This week, as the beginning of President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, the ongoing Democratic presidential primary race, and other issues swirled, Hawaii Democratic Congresswoman (and presidential candidate) Tulsi Gabbard filed a lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton of defamation. Clinton, who herself ran for president in 2016, had accused Gabbard of being a “Russian asset” while mulling over the possibilities for Russians to exploit the presence of a third party candidate and split (and thereby neutralize) the vote of those on the left. Gabbard has now issued her own public explanation for the lawsuit, insisting that Clinton and her allies “want you to know that if you dare to cross them, they will destroy your reputation as well.”
After insisting that she has dedicated her “entire adult life to protecting the safety, security, and freedom of the American people,” Gabbard added:
‘Despite my lifetime of service to our country, Hillary Clinton has essentially tried to portray me as a traitor to our country. If Hillary Clinton and her allies can successfully destroy my reputation — even though I’m a war veteran and a sitting member of Congress — then they can do it to anybody… I will not allow this blatant effort to intimidate me and other patriotic Americans into silence go unchallenged.’
My statement on defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. https://t.co/HJ4x6OqXCN #StandWithTulsi pic.twitter.com/WQChk5gLgy
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) January 23, 2020
That challenge includes Gabbard apparently seeking more than $50 million in damages. Clinton never actually mentioned Gabbard’s name in the original now infamous discussion of alleged Russian assets, but the implication of who she was talking about rang through pretty clearly anyway.
She’d commented:
‘She’s the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far… Yeah, she’s a Russian asset, I mean totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate.’
In the lawsuit, Gabbard’s legal team says that Clinton’s “false assertions were made in a deliberate attempt to derail Tulsi’s presidential campaign.”
Gabbard has made no public indication that she’s seriously considering a third-party run in the only increasingly likely event that she doesn’t win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. At present, she garners an average of only 1.5 percent of the support in national level polls — which is, just to be sure, more than a couple of other candidates who are still in the race, although the pace of dropouts from lower polling candidates is continuing to pick up anyway.
Originally, Clinton also alleged in the same conversation that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is a “Russian asset.” The idea is that Stein’s presence in the race peeled enough votes away from Clinton to allow the Russians’ favored candidate — Donald Trump — a victory. There’s no real evidence of this; it’s just speculation.
And it’s bursting back into the spotlight at the same time that Clinton’s belittling of another formal opponent went viral, too. Although he’s the most popular Senator in the country according to polling, Clinton claims in an upcoming documentary that “nobody likes” Bernie Sanders. Is that why he’s in a close second in national polls of the current Democratic presidential primary field?
