White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday slammed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for appearing to suggest that she had the 2016 election stolen from her.
“She lost that election fairly and squarely, and when she says that election was stolen from her, she’s playing a dangerous game,” Conway said while speaking on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”
{mosads}”Here she is 2 1/2 years later, literally will not accept the election results because she lost.”
Clinton said in Los Angeles over the weekend that she fears Russia will use the same hacking and disinformation tactics in the 2020 election that it did in the last cycle. She also said that she’s been telling 2020 Democratic candidates to prepare for the possibility.
“You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” Clinton said at a tour stop for “An Evening with the Clintons.”
Conway told The Hill on Monday that Clinton’s remarks were especially troubling considering how much importance Democrats had in advance placed on accepting the 2016 election’s outcome.
“Most never saw the 2016 presidential election results coming, and arrogantly asked me and others on the campaign numerous times, ‘Will HE accept the election results?’ ” Conway wrote in an email to The Hill. “Answer: yes, he accepted the 2016 election results, and will accept his successful re-election results. When will THEY?”
In 2016, President Trump raised alarms after declining to say he’d “absolutely accept the result of the election” during a presidential debate. Clinton called his comments “horrifying” at the time.
“Hillary Clinton is out there, claiming that the election was stolen from her, where nobody told her not to go to Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania, nobody told her not to have a good message,” Conway said. “Nobody told her to be the second-most popular person in a two-person household. That must really hurt every morning.”
The 2016 election has undergone intense scrutiny during Trump’s first two years as president. Special counsel Robert Mueller in March concluded a 22-month investigation into Russia’s election interference, which the U.S. intelligence community believes was carried out in an effort to help elect Trump.