Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who defended her own husband from multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment for decades, entered the political sexual misconduct crossfire Friday, taking aim at the president who defeated her.
“Look at the contrast between Al Franken, accepting responsibility, apologizing, and Roy Moore and Donald Trump who have done neither,” Hillary told WABC radio’s Rita Cosby, according to Politico.
Then-model, now newscaster Leeann Tweedy accused Sen. Franken (D-MN) of forcefully pushing his tongue into her mouth on a 2006 USO tour in Afghanistan after contriving a scene in which the two would kiss. The accusation included a photograph from the tour appearing to show him touch her breasts while she slept.
Despite the photographic evidence and an admission of some wrongdoing on Franken’s part, Hilary was willing to forgive and forget. The fact that Franken owned up and apologized to something largely proven put the matter to rest in her mind, despite the fact that Franken continues to deny elements of Tweedy’s story. Other Democrats were not so forgiving, returning donations from Franken’s PAC and entertaining the possibility of ethics violations.
Judge Roy Moore is also facing very recent allegations, most nearly four decades after the fact. None have been conclusively substantiated. Yet Hillary was not nearly so forgiving with him. In 2016, Alabama voters rejected Hillary by 28 points. But meanwhile, in her judgment, Moore “clearly doesn’t appear to be someone who will bring respect and honor to the state of Alabama.”
Hillary then included, without qualification, President Donald Trump – against whom no claim of sexual misconduct has stood, despite months of her campaign trying – with Moore in this category of the unforgivable. “I didn’t think he’d be as bad as he turned out to be,” she added about his presidency as a whole.
As for her own history of defending a man – her husband, President Bill Clinton – against as many as eighteen separate accusations of sexual misdeeds, Clinton was not nearly so contrite as she fancies Franken to have been. Having famously called the sexual accusations, including those now-proven suggestions of Bill’s serial infidelity, “a vast right-wing conspiracy,” Hillary dismissed the recent turn against her husband.
When asked about the fact that the woman who replaced her in the U.S. Senate, Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), stated, 19 years after the fact, that Bill Clinton should, in fact, have resigned after he was caught having a 22-year-old intern perform sex acts on him in the oval office and then lying repeatedly about it, Hillary was confused. “I don’t exactly know what she was trying to say,” she told Cosby.