Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday that her eyes welled with tears when Donald Trump was convicted of criminally falsifying business records to keep an alleged extramarital affair from becoming public ahead of the 2016 presidential election that she lost to him.
“The case … was election interference,” Clinton said in a lengthy interview on CBS News Sunday Morning. “Looks like karma to me,” she added, referring to how Trump taunted her throughout the contest with chants of “lock her up” only to become a convicted felon while seeking a return to the White House.
Clinton appeared on the news program in large part to promote her memoir Something Lost, Something Gained, which is scheduled for release on Tuesday. CBS recorded and aired her remarks before officials said US secret service agents fired at a person who pointed a rifle’s muzzle into Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, during what was described as an apparent assassination attempt while the former president was playing a round there Sunday afternoon.
In Clinton’s book and in her interview with correspondent Erin Moriarty, the ex-US secretary of state acknowledged how she has wished – but struggled – to “move on” from her electoral defeat to Trump in 2016, especially as her Republican rival again prepares to face a Democratic woman, Vice-President Kamala Harris, in November’s race for the White House.
The former first lady singled out Trump’s conviction in New York – the state she used to represent as a US senator – as a particularly bittersweet moment in the aftermath of her ill-fated presidential run.
She suggested it was gratifying to see a guilty verdict delivered against the man who insulted her as “Crooked Hillary” – and lustily chanted alongside his supporters to “lock her up” over her use of a private email server as secretary of state – because he had falsified business records to cover up payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
But Clinton also said the case was a stark reminder over how close she was to becoming the first woman to become US president. That is because the covered-up payments were delivered to Daniels during the 2016 election after she claimed to have had extramarital sex with Trump about a decade earlier.
“I got tears in my eyes then,” Clinton said. “The case which was mistakenly called a ‘hush-money’ case was an election interference case.
“Why did he do what he did? He did it to try to keep the information from the American public so that they wouldn’t turn away from him and vote for me. So it’s a pretty clear case of election interference.”
Trump is awaiting sentencing on 34 felony counts in that case while also dealing with other criminal charges in connection with his retention of classified government documents as well as his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Moriarty asked Clinton whether at least a part of Clinton thought positively about the fact that Trump “is the person who’s actually facing time in jail”.
“Looks like karma to me,” Clinton said.
In other parts of her interview, Clinton said watching Harris debate Trump on 10 September reminded her how hard it was to keep one’s cool in verbal exchanges with him. She also described it as “difficult” yet “emotional” and rewarding to write and deliver a speech at the Democratic national convention in August supporting Harris as she pursued something voters denied Clinton.
Clinton furthermore addressed other extramarital sexual encounters: those her husband, Bill Clinton, had during his political career, including amid his presidency. She laughed nervously as she said, “Oh, you know there was” a time when she was unsure whether her marriage would survive. But she said the couple went to counseling, and though “it was really hard”, they were now preparing to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary together.
“One day, I’d wake up and say, ‘OK, no, I’m done.’ Another day, I’d wake up and I’d say, ‘… I gotta keep trying to see this through and figure out what is it I want?
“Is it worth it? Is it something I want to invest in? And when I went through all of those questions, the answers were yes, yes and yes.”
The FBI said authorities arrested a suspect after Sunday’s gunfire at Trump’s golf club.
No injuries were reported in what was the second attempt on Trump’s life since 13 July, when a rifle-wielding attack who fired on a political rally struck the tip of the former president’s ear. The attacker also killed one spectator and wounded two more before a Secret Service sniper shot him dead.
Prominent Democrats including Harris and US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer condemned violence Sunday. “The perpetrator must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Schumer said.
