During a press exchange Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump said he remains hopeful that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be investigated for election fraud—reviving a years-long accusation he’s repeatedly made since their 2016 faceoff.
Just before boarding for New Jersey, a reporter asked Trump directly: “Will Hillary Clinton finally be investigated for election fraud?”
“I hope so, I hope so,” Trump responded. “I don’t know whether or not that’ll happen, but I hope so.”
The brief Q&A outside the White House also included sharp criticism from the president directed at Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, whom he recently ousted. Trump claimed McEntarfer manipulated jobs data in a way that could have influenced past elections.
“You have to have honest reports,” Trump said. “When you look at those numbers—just before the election and then after—they corrected it by 800 or 900,000 jobs.”
He continued: “Why should anybody trust the numbers? Go back to election day. Look at what happened two or three days before—massive, wonderful jobs numbers—trying to get him elected or her elected, trying to get whoever the hell was running. And then on the 15th of November or thereabouts, they added 800 or 900,000 in overstatement reduction, right after the election.”
Trump then turned to a reporter and added pointedly, “It didn’t work, because, you know who won, John? I won.”
Trump’s latest remarks echo a line he took during his 2016 campaign, when he threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to look into Clinton’s actions if elected. In one memorable moment during a televised debate, Trump famously told Clinton: “Because you’d be in jail.”
Despite the campaign rhetoric, Trump has not pursued prosecution against Clinton during his presidency. Clinton previously served as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
More recently, in July, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents she claimed show the Obama administration engineered a “contrived narrative” alleging Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“There is irrefutable evidence that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false,” Gabbard asserted. “They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true. It wasn’t.”
Gabbard further stated: “We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI, to investigate the criminal implications of this for the evidence. The evidence that we have found, and that we have released, directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.”
In a separate July interview, Trump called the Obama administration’s alleged actions related to the Russiagate scandal “serious treason.”
“What they’ve done is so bad for this country,” he said. “And it really started right at the 2016 election. And there’s a difference when you know it—and when you know it, and it’s all written down for you. I mean, it’s all there. It’s right there. The orders, the memos, the whole thing. It’s right there.”
