WATCH: Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow Crack Up Laughing Over Trump’s New Bombshell Charges
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow cracked up laughing over the new bombshell indictment of ex-President Donald Trump being the context of their already-scheduled interview.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced a new indictment of Trump at a press conference on Monday night, August 14, 2023. Trump is charged with 13 counts that include racketeering, conspiracy to commit forgery, filing false documents, solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, and more. Trump and the 18 co-defendants named in the indictment have been given until August 25 to surrender for arrest and arraignment.
This marks Trump’s fourth (or fifth, depending on how you count) indictment on what now stands at a total of 91 charges. Trump is also under indictment on 34 felony counts in New York over Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his grand jury investigating the circumstances around hush money payments to Stormy Daniels; 37 counts stemming from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into his retention of classified documents under the Espionage Act; a superseding indictment by Smith on three additional charges against Trump( one additional count of unlawful retention of National Defense Information and two new obstruction counts); and Trump’s indictment for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
On Monday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, the host began to laugh at the surreal toss from Lawrence O’Donnell — anchoring the breaking news coverage of the indictment — to an interview with Secretary Clinton — the 2016 popular vote winner who was defeated by Trump in the Electoral College.
The irony was not lost on Clinton either, but the laughs soon gave way to somber commentary on the weighty event:
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL, MSNBC HOST: And now we’re going back to Rachel, who has a special guest.
(LAUGHTER)
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: Thank you, Lawrence. Totally normal segue.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: Throughout her 2016 campaign for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Americans about this particular choice as the Republican’s presidential nominee, about what specifically he planned to do to our democracy.
He went on to win that election in 2016, of course. And now here we are with a multiply-indicted former President Trump and a democracy that, frankly, has not looked this fragile in well more than a century.
All over the country right now, people are wondering what Hillary Rodham Clinton is thinking…
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: … watching things unfold in Georgia. She is the former Democratic presidential nominee…
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: … U.S. senator from New York and secretary of state.
I should tell you, she has a new essay out in “The Atlantic” on the well-being of Americans and our democracy. It’s called “The Weaponization of Loneliness.”
Madam Secretary, fancy meeting you here. It’s really nice to have you here.
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D), FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: Oh, I can’t believe this.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: Yes.
This is not the circumstances in which I expected to be talking to you.
CLINTON: Nor me, Rachel.
It’s always good to talk to you. But, honestly, I didn’t think that it would be under these circumstances, yet another set of indictments.
MADDOW: This is something — this becoming, like, a skill set.
CLINTON: Yes.
MADDOW: Like, in the news business, you say, like, oh, I have covered Olympics, or I have covered a campaign.
CLINTON: Yes.
MADDOW: Now it’s those of us who’ve covered four indictments. I don’t know if four is it. We don’t know if Donald Trump is among those indicted this evening, but all expectations are that he will be.
Do you feel satisfaction in that? You warned the country, essentially, that he was going to try to end democracy. But the most of the country didn’t believe you.
CLINTON: Well, it’s hard to believe.
I don’t feel any satisfaction. I feel great — just great, profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges that went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive.
And we don’t know yet what the charges coming out of Georgia are, but, if you stop and think about what the public evidence is — and you have been talking about some of that for the last hour — he set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation. He used tactics of harassment, intimidation. He made threats.
He and his allies went after state officials, local officials responsible for conducting elections. Now we know they even went into voting machines in order to determine whether or not those voting machines had somehow been breached, when they were the ones actually doing the breaching.
So, there is a great deal already in the public record. We will wait to see what the indictments themselves say, because, clearly, this investigation has been very thorough.
But I don’t know that anybody should be satisfied. This is a terrible moment for our country to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes.
The only satisfaction may be that the system is working, that all of the efforts by Donald Trump, his allies, and his enablers to try to silence the truth, to try to undermine democracy have been brought into the light, and justice is being pursued.
Watch above via MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.
