NEW YORK CITY, New York — Real estate magnate Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, tells Breitbart News that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “crooked as hell.”
“That’s why I call her ‘Crooked Hillary,’” Trump replied when Breitbart News asked him during the interview in his Trump Tower office how she could have gone from “dead broke” when she and her husband former President Bill Clinton left the White House to worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. “She’s crooked as hell.”
Trump’s tripling down on his nickname for Clinton–“Crooked Hillary”–comes as the Los Angeles Times reports that the name seems to be sticking to Clinton nationwide.
“All campaign long, pollsters have found that many voters — including some Democrats — don’t think she’s principled,” columnist Doyle McManus wrote this week. “Maybe it’s her four decades in bare-knuckle politics, ancient questions about investment deals in Arkansas, her entanglement in her husband’s personal scandals, her decision to set up a private email server when she was secretary of State, her big-dollar fundraising and speech fees — or all of the above. Fairly or not, Clinton can’t shed her history.”
In this interview with Breitbart News, Trump called out the Clintons for their paid speeches’ connections to actions they took around the world—a theme laid out in both the “Clinton Cash” book by Breitbart News senior editor-at-large and Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer and in the subsequent film on the movie. The film, written and produced by Breitbart News executive chairman and GAI chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Dan Fleuette and directed by M.A. Taylor, will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France next week. Trump said the Clinton Cash book is “amazing” and that he is looking forward to seeing the movie.
“They made speeches for a lot of money and then things happened,” Trump told Breitbart News. “I mean, if you read that book, that book is amazing. How’s the movie? Did you see it? Let me know. If Steve [Bannon] is involved, it will be good.”
The film, which was screened for select media and political audiences here in Midtown, Manhattan, on Wednesday and will be again on Thursday, brings to life the revelations of several parts of the Clinton Cash book. It shows on the big screen in graphic detail how the Clintons used their influential connections worldwide to enrich themselves and their millionaire and billionaire friends while empowering many times corrupted world leaders and furthering plight of the world’s needy and poor in places like Africa and Haiti—all while jeopardizing U.S. interests by allowing Russia’s Vladimir Putin to have financial control of U.S. nuclear materials. This reporter saw the film at the screening on Wednesday.
Trump also noted to Breitbart News that this pattern of the Clintons pocketing enormous amounts of cash with little effort—in large part due to their governmental connections—is nothing new. He pointed back to an seemingly forgotten scandal from the Clintons’ days in the Arkansas governor’s mansion when then Arkansas First Lady Hillary Clinton—before she was even the First Lady of the United States—made shocking financial gains off cattle purchases she made.
“It’s like her cattle deal, years ago—remember?” Trump said. “She made a cattle deal, and she made a phenomenal return in a very short time. They went to various cattle ranches, and they all said it’s impossible. In other words, she bought cattle and sold it—she made a massive return in a very short period of time. All these cattle people said it was impossible to do.”
Back in May 1994, writing about the 1978 Hillary Clinton cattle deals, the Washington Post’s Charles Babcock detailed exactly how suspect the deals were.
“Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday,” Babcock wrote in the Post on May 27, 1994.
The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In about 10 months of trading, she made nearly $100,000, relying heavily on advice from her friend James B. Blair, an experienced futures trader. The new records also raise the possibility that some of her profits — as much as $40,000 – came from larger trades ordered by someone else and then shifted to her account, Leo Melamed, a former chairman of the Merc who reviewed the records for the White House, said in an interview. He said the discrepancies in Clinton’s records also could have been caused by human error.
Trump questioned, in this interview, why Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont—Clinton’s only competitor in the Democratic presidential primary—has largely avoided these serious questions about the Clinton Cash issues during his campaign. Sanders has also given Clinton a pass on the email scandal with regards to her home-brew server, for which she is under criminal investigation by the FBI—which has 147 FBI agents working on the case.
“It’s amazed me that Bernie has not gone after that,” Trump said. “Two things amaze me: He hasn’t gone after the emails, and he hasn’t gone after the Clinton Cash. Unless they have some kind of side deal —which is shocking—it’s inconceivable that Bernie has not gone after that. And it’s also amazing that Bernie has not been complaining more about the super delegates.”
Trump also noted that Clinton’s astonishing now 20 losses to Sanders in primaries and caucuses nationwide—but Sanders still trailing Clinton in the delegate race thanks in large part to super delegates who are party insiders not responsive to any voters whatsoever—is “unacceptable.”
“I think it’s unacceptable to a party and it’s a rigged system because of the super delegates, so it’s a very rigged system,” Trump said. “But I think it’s unacceptable to a party—why would anyone accept that, where she’s losing seemingly every single Tuesday? You watch and she loses. And you watch and she loses again. But then the pundits say, ‘oh he can’t win.’ I think it’s unacceptable to have someone lose that much that’s going to represent your party, but that’s their problem not mine.”
Trump said the exit polling from West Virginia showing that sizable portions of Democratic voters will support him in the general election if Hillary Clinton wins her party’s nomination in the end is proof he will win in November. He said they support him because he is strong on national security and right on trade deals.
“Because they know that I’m going to make the country safe and they know I’m going to make great trade deals,” Trump said. “One thing with Bernie that he’s got right is the trade deals are a disaster in this country. The difference is he can’t do anything about it—he wouldn’t know where to begin—whereas I’m going to make bad deals into great deals.”