After she told CNN that the allegations of sexual misconduct against her husband, ex-US President Bill Clinton, are different than the ones leveled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and current US President Donald Trump, two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is now claiming that her husband’s infamous affair with Monica Lewinsky was not an abuse of power.
Bill was 49 at the time the affair began. Lewinsky, an intern at the White House, was less than half his age – just 22 at the time, a mere 7 years older than Bill’s daughter Chelsea Clinton who was 15 then.
Interestingly, Hillary was a vocal critic of Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, decrying the allegations of sexual misconduct against a 15-year-old when he was 17. When asked about her husband’s affair with a young intern, however, Hillary defended her husband before quickly changing the subject.
When CBS correspondent Tony Dokoupil asked Hillary if Bill should have stepped down for carrying on an affair during his time as President, not to mention outright lying to his citizens that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” only to later recant, Hillary asserted: “Absolutely not.”
When Dokoupil pressed Hillary and asked, “It wasn’t an abuse of power?” Hillary claims it was not since Lewinsky was an adult at the time the affair occurred.
In a piece for Vanity Fair, Lewinsky herself identified that the affair was borne out of “a gross abuse of power”. She wrote: “What transpired between Bill Clinton and myself was not sexual assault, although we now recognize that it constituted a gross abuse of power.”
While she is quick to blame others, Hillary appears to disagree with Lewinsky’s own take and defended her husband who has been accused of sexual misconduct by several women.
In 1994, a year before the Lewinsky relationship, government employee Paula Jones filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill, claiming that he pulled out his penis and told her to “kiss it.” Four years later in 1998, another woman, Kathleen Willey, alleged that Clinton groped her in a hallway in 1993.
In perhaps the most graphic accusations, Juanita Broaddrick alleged that same year that Clinton had brutally raped her in 1978.
Besides Lewinsky, Bill also had an affair with singer Gennifer Flowers. His exploits were not necessarily always hushed up – Arkansas State Troopers have recalled procuring women for Bill when he was their governor.
Last month, former special prosecutor Ken Starr, who led the perjury and financial mismanagement investigations against the Clinton administration, revealed in an explosive tell-all memoir how then-First Lady Hillary Clinton handled the fallout of her husband’s infamous affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
After a nearly two-decade silence, Starr revealed that he believes that Hillary was a “systematic enabler” of her husband’s infidelity and that she worked for decades to organise cover-ups that hid Bill’s many affairs.
Starr further paints Bill as a “deeply flawed president who believed he was above the law,” and added that he was able to sidestep further damage since the public thought that he was just entangled in an innocent affair.
Hillary, however, does not appear to care about sexual misconduct when it comes to her husband although she is quick to point her fingers at others. Quickly changing the subject to Trump and Kavanaugh in her interview with Dokoupil, Hillary said:
“But let me ask you this: Where’s the investigation of the current incumbent, against whom numerous allegations have been made, and which he dismisses, denies, and ridicules? So, there was an investigation [of Bill], and it, as I believe, came out in the right place.”
Rejecting comparisons between the accusations against Bill and Kavanaugh, Hillary firmly positioned herself on what seems to be a moral high horse as she lamented, “It further undermined the image and integrity of the court. And that troubles me greatly, it saddens me, because our judicial system has been viewed as one of the main pillars of our constitutional government.”
Hillary’s views have been slammed by countless Americans on social media. “The View” co-host Joy Behar joined the chorus of voices flaming Hillary for her hypocrisy as she mocked, “What she just did is exactly what Republicans do, they changed the subject. And that’s why we never get anywhere in the discourse.”
