Hillary Clinton said she took no pleasure from Donald Trump’s legal troubles as a grand jury investigating the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results returned an indictment Monday night in what could be his fourth set of criminal charges this year.
“I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied,” Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday after initially smiling and shaking her head at the news. “I just feel great profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges.”
“He set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation,” Clinton, a former secretary of state, added of Trump. “He used tactics of harassment and intimidation. He made threats. He and his allies went after state officials… . We’ll wait to see what [Georgia prosecutors] say … but I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied. This is a terrible moment for our country to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes.”
Trump was indicted by the Department of Justice earlier this month over his attempts to ensure the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden, was not certified as president. Georgia’s case deals explicitly with Trump trying to get that state’s electoral vote results overturned.
In 2016, Trump rode to the White House in part by accusing Clinton of being “crooked” amid an investigation into classified materials kept on a private email server during her time as secretary of state, prompting chants at his campaign rallies of “Lock her up.”
Now Trump is the one facing criminal charges, including in a separate federal probe stemming from his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office.
But if Clinton is feeling any schadenfreude at the fact that Trump is facing possible jail time, she didn’t show it during Monday’s interview.
“The only satisfaction may be that the system is working,” she said. “That all the efforts [to subvert the 2020 election] have been brought into the light and justice is being pursued.”
The former Democratic senator also referred to Trump as a “demagogue” and said he led a “deliberate effort to divide Americans [and] to lie to Americans.
“What happened on January 6 — ‘Don’t believe what you saw, believe what I tell you’ — those are all the hallmarks of authoritarian, dictatorial kinds of leaders,” she added.