"We are dealing with something unprecedented in the history of this country...that should scare everyone. Democrat, Republican, and Independent.”
“Donald Trump should immediately disclose all of his tax ties and connections to the Kremlin and its associates. The American people deserve to know the full extent of these links and how they relate to what the Russians are doing..."
Hillary Clinton did not mince words in a speech delivered to a rapt crowd regarding what she explicitly referred to as the "relationship between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin."
"Putin is manipulating Donald. Putin is a trained intelligence officer from the old KGB. He knows he can use flattery to get into Donald’s head -- to make Donald the Kremlin’s puppet. And It seems to be working. Donald has signaled to Putin that he will let Russia do whatever it wants, from Ukraine to Syria and beyond," said Clinton in the explosive statement.
The catch? The statement was given during a campaign rally on a cold Monday night nearly five months ago, and only eight days before the 2016 presidential election, on October 30, 2016.
A captured snippet from the event in which Clinton addressed supporters in Kent, Ohio has recently resurfaced, but at the time it received relatively little fanfare and was not otherwise widely reported on, despite the explosive nature of its contents. This was, of course, three days before FBI Director James Comey publicly suggested that she was the subject of a potentially new criminal investigation into her e-mails, which did not pan out to be true. In retrospect, the timely video serves as a shockingly precise warning about the quagmire currently rapidly unfolding, with potential collusion between members of Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russian operatives become more and more of a reality.
As of Thursday evening, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), the leading member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has gone on record to state that the FBI is in possession of new information that exceeds “circumstantial evidence,” and suggested that this may go before a grand jury.
Indeed, it appears that Hillary Clinton tried to warn the American people, who likely did not have the capacity or or context to fully understand the weight of her words until now. The video marks a series of uncovered moments from the campaign trail which have served to admonish the American people that we were warned.
Other noteworthy moments from the speech not depicted in the video include Clinton quoting former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "We have never seen a mind meld of the kind between the Russian leadership and a candidate for the presidency of the United States."
Other moments not in the video include a segment on the president's authority to launch nuclear weapons:
"I had my differences with Republicans and even with Democrats, but I never doubted their fitness to serve. Donald Trump is different."
"President Ronald Reagan once said -- and he worked hard for arms control and I admired what he did working with the Soviet Union -- he once said he feared, and this is a quote from President Reagan, ‘some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us.’ That has been the fear and the commitment of Democratic and Republican presidents since the dawn of the Atomic Age. So what would he think about Donald Trump, who says he wants to be, and I quote, ‘unpredictable’ about using the most powerful weapons ever produced?”
"...when the President gives the order, that’s it. There’s no veto for Congress, no veto by the Joint Chiefs. The officers in the silos have no choice but to fire. And that can take as little as four minutes. That’s why all those retired launch officers stepped forward and said Donald Trump should never be put in charge of our nuclear arsenal."
The Clinton campaign has not formally addressed whether they will pursue any formal legal challenge of the election, though I have previously reported on at least one possible (if not highly implausible) legal scenario her campaign might reference for suggestions.
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