US President Donald Trump continued to defend Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard and physician Jill Stein on Friday, telling supporters at a rally in Mississippi that his former rival Hillary Clinton was continuing to spread a “hoax” which she had originally tried to use against him.
“She’s a beauty,” Trump said, commenting on Mrs. Clinton and her email server scandal. “How about last week? Did you hear? I don’t know who Tulsi Gabbard is, but I know one thing: she’s not an agent of Russia."
"And Jill Stein, she’s a greenie, that’s fine. We love the environment, everybody in this room…I don’t know Jill Stein, she ran last time. I don’t know her, but I know she’s not an agent of Russia,” Trump added.
“When Hillary made those statements, two statements, both of them – ‘they work for Russia', 'they’re agents of Russia’, I said you know, when she made that statement about me three years ago, it took me two years to get out of that hoax statement! She made it about them, everybody laughed because of what we proved,” Trump said.
“But I’ll tell you what, these are very bad people. These are very dishonest people, and the media is worse than all of them,” Trump noted.
Clinton vs. Gabbard
Last month, former first lady and secretary of state Hillary Clinton implied in a podcast that Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein were “Russian assets,” prompting a firestorm of criticism from Gabbard, who called the former secretary of state “the queen of warmongers, the embodiment of corruption, and the personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.” Stein, meanwhile, accused Clinton of making up a “completely unhinged conspiracy theory,” and recommended that the former candidate spend more time reflecting on why she lost in 2016.
Trump later joined the debate, tweeting that “Crooked Hillary” was “at it again!”, and accusing his former rival of being “crazy.”
Gabbard has taken advantage of Clinton’s attack and the national media attention it brought to engage in fundraising, with a recent USA Today/Suffolk poll showing her increasing in the polls to 4 percent support, overtaking rivals Senator Kamala Harris and entrepreneur Andrew Yang but still far behind the frontrunner, former vice president Joe Biden, as well as senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
