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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
David Remnick and Hillary Clinton discuss “What Happened”
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David Remnick and Hillary Clinton discuss “What Happened”
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:17]
B
I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks to Hillary Clinton about her new book, her defeat in 2016, and her belief that allies of Donald Trump colluded with Russia and WikiLeaks to derail her election.
- [01:32]
C
You gave an incredibly moving concession speech, a speech the morning after the election, and you said, we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don't just respect that, we cherish it. Masha Gessen, who wrote in favor of you throughout the campaign, in many ways, said, you should have said something else. You should have said, we have lost. And this is maybe the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We're standing at the edge of an abyss. Our political system, our society, our country are at great danger. Greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The President Elect has made his intentions clear and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. You know where this is going. Are we at the point where you're ready to say that? Are we in the dire straits that Masha Gessen is asking you to describe?
- [02:36]
B
Well, I think the president and his administration pose a clear and present danger to our democracy. And I hoped back the day after that election that I wouldn't be sitting here all these months later feeling compelled to say that with a sense of urgency. But I am, and I do. I am deeply concerned about the direction he is taking our country and his behavior in office, which I think is way beyond politics as usual.
- [03:21]
C
Clear and present danger is a very specific, constitutionally rooted phrase. What do you mean by it, in its specificity? What concerns you the most?
- [03:32]
B
Really, several things, and I write about all of these in the book. But first, the ongoing assault on facts, reason, truth, which is insidious and deeply antithetical to a democracy. I think the attack by Russia, which we still don't fully understand in terms of everything that was done, was a new form of warfare, and I write in some detail about that.
- [04:12]
C
You use the word war.
- [04:13]
B
Yes, I do. And it was right out of the playbook of Putin and one of the generals who. He listens to. This attack on our electoral system, which was at least publicly encouraged by Trump and his campaign. I hope the investigations in the Congress by Mueller as well, will give us more information and understanding of what else they really did to us is not going away. And as you know so well, Putin wants to undermine democracy, to undermine the Atlantic alliance, to undermine the eu, to undermine NATO, and to reassert Russian influence as much as possible beyond the borders. So the stakes are huge here.
- [05:13]
C
The stakes were huge all along, and the stakes could never have been more gigantic toward the end of the campaign. And the Obama administration had a very tough decision to make. You write in your book that you. You put it in a very speculative way. I sometimes wonder if the president had gone on television and made this a more pronounced thing. In other words, there was a choice to make for the.
- [05:39]
B
For the.
- [05:39]
C
For the president. President Obama either treat it as a very. Like. Like a political hand grenade, knowing that if he came out publicly, he would be accused of tipping the scales toward you, or you treat it like a national security emergency and the hell with the campaign, and you do what's necessary. Now, you have been very politic on this. Most people on the Obama side have been pretty politic on this, saying, well, it was very hard to know, and we thought she would win. One person in the administration, at least, said we blew it. Quoted in the Washington Post. Did President Obama blow it?
- [06:20]
B
Well, I think that I'm very understanding of the position he found himself in, because I've been in that Situation Room. I know how hard these calls can be, and I believe that they struggled with this and they were facing some pretty difficult headwinds. Let me just mention a couple. Mitch McConnell, in what I think of as a not only unpatriotic but despicable act of partisan politics, made it clear that if the Obama administration spoke publicly about what they knew, he would accuse them of partisan politics, of trying to tip the balance toward me, even though, as you point out, the president thought I was going to win. Thought that all the way up until the night before the election when he told me that. So that was one.
- [07:30]
C
He told you the night before the election that he was pretty sure you were going to win?
- [07:33]
B
Absolutely. He said, you've got this. I'm so proud of you. And he was running his own research, his own analytics, because, you remember, I.
- [07:40]
C
Traveled with him to North Carolina just before, and I said, are you feeling confident? He said, nope.
- [07:46]
B
You never do. You never feel confident. I mean, you don't allow yourself to. You don't allow yourself. You have to fight to the very end. So I think that the role that McConnell played, the role that Comey played in refusing to in any way acknowledge there was an investigation, made the political stakes even higher for the president.
