Former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has told former White House press secretary Jen Psaki that Russian President Vladimir Putin "hates" the US. She further claimed that Moscow will interfere in the 2024 election, repeating never-proven allegations from 2016 and 2020.
“The Russians have proved themselves to be quite adept at interfering and if [Putin] has a chance, he’ll do it again,” Clinton insisted during Sunday's MSNBC interview. She further alleged that the Russian leader, whom her campaign famously accused of propping up her Republican rival, Donald Trump, in 2016, “hates democracy.”
“He particularly hates the West, and he especially hates us,” she said, arguing that Putin was behind a deliberate strategy to “damage and divide” the US. The twice-failed candidate called on Americans to resist the purported tyranny of Russia’s “authoritarian dictator,” as well as his “apologists and enablers.”
“We have to reject a kind of creeping fascism of people who are really ready to turn over their thinking, their votes to wannabe dictators,” Clinton added.
Psaki, an MSNBC host since leaving the White House last year, infamously revealed to the public that the administration of President Joe Biden was attempting to control the Covid-19 narrative on social media in 2021, admitting the government was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook.” It subsequently emerged that multiple government agencies had representatives meeting regularly with social media platforms to request content takedowns, user bans, and the promotion of content considered more favorable to Washington.
At the Eastern Economic Forum earlier this month, Putin denounced the Biden administration as hopelessly corrupt and engaged in political persecution of the president’s Republican predecessor, arguing that the lawfare campaign against Trump exposed “the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others democracy.”
He reminded the audience that the allegations of Russian collusion leveled against Trump by Clinton and others – later revealed to have been based on illegal surveillance warrants, bogus tips, and falsified evidence – were “complete nonsense.”
Justice Department Special Counsel John Durham found the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s purported Russian ties to be massively flawed, concluding in a report published earlier this year that the agency had “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law” in entertaining dubiously-sourced information from Clinton operatives and other Trump political opponents.
Undeterred, US intelligence agencies revisited their 2016 election-meddling claims with a report insisting that Moscow had manipulated the 2020 vote in favor of Trump. However, no official investigation of those allegations was ever performed, and that same report ultimately admitted no effort had actually been made to interfere with vote totals.