Referring to Republicans in 2017, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, “It appears they don’t know I’m not president.” The relevance of that quote continues to linger.
When Donald Trump launched his 2020 re-election campaign, for example, the Republican incumbent devoted much of his speech to Clinton, despite the fact that she wasn’t running. With just weeks remaining before Election Day 2020, Trump not only pushed then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to uncover and release Clinton emails, he also lobbied then-Attorney General Bill Barr to prosecute Clinton for reasons unknown. (This was before the GOP started pretending to care about the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement.)
Nearly four years later, the former president is still fixated on the rival he defeated in 2016, and who hasn’t held public office for more than a decade. Here’s what the presumptive GOP nominee told Newsmax during an on-air interview this week from Mar-a-Lago:
“By the way, they released Hillary Clinton. She hammered her phones. She used all sorts of acid testing and everything else they call it, BleachBit, but it’s essentially acid that will destroy everything, you know, within 10 miles. I mean, what she did was unbelievable. Nothing happens to her. Nothing happens to Bill Clinton. He took it out in his socks, you know?”
In context, the former president was feeling sorry for himself: He’s dealing with criminal prosecutions, including his classified documents case, while those rascally ol’ Clintons got away with related misdeeds.
At the heart of the problem, of course, is that Trump continues to have no idea what he’s talking about. Despite having obsessed over this for nine years, he continues to believe software with the word “bleach” in the title was actually some kind of acid. It wasn’t.
Relatedly, Clinton was never “released.” She was investigated, and officials couldn’t find evidence to warrant an indictment.
As for the idea that…
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