- [08:12]
C
Nevertheless.
- [08:13]
B
Nevertheless.
- [08:14]
C
Did he blow it?
- [08:15]
B
Nevertheless, I would have, in retrospect, now wished that he had said something, because I think the American people deserved to know.
- [08:24]
C
Does he wish he had said something?
- [08:26]
B
I don't know. I don't know. I think it's something he's probably mulling over, but I have not spoken to him about that.
- [08:35]
C
Let's go to October 7th, the most bizarre day that I can think of in American politics. It begins with statements about Russian activities. Then it's followed about minutes later by the Access Hollywood tape. And I've talked to people around you who say everybody out in the world thought the Access Hollywood tape would be the greatest gift to the Clinton campaign ever. We were freaking out because it was going to obscure the Russia thing, because the people that were going to be most offended by Access Hollywood were already voting for you.
- [09:08]
B
Yeah, well, but you forgot the other thing that happened.
- [09:11]
C
Later in the day, the email dropped.
- [09:12]
B
Within an hour, the email dropped. So it seems clear to us that the Russians were again being guided about our politics.
- [09:24]
C
Guided is the word you use.
- [09:25]
B
Yes, I Would say guided.
- [09:27]
C
And that means what?
- [09:28]
B
Someone was offering very astute political advice about how to weaponize information, how to convey it, how to use the existing Russian outlets like RT or Sputnik, how to use existing American vehicles like Facebook. They were given very astute advice. So what my analysis led me to conclude is that the Access Hollywood tape was like a big bomb going off and it just blotted out everything for about 48, maybe 72 hours.
- [10:12]
C
Because it was irresistibly obscene.
- [10:14]
B
It was. It was obscene. It was him, he was on tape, what he said, he was confessing or bragging about sexual assault. He said he could get away with anything. I mean, everything that we had tried to tell people about him was there for the world to see. Now, because there was no follow up story and because the press said, okay, we've covered that and there's nothing else to cover, became obsessed with the details of John Podesta's emails, including his risotto recipe that became the drumbeat. So the bomb went off. People kind of settled down afterwards, everybody holding their breath to see whether there was another revelation. Women came forward, but no more tapes. But every single day from then on, artfully done, WikiLeaks was dropping emails.
- [11:19]
C
And what was their ideological motivation to be behind Trump, in your view, why would Julian Assange be in favor of Trump in a sense of nihilist? Let's all just blow it up. I mean, what's the motivation there? We just published a huge profile of him and he remains a pretty mysterious character.
- [11:42]
B
I don't think he is that mysterious. I think he is part nihilist, part anarchist, part exhibitionist, part opportunist, who is either actually on the payroll of the Kremlin or in some way supporting their propaganda objectives because of his resentment toward the United States, toward Europe. He's like a lot of the voices that we're hearing now which are expressing appreciation for the macho authoritarianism of a Putin. And they claim to be acting in furtherance of transparency, except they never go after the Kremlin or people on that side of the political ledger.
- [12:37]
C
Do you put him in the same basket as Snowden?
- [12:41]
B
I do. I think that both Snowden and Chelsea Manning, that's a different case. I mean, I think there's a different set of motivations and from my understanding of the case, manipulation that led to her actions. But with Snowden and Assange, I do put them in the same bucket and they both end up serving the strategic goals of think.
- [13:07]
C
Snowden willingly is serving the strategic goals Of I do.
- [13:12]
B
I do. I think that it isn't an accident he ended up in Russia. And it's not an accident that Assange ended up serving as the vehicle for disclosing and distributing the emails that were stolen first from the DNC and then from Podesta. But the point here is they not only dropped them into the middle of our presidential campaign a month before the election, they weaponized them again, suggesting. Suggesting some level of either guidance, cooperation, understandings between political actors and WikiLeaks and the Russians. And if you look at how Trump used WikiLeaks, we counted up that he mentioned WikiLeaks 160 times that last month.
- [14:06]
C
I love WikiLeaks.
