[H]ANOVER, N.H. — When Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived Wednesday at Dartmouth College, the former U.S. secretary of state intended to share her worldview on the most headline-grabbing international issues.
But as soon as the former first lady and U.S. senator from New York was introduced as “the winner of the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election,” a capacity crowd at the school’s Spaulding Auditorium interrupted with applause, signaling it was more interested in national politics.
And so Clinton aimed to appease all as she urged 850 assembled students and faculty to read — “maybe after exams” — the multi-based findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s recent report on Russian interference into the U.S. political process.
“I don’t care whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, a libertarian, a green, a vegetarian,” she said. “If you’re an American, the idea that our election is being trifled with, being impacted and maybe being determined by (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and the Kremlin and his intelligence service and the military and all of their assorted allies and agents, that should give us heartburn.”
Clinton’s return to the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire sparked an hour of candid conversation about past conflicts with her 2016 opponent Donald Trump and present calls for the president’s impeachment.
Clinton, 71, recounted how she had just graduated from Yale Law School in 1973 when she helped the House Judiciary Committee investigate corruption and cover-up charges against President Richard Nixon.
“We were told in absolutely certain terms there was to be no prejudgment, nobody was going to be advocating for impeachment or not — we were going to be collecting all the evidence,” she said.
In a recent Washington Post essay, Clinton has advocated for a similar strategy regarding Trump.
“I think it’s a mistake to jump to it … I think you take this step by step,” she told students. “If you do it in a deliberative, thoughtful and as independent and nonpartisan way as possible, then you can get to a decision as to whether or not you should proceed with impeachment.”
Clinton came to campus at the invitation of Jake Sullivan, her former State Department director of policy planning and current Dartmouth visiting teacher, and Daniel Benjamin, her former counterterrorism coordinator and current director of the school’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
Clinton began by noting the one-year anniversary of Trump’s withdrawal from an Iran nuclear agreement reached before his election by the United States and five other world powers — a move that has sparked Iran to warn that it, too, will walk away from the accord.
“I don’t know any agreement that is perfect, but it was very close to being the best you could get,” she said. “I worry greatly that there is some desire on the part of this administration to provoke something. And there is always the threat of miscalculation — somebody makes a mistake. I cannot imagine a more dangerous situation than the one that we’re seeing unfold right now.”
But talk soon turned from Iran to the Mueller report and Russia.
“The professionals who follow this are well aware that we are under a continuing, chronic cyberattack,” Clinton said. “We don’t want to have adversarial or conflict relations with any other country, but I think that Putin has a very clear agenda, which is to weaken not only our democracy but all of the western democracies.”
“You have to ask yourself, ‘What are we doing to try to protect this next election?’” she continued. “The answer is not very much. As someone who apparently really annoyed Putin, I’m well aware that he thinks he has died and gone to heaven having the current occupant of the Oval Office. We need to stand up to that. And right now I don’t think that will likely occur until we have a new president.”
Clinton voiced just as much disappointment in Republicans who are allowing the Trump administration to defy congressional subpoenas with claims of executive privilege.
“I think we are at a crisis point, and I say that with great sadness,” she said. “With very few exceptions, very, very few Republicans have really stood up. We’ll see whether it’s the rule of law or the rule of Trump that the Republicans in the Congress and in the courts are going to abide by.”
Clinton noted the combined controversies are pulling attention away from issues ranging from health care to climate change. Political polarization fueled by social media isn’t helping, she added.
“This kind of agitation, this kind of conspiracy fetishizing, the lies — it has real world consequences,” she said. “We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to handle this, stand up against it. I don’t understand why I rile these people up on the right so much. When I am attacked or maligned, I just keep going.”
Dartmouth students who spilled out of the auditorium into an overflow room voiced approval.
“I wasn’t trying to be first in line, I just would love a chance to meet this woman,” said Emily Stehr, who arrived four hours before the event’s start in a “Love Trumps Hate” campaign T-shirt. “I’m glad I will be so close to this superhuman lady.”
