Hillary Clinton just floated the possibility of contesting the 2016 election
(CNN)In
interviews over the last week surrounding the release of her 2016
memoir "What Happened," Hillary Clinton has been hugely critical of
President Donald Trump. She's suggested he is a misogynist and said
repeatedly that she fears for the country with Trump in charge.
But in an interview Monday with NPR's Terry Gross,
Clinton raised that critique up a notch -- not only questioning the
legitimacy of Trump's presidency but refusing to rule out the
possibility of contesting the results if Russian collusion is proven by
special counsel Bob Mueller.
Here's the full text of the back-and-forth, courtesy of CNN's Dan Merica:
Gross:
I want to get back to the question, would you completely rule out
questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian
interference in the election is even deeper than we know now?
Clinton: No. I would not. I would say --
Gross: You're not going to rule it out?
Clinton: No, I wouldn't rule it out.
!!!!
This a big
deal. The 2016 Democratic nominee, who won the popular vote by nearly 3
million votes, is expressly leaving open the possibility that she would
pursue legal action to invalidate the last presidential election.
I've
paid close attention to what Clinton's been saying since she lost the
election and I have never heard her broach the possibility of a formal
challenge of the results.
Knowing
what we know of Clinton, it seems unlikely to me that she simply spoke
off the cuff here, that this was just an unconsidered remark. She
doesn't really do that sort of thing.
Glen
Caplin, a spokesman for Clinton, said after the interview aired that
the former secretary of state "has said repeatedly the results of the
election are over but we have to learn what happened."
"I
would hope anyone in America concerned about the integrity of our
democracy would feel the same way if we got there. But we're not,"
Caplin said. "Right now Bob Mueller and several congressional committees
are investigating to what extent the Russians impacted our election and
who exactly helped them do so."
And,
context matters too. Clinton floated the idea of formally contesting
the election after she said this about how she envisions her role in the
party going forward: "I expect to be really active, and my voice, I'm
going to keep out there. I'm not going to just go slowly and quietly
into that good night."
Given all of that, it's logical to conclude Clinton knew what she was doing here.
The
harder-to-answer questions are a) how she would go about challenging
the election and b) what the prospects for such a challenge actually
working might be.
Julia Azari, an associate politics professor at Marquette University, took both questions on in a piece for 538 earlier this summer. Here's the key bit from that piece:
"Some
legal scholars maintain that the language in Article II of the
Constitution prevents holding a presidential election again, thus
putting it beyond the power of the courts to order a re-vote, as they
have occasionally done for other offices. Others suggest that there is
legal precedent for a presidential re-vote if there were flaws in the
process. One instance in which this question arose was the 'butterfly
ballot' from the 2000 election, which may have caused some voters to
choose Pat Buchanan when they meant to vote for Al Gore in Palm Beach
County, Florida."
The question
then isn't even whether Mueller is able to prove collusion. It's
whether that collusion can be proven to have directly affected actual
votes. And, from what we know from every intelligence agency -- at least
to date -- is that there is no evidence that any votes were changed as a
result of Russian interference in the election. (Trump has made this
point whenever the Russia investigation comes up.)
It
is possible -- but far from probable -- that in the course of his
investigation Mueller uncovers evidence of not only collusion but also
examples of when that collusion changed actual votes. But that's a long
way from today.
Clinton
acknowledges that difficulty in the interview with Gross. "I don't know
if there's any legal constitutional way to do that," she says of
contesting the election results. She added: "There are scholars,
academics, who have arguments that it would be, but I don't think
they're on strong ground." She does go on to immediately note, however,
that elections have been overturned due to fraud in other countries. (Read the full transcript here.)
There
is, of course, some level of irony in Clinton's willingness to broach
the possibility of contesting the 2016 election. Trump made headlines --
when does he not? -- when he refused to commit to honoring the election
results in the days leading up to the vote. Trump repeatedly insisted
the system was "rigged" against him. Even on election day, he was
circumspect about whether or not he would accept the results; "So no, if
I think everything's on the up and up, that's a lot different, and we
can only see what happens, I hope it's going to be very fair, I think
we're going to do very well," he said on a Tampa radio station on November 8.
That
Clinton is now holding open the possibility of formally contesting the
results -- even though it's not clear what that would even entail -- is
yet another reminder that the 2016 election was unlike any we've ever
seen before (or likely will ever see again).
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