- [14:08]
B
I love WikiLeaks. You know, he had, in the summer, called on the Russians to go find my personal emails. And so he was keeping that drumbeat going. And then innocuous comments in the emails were transformed into attacks. And if you just read the WikiLeaks, as we quote Tom Friedman, he said, you know, I like Wiki Hillary. I think she'd be a good president. But if you read on Facebook or Twitter or in InfoWars about John and I running a child trafficking ring in a Penn State.
- [14:45]
C
I didn't know you ran that.
- [14:46]
B
Yeah, we didn't either. And the Clinton foundation, you know, turning its money over to us and paying for our daughter's wedding, people believed that. So Access Hollywood happens, big bomb, and then it fades away. WikiLeaks just kept going. More and more Google searches for WikiLeaks, people trying to get behind the curtain, so to speak, what's really happening.
- [15:15]
C
So in political terms, though, who do you lose as a result of WikiLeaks?
- [15:19]
B
We lose people trying to make up their minds.
- [15:22]
C
Is there a suburban woman outside of Philadelphia who liked you after Access Hollywood but didn't after WikiLeaks? How do you quantify this?
- [15:30]
B
Well, if you're Talking specifically about WikiLeaks, we have one example, which we use, of Glenn Kessler, as you know, from the Washington Post, saying that people voted for Trump because the Clinton foundation paid for Chelsea's wedding. These were people who at least were open to me, graspable, graspable, but whose opinion closed dramatically against me. And then the comey letter hits, and that's when the bottom fell out, particularly with women in the suburbs of Philadelphia and elsewhere who thought, well, you know, that's it. I wanted to vote for her. I was fighting with my husband, with my son, with my employer, and I told them I was gonna vote for her. But they're right. She's going to jail. We're going to lock her up. I can't vote for her or what.
- [16:20]
C
The hell, let's blow it up.
- [16:22]
B
That was not women. Women are not into blowing it up. We'll get to that subject in a minute. Yes, there were a lot of white male voters whose anger, resentment, grievance, wanted to blow it up. And they were very receptive to Trump's argument. So you get the Comey effect, and it's similar to what happened with Access Hollywood. The Comey effect of the letter blanketed the media. Front page, everywhere, news coverage endlessly. Everybody knew about it. I went From, I think, 26 points ahead in the suburbs of Philadelphia to 13 points ahead. You say, oh, well, you're still ahead. I needed to win by about 18 to cover Western, cover Western Pennsylvania. The Comey letter blanketed the traditional media. The Google searches kept going on WikiLeaks. Oh, my gosh. Was she involved in some criminality in a pizza parlor? Let's find out. So it was the perfect storm. It was the perfect storm.
- [17:26]
C
The whole thing was the perfect storm.
- [17:27]
B
It was. It was. And not to make any excuses, because I try not to, and I try to take responsibility for everything that I did that hurt me, but the combination of these factors really was unprecedented.
- [17:42]
C
One factor we haven't discussed, I remember, you won't remember, but 25 years ago or so, whatever it was, 1993, whatever that is, I was invited to the White House and I got to sit next to you at a dinner. There were a series of kind of smallish, by White House standards dinners, and a piece in the New York Times had just been published by Michael Kelly St Hilary, attacking the politics of virtue and all this. And you were not happy about that article. And it seemed to me that that period began a relationship with the press that was difficult, to say the very least. And it might surprise some people who haven't read the book yet. One of the objects of your criticism and even anger in this book is not Breitbart, not the Drudge Report, but the New York Times.
- [18:37]
B
Well, let me say more generally, I have a lot of sympathy for what the press was facing in this election because it was a perfect storm. It was hard to know how to cover someone who played for the cameras all the time, who said outrageous and vile things, who never apologized for anything, whose record was incredibly negative when it comes to any kind of honesty in business or his attitudes about race and so much more. And it's hard to cover that. I Understand that.
- [19:19]
C
Nevertheless, the truest thing that Donald Trump ever said is, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and nobody would say a thing about it. There was story after story after story about his business dealings, his child.
- [19:33]
B
But if you look at the overall news coverage, David, which I'm sure you have, and which we cover in the book, I got much more negative press than he did.
