In an umpteenth swipe at the 2016 victor, Hillary Clinton branded US President Donald Trump a “corrupt human tornado” – despite US officials still investigating her private emails and senators demanding a probe into her alleged anti-Trump conspiracy with Ukraine.
The president is a corrupt human tornado.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 30, 2019
Hillary Clinton’s Monday tweet came days after she came up with the same poetic comparison in an interview with CBS. In the same interview, the former secretary of state didn’t miss the chance to bash the 2016 Trump campaign and lambast the president himself over the ongoing impeachment proceedings.
“I believe he (Trump) understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories ... there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did," she said, of the 2016 Trump campaign, before adding: “It was like applying for a job and getting 66 million letters of recommendation and losing to a corrupt human tornado.”
Although Mrs Clinton’s tweet did elicit praise, it also drew plenty of condemnation, with users calling the 2016 candidate a “corrupt human hurricane” and a “diarrhoea volcano of corruption.”
You are a diarrhea volcano of corruption.
— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) September 30, 2019
Then you must be a corrupt human hurricane
— Saladino for Congress (@JoeySalads) September 30, 2019
Everyone in the entire world knows there’s no one more corrupt than you, Hillary.
— S.L. Stiles (@StacyLStiles) September 30, 2019
As Secretary of State, you sold America to the highest bidder. Pay for play. EVERY ONE knows it. (Uranium One, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation)
Save your piety. You’re an evil, corrupt human tsunami.
You lost. It would be best for your health to move on. You know... like the organization formed to ignore your husband’s lying under oath when he was actually impeached.
— Jessica Fletcher (@heckyessica) September 30, 2019
That’s rich coming from the woman that:
— Students For Trump (@TrumpStudents) September 30, 2019
- Sent/Stored Classified Information in an unauthorized manner,
- Deleted over 30,000 emails prior to being investigated,
- Called millions of Americans “deplorable,”
- And failed to protect innocent Americans in Benghazi.
The Clinton Probes
Much of the 2016 election was dominated by an FBI investigation into the use of a private email server for official public communications by Clinton during her time as secretary of state under Barack Obama. She was eventually cleared of criminal wrongdoing, but reports have emerged that the State Department is reviving the investigation.
Moreover, Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairmen of two Senate committees, have urged Attorney General William Barr to investigate any ties between Ukraine and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.
The two senators wrote in a letter to Barr that action should be taken to look into “brazen efforts by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign to use the government of Ukraine for the express purpose of finding negative information on then-candidate Trump in order to undermine his campaign.”
The Trump Impeachment Process
It comes as the Democrats, who are controlling the lower chamber of Congress, have launched an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump’s alleged attempt to press to Ukrainian President Zelensky to probe Hunter Biden, who had sat on the board of a major gas production company between 2014 and 2019.
The company, Burisma Holdings, had already come in the crosshairs of Ukrainian prosecutors in the past over allegations of money laundering and tax evasion. The case has been dropped and re-opened, and the prosecutors are currently looking into the activities that had taken place before Hunter Biden’s hiring.
According to a non-verbatim transcript of a July phone call with Zelensky, published by the White House, Donald Trump did ask his counterpart to “look into” whether Joe Biden stopped an investigation into his son’s company in 2016.
Trump alleged that Ukraine's prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was sacked in March 2016 after pressure from then Joe Biden in an alleged effort by the latter to quash the Burisma investigation, which reportedly was dormant at the time. Joe Biden and Ukraine’s former foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, have both denied that Shokin was fired over Burisma.
Joe Biden is the former US vice president who is also a front-runner in the 2020 presidential primary, and the Democrats claim that Trump may have attempted to seek damaging information on his potential rival.
It has been suggested that Trump had blocked planned military aid to Ukraine a week before the conversation; Trump confirmed the move but said it had nothing to do with the Bidens. Zelensky himself described the call as “normal” and said nobody had put pressure on him.
The call is at the centre of a whistle-blower complaint by an intelligence officer, which has already been released. The officer said they had received “received information from multiple US Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”
Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives are currently investigating the affair and are expected to present their findings later this year to the House Judiciary Committee.
If the Democrat-controlled committee finds that Trump’s actions are worthy of impeachment, the House will next hold a vote where a simple majority is required to move the process to the Senate. There, the president would stand a trial, and a two-thirds majority would be needed to convict him and remove him from office.
