Hillary Clinton has endured a lot more than defeat from Donald “Meat Breath” Trump. In addition to being the “her” in the “Lock her up!” chant that has become a staple of Trump’s rallies, the former president and his stooges (i.e. Rudy Giuliani and Don Jr.) have never missed a chance to hurl insults and conjecture that some might consider defamatory her way. And Hillary has had enough.
On Thursday, Clinton gave a speech at the New York State Democratic Convention which some people interpreted as the former secretary of state signaling that she might be ready to take legal action against the former president, as well as his cronies at Fox News. As Mediaite reports, Clinton directed attendees to not be “distracted… [by] some new right-wing lie on Fox or Facebook.” More specifically, she was referring to special counsel John Durham’s claims that Clinton and her team “spied” on Trump when he was both a presidential candidate and president of the United States. In response, Clinton told the crowd:
By the way, they’ve been coming after me again lately, in case you might have noticed. It’s funny. The more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get. So now his accountants have fired him, and investigations drop closer to him, and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up, doesn’t it?
Fox leads the charge with accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. And as an aside, they’re getting awfully close to actual malice in their attacks. But as I said, don’t get distracted. Don’t let the extremes of any or either side throw us off course. Focus on the solutions that matter to voters, not the slogans that only matter on Twitter.
As Mediaite notes, the phrase “actual malice” is what stood out to legal experts, as the Supreme Court uses the term in considering defamation suits, and defines it as a statement one makes “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
Fox, of course, has run with the narrative, and published a controversial story with the headline “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia, Durham finds.” And Sean Hannity is basically daring Clinton to sue his employer. Careful what you wish for?
Could the next Hillary/Donald match-up be in a courtroom? Anything’s possible at this point.
(Via Mediaite)