- [19:41]
C
And tell me why you think this is. You speculate here and there in the book, but never quite come down to it. It's very painful. In the book, you describe it, you have to come to the conclusion that you're held out for some sort of special treatment and that millions of people don't like you for one reason or another. How do you go about analyzing that?
- [20:03]
B
Well, let's take.
- [20:04]
C
Do you feel like a victim in this?
- [20:05]
B
No, I don't feel like a victim, but let's take that statement. When I left the State Department, I had a 69% approval rating.
- [20:13]
C
Because you were running something.
- [20:14]
B
I was running something in service to someone else, a man who I was honored to serve. And so I knew that if I did get into the presidential race again, I would face what women face when you are not serving someone, but you are seeking power yourself.
- [20:35]
C
So what you're saying is that it's gendered, as we now say, and not Clinton specific?
- [20:39]
B
No, I think it was Clinton specific, plus sexism and misogyny. And I think it was the way the press, which thought I was going to win and which gave me lavish endorsements. I got endorsements from papers that had never endorsed a Democrat before, certainly not since, you know, World War II. And the endorsements all said, like the Times endorsement said, you know, this email thing, it's like an issue for the help desk. So smart, thoughtful, experienced journalists, when writing about what they believed was best for the country in this election, lauded me. But when it came to news, because I think, in part, they couldn't figure out how to cover Trump, and because, yes, the Russians served up stuff which was irresistible. Comey served up stuff which they couldn't say no to. There was such an imbalance, and the imbalance which scholars are now writing about that basically concluded that I talked about jobs more than anything else. Network news covered all policies to the tune of 32 minutes during the whole campaign, as compared to 114 minutes in 2012 and 220 minutes in 2008. So I took the responsibility of trying to tell people what I would do and how I would pay for it very seriously, because I really believed that at some point it would count.
- [22:27]
C
Hillary Clinton, former senator, former secretary of state, and the Democratic nominee for president in the 2016 election. Election. We'll talk more in a moment about how to address the nuclear threat of North Korea. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
- [22:55]
D
New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Brooklyn Museum presenting proof depicting the societal impact of politics and power. Proof encourages a fresh evaluation of three artists who each witnessed revolution, war and civil unrest. Experience iconic prints by Francisco Goya from our European art collection, films shown in slow motion by Sergei Eisenstein and new works by contemporary American artist Robert Longo. More@brooklyn museum.org New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Netflix's new movie First They Killed My Father. From director Angelina Jolie comes the riveting true story of one girl's courageous journey to survive the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia. Based on the best selling memoir by Luang Ung, First They Killed My Father is powerful, intense and inspiring. Now available on Netflix and in select theaters.
- [23:54]
E
Hi y', all, I'm Jessica Williams. And I'm Phoebe Robinson. And we're back this fall with an all new season of our hit podcast 2 Dope Queens from WNYC Studios. Season 4 is gonna be better than ever, I swear. We got special guests like Abby Jacobson, Tegan and Sarah W. Kamau Bell, Queen Latifah and more. Plus Stana from the Best in the Biz. And Phoebe and I live out our wildest dreams this season. For example, I met J.K. rowling and I met Bono. Those aren't the same. To hear these stories and more, come on over to 2 Dope Queens wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, the memories, the memories. Bono, I love you. Not the same.
- [24:52]
C
Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I met with Hillary Clinton at her office just before her book what Happened was officially published. And I spoke with her about how she lost the most astonishing presidential campaign of our lifetimes and the threats at home and abroad that America now faces. Back in the day you got blasted for using the phrase vast right wing conspiracy, although what you described the map of it is pretty undeniable. Then you got blasted for using the phrase deplorable basket of deplorables. And you I think for political reasons that was in politic. But are there deplorables in this country and how many?
