Hillary Clinton believes it’ll take a political thrashing before Republicans on Capitol Hill are willing to intensify their scrutiny of President Donald Trump and his administration’s potential ties to Russia.
Hillary Clinton says Republicans might probe Trump if the party risks losing in 2018
She says the current probe in the House of Representatives isn’t good enough.
At the moment, the House and Senate — through the chambers’ intelligence committees — have started asking current and former White House officials to share more information about their communications with officials in Moscow. A related probe is under way at the FBI.
But Clinton criticized Republicans in Congress, particularly in the House, for failing to probe the president deeply enough. A veteran of the bipartisan commission that reviewed another Republican in the White House — Richard Nixon — and the Watergate scandal, Clinton said onstage at the Code Conference that lawmakers should have formed a bicameral, bipartisan special committee to look into Trump and his administration’s conduct.
During Watergate, GOP lawmakers at the time were “not happy about investigating a president of their own party but they were open to the evidence,” Clinton said. And in 2017, she added: “We don’t have that right now in the Republican majority in the House.”
But Clinton stressed the sentiment might shift if GOP lawmakers begin to think they’re at risk of losing their majority in the House or shedding some much-needed seats in the Senate.
“The only point I would make is if the Republican leadership begins to believe that Trump is a big political burden to them, then they will begin to be more open to a more thorough investigation,” Clinton said.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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