August 21, 2020

The "Don't Sugarcoat It" award for this week goes to Hillary Clinton.

Hillary is right. What happened to the Republican Senate that even those not up for reelection this year are letting Trump get away with foreign interference in our elections even today?

Have they been lobotomized?

JOY ANN REID: Your speech in combination with former President Obama and Senator Harris, you know, really did put together sort of a package of dire warnings to the American people. But those same warnings really have been heard really since 2016 by your former colleagues in the United States Senate. And we knew that in 2016 Senator McConnell, Mitch McConnell, refused to protect the election that you were a part of. You served with these people. You know, and you were very well known for working quite well across the aisle and having a lot of good allies on the other side of the aisle. Does it surprise you that there has been so little alarm raised? Yes, the Senate Republicans did sign off on that damning Senate intelligence report about the 2016 election. But there has been no outcry, really, about what Russia did. No outcry about the bounties on American troops. No real outcry about any of it, including, you know, the interference of an adversary into the election. Does that surprise you or does it affirm something you learned about your former Senate colleagues on the other side?

HILLARY CLINTON: Joy, it does surprise me and it really saddens me. I served with a lot of people who are still there. And I give a lot of credit to the bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that just came out with a fifth volume that really goes chapter and verse about all of the interference in the 2016 election. But more importantly, that it continues today. You know, you have the intelligence officials of even the Trump administration sounding the warnings. And you have a lot of good legislation that has come out of the House under Nancy Pelosi that goes to the Senate and is just basically buried by Mitch McConnell. I don't understand what has happened to the people that I served with, I worked with, I traveled with, who literally seem to have had like a lobotomy or something. They have given up their principles, their values, their backbone to following Trump regardless of where he leads, which they know, and I believe they know, is, you know, unconstitutional, often illegal, reckless, wrong, whatever adjective you want to use. So I can't explain it, Joy. I give credit to people like Mitt Romney who do stand up and speak out. But I wish that there had been more, like Margaret Chase Smith, who was the first Republican Senator to spoke out against Joe McCarthy back in the early '50s. You know, where is that kind of leadership? And it really saddens me that it seems to be absent.

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