- [25:35]
B
I think Trump has behaved in a deplorable manner both during the campaign and as president. I think he has given permission to others to engage in deplorable behavior as we did see in Charlottesville and elsewhere. So I don't take back the description that I made of him and a number of his core supporters. And it's deeply disturbing to me. And that's part of the clear and present danger that these groups of people are trying to assert their views as a way of marginalizing and dismissing so many other Americans. And I don't think that's, you know, in our interests. And I think that Trump should have tried more than he has to be the president for everyone. His inaugural speech was a cry from the white nationalist gut. It wasn't in any way a speech of reconciliation, of outreach. He is still playing to that base. That is part of what he's doing by trying to turn the clock back on the dreamers and the DACA protection that they got.
- [27:04]
C
I've lived in New York for a long time, as have you. Donald Trump was a kind of figure on the New York jokescape. He was a cover of Spy magazine figure. He wasn't even a leading light in the real estate business here. And suddenly, really quite suddenly, he went from that to. To this. And you've now, you campaigned against him for a long time. You've thought about him endlessly. You debated him three times with him looming over your back, which we can talk about in a second. But I want to know what you make of him as a human being.
- [27:37]
B
I think he is immature with poor impulse control, unqualified for the position that he holds. Reactive, not proactive, not strategic, either at home or on the world stage. And I think he is unpredictable, which, at the end of the description one can give of him, makes him dangerous. The latest incident with North Korea going after our ally South Korea, while North Korea is threatening the region, threatening us, going after China, which we need, whether we like it or not, to help us try to resolve the aggressive behavior of Kim Jong Un. It puts a smile on Kim's face, just like him going after NATO in the Atlantic alliance puts a smile on Putin's face. He admires authoritarians. In fact, before this crisis with North Korea, he was praising Kim Jong Un. He clearly has a bromance toward Putin, who he laws as a great leader. And he's being played. He's being played by the Putins and the Kim Jong Uns of the world. I'm not even sure he's aware of that because he has such a limited understanding of the world. Everything is in relation to how it makes him feel. And therefore he has little objective distance, which a leader must have, making decisions in the Oval Office requires a level of dispassionate, reasoned analysis. We've seen no evidence he's capable of that.
- [29:46]
C
What is the proper policy to carry out vis a vis North Korea at this moment? This is a really perilous moment.
- [29:52]
B
Yes, it is. Well, it's hard to talk about what needs to be done because it has to be both a. A diplomatic and a military approach. There are no diplomats at home. There are no China experts. I don't know who is left in the government at any level of experience and seniority who could be brought in to the kind of diplomatic effort that I would advocate for. You should have an envoy that carries the imprimatur of the president in Korea right now shuttling between Tokyo and Seoul and Beijing in trying to figure out what is the best way forward here and making it clear to China in particular that we cannot stand back and allow an attack on South Korea or Japan or, heaven forbid, Hawaii. We would have to respond. North Korea shooting a missile over Tokyo that caused sirens to go off is going to be the biggest argument for Abe and his party to remilitarize and rearm. South Korea doesn't want that, and China doesn't want that, but what's the alternative? So I think intense diplomacy right now would make a difference. We have basically outsourced that to the military. You know, Mattis is both Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State, as far as I can tell. And he's the one going off. And look, he's a general, and I have the greatest respect for him. I was in Fallujah with him shortly after the Marines took it back.
- [31:40]
C
So we have generals running foreign policy.
- [31:42]
B
We have generals, and there's a very important role for generals, and there's a very important military aspect to any kind of coercive diplomacy, but it can't be the leading edge. And I worry that nobody's home at the State Department and there isn't anybody to really guide a strategic approach to North Korea as opposed to tweeting and speechifying.
- [32:12]
C
This is not in the book, although you do use the phrase, wonderful phrase, manspreading a New York subway expression, that Putin's posture toward almost everyone is one of contempt. But I've also heard that in meetings with you, he would not even look at you at times and stare away. What was the dynamic between the two of you in a room? How did he treat you?
