Hillary Clinton has defended her campaign for paying for the infamous Steele dossier into Donald Trump.
The former presidential candidate told Trevor Noah on the Daily Show that ‘of course’ there is a difference between paying for that information and colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
Clinton said the dossier was simply ‘opposition research’ and pointed to the fact that it was not public knowledge during the election.
Hillary Clinton defended paying for the Steele dossier on The Daily Show, saying it was simply ‘opposition research’ that never became public during the election
But she added that the public should have been aware that the FBI started investigating Trump’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016.
Clinton has previously blamed her election loss on the fact that James Comey reopened the FBI investigation into her emails and made that fact public.
Speaking about the dossier, Clinton said: ‘It was research that started by a Republican donor during the primary, and then when Trump got the nomination for the Republican Party, the people doing it came to my campaign lawyer [Marc Elias] and said, “would you like us to continue it?”
‘He said yes. He’s an experienced lawyer, he knows what the law is, he knows what opposition research is.
‘From my perspective, it didn’t come out before the election, as we all know, and what also didn’t come out, which I think is an even bigger problem… is that the American people didn’t even know that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign because of connections with Russia starting in the summer of 2016.
‘I know that voters should have had that information. That’s something that may have influenced some people. And it’s part of what happens in a campaign, where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out into the public arena is accurate.
Clinton, pictured leaving The Daily Show on crutches after hurting her foot in the UK, said the fact that the FBI was looking into Trump’s links to Russia should have been made public
‘So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated, but the fact of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia should have come out.’
Clinton is facing an investigation by the Federal Elections Commission over the dossier, after the Campaign Legal Center alleged she funneled money meant for ‘legal services’ into opposition research instead.
Clinton’s presidential campaign and the DNC is accused of using legal firm Perkins Coie as a pass-through to Fusion GPS, the firm which hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele to compile the dossier.
The Washington Free Beacon, which is funded in part by billionaire Paul Singer, allegedly started funding the dossier back in 2015, before Clinton and the DNC took over later.
It is also claimed that Barack Obama’s campaign organization, Obama For America, paid Perkins Coie almost $1million to fund the research.
Marco Rubio, former Republican nominee, is also accused of helping to fund the research, though he has denied this.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the disgraced former DNC chair, has also denied any knowledge of how the dossier was put together.