Hillary Clinton warned Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will try to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election.
“I fear that the Russians have proved themselves to be quite adept at interfering, and if he has a chance, he’ll do it again,” the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee said on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
Clinton said the U.S. does not talk about Russian interference in the nation’s elections enough, claiming Putin has “a lot of apologists and enablers in our own country.”
She said some Americans do not see the “danger” of Putin, while cautioning some even agree with him on certain issues, such as the invasion of Ukraine. Clinton warned that fascism and authoritarianism may be growing in the U.S. and urged voters to “reject” that kind of thinking.
“And part of the challenge is to continue to explain to the American public that you know, the kind of leader Putin is, this authoritarian dictator who literally kills his opposition, kills journalists, poisons people who disagree with him, invades other country, interferes with our election,” she said.
“That is part of the alternative we have to reject in this election,” she continued. “We have to reject authoritarianism. We have to reject a kind of creeping fascism almost, of people who are really ready to turn over their thinking, their votes to wannabe dictators, and we can’t allow that to proceed.”
The intelligence community found that Russia’s interference in the 2020 election was intended to harm Clinton as the Democratic nominee and that it preferred the election of Republican Donald Trump. The Senate Intelligence Committee later reaffirmed those findings.
Clinton said the reason Putin worked so hard against her campaign was because “he didn’t think that he wanted me in the White House.”