- [32:34]
B
It was interesting because he would manspread. He would make very belligerent comments to the press spree with you sitting next to him with me sitting next to him. We were one incident I'm thinking about. We were in his dacha outside of Moscow. Then the press would leave the room, and he would just not look at me. He would just basically sit there. So I would come with my agenda, and I would have our ambassador and maybe one other person, and he would have one or two people. So I would raise all these issues which he would give short shrift to. Flick of his hand, contemptuous, disdainful look. And so I always came to meetings prepared to say something that might catch his interest. So in that particular meeting, I said, you know, one thing we do have in common, Mr. President, is a great interest in wildlife conservation. And all of a sudden, he sits up and he actually looks at me. I said, I've studied what you're doing with Siberian tigers with polar bears, and I want to commend you because that's a very important issue for you to lead on. He looks at me and he says, come with me. He gets up, I get up. I follow him out the door. We go down the stairs. We go down a corridor. We go into a little office. All of his security is sitting there. They jump up, and he opens a door. We go into an anteroom. Then we go into a big room that looks kind of like a giant situation room with a very large desk and the biggest map of Russia you've ever seen on the wall. It's sort of the inner sanctum of the dacha. And he begins telling me what he's doing in Siberia and Franz Josef Island. And then he turns to me, he goes, I'm going to the island to tag polar bears. He says to me, would Bill like to come?
- [34:32]
C
Would Bill like to come?
- [34:33]
B
Would Bill like to come? I said, well, I don't know. I'll ask him, Mr. President, but if he can, I'd be happy to come. Doesn't respond to that, but we had the most animated.
- [34:42]
C
He didn't think you were the polar bear type.
- [34:43]
B
No, wrong gender. Gender. But we had the most animated conversation, and it really worked to make some kind of connection with him. Fast forward. The last time I met with him was in Vladivostok in September, Labor Day, round Labor Day of 2012. And we were in a pitched battle with Russia over Syria. And he wouldn't meet with me. He wouldn't talk to me. He wanted nothing to do with me because he knew I was going to raise Syria again. And as you probably know, I had been one who said we needed to do more earlier.
- [35:22]
C
You wanted to know fly zone and other.
- [35:23]
B
Yeah. And to support the original rebels, not the, you know, isis, Al Nusra rebels. So finally, right before the dinner, we have all the meetings, won't give me the time of day. Right before the dinner we have like a 10 minute sit down. And he's, you know, looking bored and uninvolved, but protocol required that I sat next to him at dinner.
- [35:53]
C
How's this? English?
- [35:56]
B
It's okay.
- [35:57]
C
Yeah. It's better than people know.
- [35:58]
B
It's better than people know. So I, you know, he was not enthusiastic about it. But you know what they say, you know, what's the difference between a protocol officer and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist. So we had hosted it the year before, Indonesia was hosting it the next year. So he had to sit between me and the president of Indonesia. So again, I came prepared with something to talk about.
- [36:22]
C
It seemed like bad dates.
- [36:24]
B
It is a little bit like that. And, you know, you have your little repertoire of conversation subjects that you try to bring up to see whether anybody will bite. So I said to him, Mr. President, before I came here, I stopped in St. Petersburg and I went to the memorial to the siege of Leningrad. And all of a sudden he perks up and he says, what did you think? And I told him, and I told him how moving it was and how extraordinary. A story of courage and persistence and resilience of the Russian people. And he says, let me tell you something. He proceeds to tell me a story that no Russian expert that I've ever told this to had ever heard before. And he says his father had been on the front lines and he was manning the front lines for days. And then they got a little time off. He was going back to, you know, just collapse, spend the night in his apartment with his wife. He gets to his street. He's walking down his street. He sees the body collectors who are trying to lift up the dead bodies as quickly as possible to prevent plague and other disease. He walks by the pile of bodies and he sees a leg sticking out. And he says, that's my wife. That's my wife. You recognize the leg and the shoe? And he begins pulling on the leg, and the body collectors are yelling at him, get out of there. Get out of there. He says, I won't leave my wife. I won't leave my wife. He pulls her out of the pile, carries her up to the apartment, and she's still alive. He nurses her back to health. A few years after the war, Putin is born. So Putin tells me this story immediately after the dinner, I get Mike McFaul and the CIA guys and everybody.
- [38:20]
C
Mike McFall is the ambassador.
