Hillary Clinton took a jab at both Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo over their phone call with the Ukraine’s president, during which Trump asked Volodymyr Zelensky to ‘look into’ his political rival, Joe Biden, and the former vice president’s son.
When it comes to foreign officials, Hillary Clinton, 71, considers her and Barack Obama’s phone etiquette to be slightly different — okay, a lot different — than Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo’s. Hours after it was reported that Pompeo was on the July 25 phone call with Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, per the Wall Street Journal, Hillary made sure to shade the POTUS and his secretary of state (Hillary’s former job title) while appearing on the Sept. 30 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “How many times when you were secretary of state did you have to say to Barack Obama: ‘You can’t extort foreign countries’?” Stephen Colbert cheekily asked Hillary, who was visiting the show alongside her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, 39. “Yeah…that never happened,” Hillary simply replied. Boom!
During the phone call in question, Trump requested Ukraine’s president to investigate his rival in the upcoming 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden, and the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden. “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me,” Trump said on the call, according to a transcript released by The White House, published by The New York Times. About a week before the phone call, Trump reportedly ordered his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to delay nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine!
Congress has since launched a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump on Sept. 24, which Hillary was all for while speaking on Monday night’s episode of The Late Show. She continued to shade Trump’s phone call, and even dissed Pompeo! Speaking from experience, Hillary said that the secretary of state’s No. 1 job is to know “what the president is going to say on those calls,” and questioned if the Trump administration has “given up” on trying to prepare the POTUS for these talks since she believes he “doesn’t listen to anybody and doesn’t follow instructions.”
Taking direct aim at Pompeo, Hillary then added, “If the Secretary of State was on the call, as is now being reported, he should have been one of the very first people to just say, ‘Wait a minute, we gotta clean this up; we can’t let that stand.’ But we don’t know what he did.” You can watch the rest of the interview in the clip above! Hillary had stopped by The Late Show to promote her and Chelsea’s co-authored project, The Book of Gutsy Women, which covers the historical impact of iconic women and was released on Oct. 1.