Hillary Clinton wrote in a blistering opinion piece published Wednesday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “documents a serious crime against the American people” — and that President Trump possibly broke the law.
But the former first lady — who infamously lost to Trump in the 2016 elections — added that she opposed any knee-jerk impeachment effort, favoring a more deliberative probe like the Watergate hearings.
“Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. It documents a serious crime against the American people,” .
“The debate about how to respond to Russia’s ‘sweeping and systemic’ attack — and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law — has been reduced to a false choice: immediate impeachment or nothing. History suggests there’s a better way to think about the choices ahead.”
Clinton noted that the issue was personal for her given Republicans in the House voted to impeach President Clinton.
But she said she had a unique vantage point because she was secretary of state during much of Vladimir Putin’s rise and had also served as a staff attorney during the Watergate hearings.
“My perspective is not just that of a former candidate and target of the Russian plot. I am also a former senator and secretary of state who served during much of Vladimir Putin’s ascent, sat across the table from him and knows firsthand that he seeks to weaken our country,” she said.
“I am also someone who, by a strange twist of fate, was a young staff attorney on the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate impeachment inquiry in 1974.”
She said Mueller’s report didn’t tell the whole story partly because of Attorney General William Barr’s “redactions and obfuscations.”
But launching impeachment now would be a mistake — just as it was for the GOP-controlled House that voted to impeach Bubba, who was saved by the Senate.
“But [the report] is a road map. It’s up to members of both parties to see where that road map leads — to the eventual filing of articles of impeachment, or not,” Clinton said.
And that decision should only follow extensive public hearings before Congress — a la Watergate.
“Watergate offers a better precedent. Then, as now, there was an investigation that found evidence of corruption and a cover-up. It was complemented by public hearings conducted by a Senate select committee, which insisted that executive privilege could not be used to shield criminal conduct and compelled White House aides to testify,” she wrote.
Some progressive House Democrats have already called for the president’s impeachment, while others, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said that now was not the time.
Trump has vowed to fight any efforts by Congress to investigate the Russia matter further.
It wasn’t the first time she had gone after the report, saying that “any other person” than Trump would have been indicted after Mueller’s report.