US President Donald Trump has weighed in on the ongoing feud between Hillary Clinton, his former arch-nemesis who suffered a defeat in the 2016 presidential elections, and Tulsi Gabbard, one of many Democratic presidential candidates challenging Trump in the upcoming 2020 elections.
“Then you have Hillary Clinton saying two days ago, ‘Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset,’ and that Jill Stein was a Russian agent", Trump said on Fox News Hannity on Monday. “I said, wait a minute, it took me two-and-a-half years, I wish she would have said that earlier because people... have realized she is crazy. She’s crazy".
Earlier last week, Clinton suggested that presidential candidates Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein were both “Russian assets", and that Gabbard was being "groomed" by the Republicans as a spoiler candidate.
“I'm not making any predictions but I think [the Republicans] got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate", Clinton said on David Plouffe’s Campaign HQ podcast. “She's the favourite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her".
Clinton did not refer to Gabbard by name, which did not stop Plouffe from concluding the stream by saying that the former secretary of state believes “Tulsi Gabbard is going to be a third-party candidate propped up by Trump and the Russians".
“That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset", Clinton said during the podcast.
Gabbard minced no words when replying to the allegations, referring to Clinton as “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of rot” in her tweet.
In an eyebrow-raising move, Clinton drew criticism from a large number of her fellow Democratic candidates, including Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, Pete Buttigieg, and Bernie Sanders – to agree with Trump, who spends a solid portion of each day lambasting the Dems on Twitter.
In the same interview, Trump said he hoped US Attorney General William Barr looks into ties between Clinton, Ukraine, and the notorious anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
“I heard they got somebody who wrote the fake dossier was out of Ukraine. All of the things that happened", Trump said. “And, I assume that the attorney general -- I would like the attorney general to find out what’s going on. Because, you know what? We are investigating corruption".
Various media reports indicate the White House is blaming Ukraine for being the source of at least part of the dirt that ended up in the infamous Steele dossier. Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, a company hired by the Clinton campaign to conduct anti-Trump research. A Fusion GPS employee, Nellie Ohr, later testified before Congress that she did receive some “dirt” from a source inside the Ukrainian Parliament, according to The Hill’s investigative report published in September.
*CORRECTION: The text of this article has been amended to reflect the fact that Mrs. Clinton was apparently referring to the Republican Party, not “the Russians,” when she mentioned that someone was “grooming” a third-party candidate for the 2020 race.
