In a coincidence for the ages, Hillary Clinton—widely dismissed in 2016 as she tried to warn the country of what a threat Donald Trump posed—was on MSNBC on Monday night as the latest round of indictments around Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election were coming out.
In the interview, Rachel Maddow asked the question everyone wants to ask Clinton: “Do you feel satisfaction in that?”
“I don’t feel any satisfaction,” Clinton responded. “I feel great, just great profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges that went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive.”
Clinton went on to note that while we don’t yet know what’s in the Georgia indictments, the publicly available evidence of efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn that state’s election paint a damning picture.
“The only satisfaction,” Clinton added, “may be that the system is working. That all of the efforts by Donald Trump, his allies, and his enablers to try to silence the truth, to try to undermine democracy have been brought into the light, and justice is being pursued.”
Clinton: It’s always good to talk to you, but honestly I didn’t think that it would be under these circumstances. Yet another set of indictments.
Maddow: This is something, this is becoming like a skill set—like in the news business you say, like, Oh, I’ve covered Olympics or I’ve covered a campaign, now it’s those of us who’ve covered four indictments. I don’t know if four is it. We don’t know if Donald Trump is among those indicted this evening, but all expectations are that he will be. Do you feel satisfaction in that? You warned the country, essentially, that he was going to try to end democracy, but most of the country didn’t believe you.
Clinton: Well, it’s hard to believe. I don’t feel any satisfaction. I feel great, just great profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges that went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive. We don’t know yet what the charges coming out of Georgia are, but if you stop and think about what the public evidence is—and you’ve been talking about some of that for the last hour—he set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation. He used tactics of harassment, intimidation, he made threats, he and his allies went after state officials, local officials, responsible for conducting elections. Now we know they even went into voting machines in order to determine whether those voting machines had somehow been breached when they were the ones actually doing the breaching.
So there is a great deal already in the public record. We’ll wait to see what the indictments themselves say, because clearly this investigation has been very thorough. 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.
The only satisfaction may be that the system is working. That all of the efforts by Donald Trump, his allies, and his enablers to try to silence the truth, to try to undermine democracy have been brought into the light, and justice is being pursued.