- [38:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, the ambassador and a Russian expert. And I tell them the story and they just look at me wide eyed because it's kind of like Masha Gessen's book, the man with no Face. Nobody really knows anything about him. So I guess my larger point is that he can be engaged if you really work at it, but he never forgets what his objectives are. And in the book, I have one of his favorite quotes from Lenin. You take a bayonet and you push. If you hit mush, you keep going. If you hit steal, you stop. He is someone that has to be managed every single day to be able to make clear to him that there are limits about what he can do and what he will get away with. And of course, circling back to this election, he succeeded in affecting our election.
- [39:23]
C
Were we mush?
- [39:25]
B
I think we were mushy. And what I fear is we still haven't gotten to the bottom of what the Russians did. That's why I am strongly in favor of an independent commission with subpoena powers to really go deep into understanding what they did. And especially with this new information coming out about their intrusion into voting rolls, their potential interference with election officials, personal accounts. What were they doing and what effect did it have?
- [39:59]
C
Fair enough. Do you think that a Republican Congress is capable of turning on Donald Trump? If there's a certain evidentiary weight, whether it's about his business practices, whether it's about his behavior with Russia or whatever? How does this end? Or does it end well?
- [40:17]
B
We're going to have to wait to see what the investigations turn up. But on this point about investigating what Russia has done, the Republicans have just as big a stake in this as Democrats. Putin can turn on Republicans and members of Congress. Putin can turn on Trump. Putin can not only try to influence elections in 2018, but in 2020, and all bets are off. You don't always understand what it is he wants from you. Trump has turned out to be a disappointment in some respects because the sanctions are still in effect and he felt compelled to sign the congressional legislation on sanctions. But no one should rest easy just because it was aimed at me, because I represented the United States and spoke out and stood up to him, and doesn't mean it ends with me.
- [41:13]
C
Before I came over here this morning, I went onto Twitter and I punched in your name.
- [41:18]
B
A dangerous thing to do.
- [41:19]
C
No, it's a horrendous thing to do. And you would think that you were president and that you had just made the most divisive decision possible and the most emotional. It never stops where you're concerned.
- [41:32]
B
Well, but I've thought a lot about this, and for whatever combination of reasons, some I think I understand, others I don't, I am viewed as a threat to powerful forces on both the right and the left. I am still one of the favorite subjects for Fox tv. And it's because I do speak out and I do stand up. And sometimes, you know, what I say is not fully appreciated for years, to be honest. At least it seems to me that way. But I'm going to continue to speak out. And on the left, there is a real manipulation of the left. In addition to those who are calling me names, we know that Russia has really targeted, through their trolls and bots, a lot of accounts, a lot of Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts of people on the left feeding them a steady diet of just nonsense.
- [42:42]
C
Bernie Sanders was hammering at you for months, and you were. Yes, he was very reluctant. And I think your advisors were reluctant join you in this reluctance and President Obama, too, for you to hammer back because he was in your own party.
- [42:55]
B
Right.
- [42:55]
C
Was that a mistake?
- [42:57]
B
Hard to know. I mean, I beat him by 4 million votes. That was a landslide. But he never.
- [43:03]
C
Did he play fair with you?
- [43:04]
B
Oh, I think he is not a Democrat. And that's not a smear. That's what he says about himself. And he riled up so many people who supported him with all kinds of innuendo and artful smear about me that he was reluctant to do for me what I had done for President Obama.
- [43:26]
C
You resent him for that?
- [43:28]
B
No, I don't have any personal feelings about it one way or the other. I am interested in fielding candidates at all levels who can win. That's why I've started this group called ONWARD Together to help recruit, train and support people who will run, particularly young people and especially young women. And so I'm looking for that bench and that next generation of Democratic leaders who will bring their own sensibility and experiences into politics, which I think would be all to the good.
- [44:05]
C
Secretary Clinton, thank you very much.
- [44:06]
B
Thank you, David. That was Hillary Clinton talking with David Remnick. America is changing, and so is the world.
- [44:20]
C
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [44:28]
B
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [44:31]
C
Tristan Redman in London, and this is.
- [44:33]
B
The Global Story Every weekday We'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [44:40]
C
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [44:48]
B
From.
- [44:48]
E
PRX.