REUTERS/Mike Blake
Donald Trump Hillary Clinton finish their third and final 2016 presidential campaign debate at UNLV in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 19, 2016.
- Former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton appeared to take a jab at President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
- Clinton used a hypothetical Democratic presidential candidate to illustrate the importance of election security and hit back at Trump during an MSNBC interview.
- "'China, if you're listening, why don't you get Trump's tax returns,'" Clinton said in her hypothetical scenario, referring to Trump's unwillingness to release his tax returns. "'I'm sure our media would richly reward you.'"
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton appeared to take a veiled jab at President Donald Trump and the Republican Party through a hypothetical scenario.
"Imagine ... that you had one of the Democratic nominees for 2020 on your show, and that person said, 'you know, the only other adversary of ours who is anywhere near as good as the Russians, is China,'" Clinton said during an interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Wednesday.
"'So why should Russia have all the fun?'" Clinton said of this hypothetical Democratic candidate. "'And since Russia is clearly backing Republicans, why don't we ask China to back us?'"
Clinton appeared to be referring to Trump's comments during a July 2016 press conference, in which he asked Russia to find her deleted emails from her tenure as secretary of state.
The Kremlin launched a campaign to hack into Clinton's private email servers on the same day as the press conference, according to a Justice Department indictment against Russian intelligence operatives. Trump continued to suggest that thousands of the emails had been deleted with a nefarious intent from Clinton's operatives.
Associated Press/Mike Roemer
President Donald Trump speaks at a Make America Great Again rally, April 27, 2019, in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said during the press conference in 2016. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."
Clinton mirrored those words with a twist in her hypothetical scenario.
"'China, if you're listening, why don't you get Trump's tax returns,'" Clinton said, referring to Trump's unwillingness to release his tax returns. "'I'm sure our media would richly reward you.'"
"Now, according to the Mueller report, that is not conspiracy because it's done right out in the open," Clinton added of her scenario.
Clinton offered the example to broadly illustrate her concern for the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. The Trump White House and Republican leadership are accused of blocking a bipartisan bill that was intended to increase cybersecurity awareness for the election system.
A redacted version of Mueller's report revealed that the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the intent to hurt Clinton's campaign.
"The Republicans in the Senate wouldn't at all go forward with some of the bipartisan legislation that was meant to secure our elections under orders from the White House," Clinton said. "Now, why is that? Well, because they think it helped them."
"Just saying that shows how absurd the situation we find ourselves in," Clinton later added.