Hillary Clinton suggested Thursday that a desperate former President Donald Trump hopes to divert attention from his deepening legal trouble by spreading ludicrous lies about her.
“It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get,” Clinton said, drawing laughs as she delivered the keynote speech at the New York State Democratic Convention.
“His accountants have fired him,” Clinton added. “And investigations draw closer to him. And right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up.”
Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, delivered her speech on the same day that a judge ruled Trump must sit for questioning in the New York attorney general’s civil investigation into possible fraud by the Trump Organization.
Liz Harrington, Trump’s spokeswoman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Clinton’s speech.
On Saturday, Trump issued a blustery statement claiming that Clinton’s campaign spied on his campaign during the 2016 race.
“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” Trump said in the statement.
The next day, he added in an all-caps statement: “THEY SPIED ON THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!”
He has never publicly accepted that he lost the 2020 election to President Biden, instead sowing dangerous falsehoods about widespread voter fraud.
Clinton said America’s fight to maintain its democracy remains unfinished, pointing disapprovingly at the Republican Party’s decision to declare that the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was “legitimate political discourse.”
“We must reject the big lie about the 2020 election and the coverup of the insurrection of last Jan. 6,” Clinton said in her speech at the Democratic convention in Midtown Manhattan. “And we can’t get distracted — whether it’s by the latest culture nonsense, or some new right-wing lie on Fox or Facebook.”
Fox News, which was broadcasting the speech live, cut away.
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