Hillary Clinton excoriated President Donald Trump for his treatment of the media, saying in remarks on Sunday that press rights and free speech are ‘under open assault’ in the current administration, which she compared to an authoritarian regime.
‘We are living through an all-out war on truth, facts and reason,’ Clinton said at the PEN America World Voices Festival, in Manhattan.
‘When leaders deny things we can see with our own eyes, like the size of a crowd at the inauguration, when they refuse to accept settled science when it comes to urgent challenges like climate change … it is the beginning of the end of freedom, and that is not hyperbole. It’s what authoritarian regimes through history have done.’
Clinton, who was delivering the festival’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, began by discussing threats to press freedom and free speech around the globe, including in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
All-out war on truth: ‘It is the beginning of the end of freedom, and that is not hyperbole. It’s what authoritarian regimes through history have done,’ Hillary Clinton said in a speech in New York
It’s his fault: ‘Today we have a president who seems to reject the role of a free press in our democracy,’ Trump claimed
But she soon turned her remarks to the United States under Trump, saying that such freedoms are ‘in the most perilous position I’ve seen in my lifetime.’
‘Today we have a president who seems to reject the role of a free press in our democracy,’ she said of her 2016 opponent.
‘Although obsessed with his own press coverage, he evaluates it based not on whether it provides knowledge or understanding, but solely on whether the daily coverage helps him and hurts his opponents.’
And she added: ‘Now, given his track record, is it any surprise that according to the latest round of revelations, he joked about throwing reporters in jail to make them talk?’
The reference to revelations from memos by former FBI director James Comey was Clinton’s only reference to Comey, who was fired by Trump.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Clinton’s remarks.
The onslaught at New York’s Cooper Union came on the same weekend that her husband was revealed to have peddled a conspiracy theory that the New York Times had a deal with Trump to keep Clinton out of office.
The conspiracy theory which was reportedly spread by the former president holds that the Times was eager to see Trump elected because it would boost readership.
‘After the election, Bill would spread a more absurd Times conspiracy: The publisher had struck a deal with Trump that we’d destroy Hillary on her emails to help him get elected, if he kept driving traffic and boosting the company’s stock price,’ writes Amy Chozick, herself a Times reporter and the author of a new book, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling.
She was robbed: Bill Clinton was revealed to have claimed the New York Times cost Hillary the election by focusing on her email scandal for commercial gain
Money making: Bill Clinton claimed that the New York Times had a deal with Donald Trump to hammer his wife for their commercial benefit when he won
Chelsea Clinton popped a bottle of champagne before her mom was declared the loser in the 2016 election, according to a new book. She called the report ‘false’ – but the New York Times stood by it
Fake news claim: Chelsea Clinton called the report ‘false’ but the New York Times did not back away from the story
The excerpt about Bill Clinton’s conspiracy theory was reported by The Daily Beast. The New York Times has not responded to the claim.
Clinton’s daughter has already attacked Chozick for saying that she had popped open Veuve Cliquot champagne an hour after polls closed.
Chelsea Clinton claimed that was impossible because she was at home pumping breast milk.
The New York Times however stuck by the claim in a printed extract from the book, saying ‘several people’ had reported the anecdote to Chozick.
Hillary Clinton’s remarks were followed by an onstage conversation with Nigerian-born novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, largely about the 2016 election.
The revelations are detailed in a new book by Times reporter Amy Chozick, who covered the Clinton campaign for the newspaper
Under friendly questioning, the former secretary of state was asked if she had ‘hit back’ enough during the campaign – a reference to a childhood episode in which, Clinton has written, her mother gave her permission to hit back at a bully.
‘I now think that I didn’t,’ Clinton said. She described the much-discussed moment when Trump was ‘stalking me on that debate stage.’
She recalled thinking, ‘What do I do? Do I turn around and say, ‘Back up, you creep?” But then, she said, ‘the coverage would have been, ‘She can’t take the pressure, she got angry.”
And so, she said she told herself, ‘You just have to be calm and in control. Because ultimately what the country wants is someone who is not blowing up in the Oval Office.’
‘Well, you know that did not work out so well,’ she said, to laughter in the audience.
Adichie expressed admiration for Clinton but confessed to some disappointment that in her Twitter profile, she describes herself first as a ‘wife’ – followed by mom, grandma and then her professional titles, ending with 2016 presidential candidate.
The author said she would have preferred Clinton begin with ‘should have been a damned good president.’
Clinton spoke of the difficulty she had in finding a balance between one’s personal roles and relationships and one’s professional roles. ‘It shouldn’t be either-or,’ she said, noting that she had long strived for the right mix.
‘But when you put it that way, I am going to change it,’ she said of her Twitter profile, to laughter and applause.
As of Monday morning, she had not yet done so.