour promoting her book, What Happened (okay, it’s been, like, a week, but it feels like she’s been everywhere), and made a pit stop to chat with NPR’s Fresh Air about her post-election emotional recovery.
But Clinton was reticent to say that she’s fully come to terms with her loss, and appeared to claim she’s got something in her back pocket for when it’s finally revealed the Russians messed with the election.
“As more and more information comes out about the depth of Russia’s interference in the election, do you think, at some point, that it would be legitimate to challenge the legitimacy of the election?” asked Gross.
“Let me just put it this way, if I had lost the popular vote but won the electoral college and in my first day as president the intelligence community came to me and said, ‘The Russians influenced the election,’ I would’ve never stood for it,” Clinton said. “Even though it might’ve advantaged me, I would’ve said, ‘We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.’ I would’ve set up an independent commission with subpoena power and everything else.”
Clinton says she’s sure Russians were involved in the election outcome because then-candidate Donald Trump jokingly asked the hackers who’d broken into the DNC’s unprotected server, if they’d be able to recover the 33,000 missing emails Clinton had deleted off her own private email server, kept in the bathroom of her Chappaqua home.
“There’s no doubt they influenced the election,” Clinton said. “We know more about how they did that.”
When Gross pressed Clinton on whether that meant Clinton could still challenge Trump’s win, Clinton was less cagey.
NPR: I want to get back to the question, would you completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now?
CLINTON: No. I would not. I would say —
NPR: You’re not going to rule it out.
CLINTON: No, I wouldn’t rule it out.
When asked whether she thought there’d be any available apparatus for overturning a vote that happened nearly a year ago, Clinton said she wasn’t sure, but that Kenya just overturned their election, and that transition went smoothly. Clinton then launched into a bizarre, Beautiful Mind-style connect-the-dots conspiracy, tying the Mercer family, who gave a fortune to Trump in the election, to the overturned Kenyan contest, and then to Brexit.
She admitted, though, that her chance has probably come and gone and that, instead, she’d like to work to abolish the Electoral College, because while she dominated the vote on the coasts, nominal Rust Belt and flyover country states still stubbornly demand to have a say in presidential elections.