Clinton says she won’t contest legitimacy of election

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Tuesday clarified earlier comments she made to NPR, stating that she will not contest the legitimacy of her 2016 election defeat to President Trump.

In an interview with Mic, the former Secretary of State said that there is no constitutional recourse for such a move.

“I think no one, including me, is saying we will contest the election,” Clinton at a Mic roundtable in New York. “I’m in the very large group of people who believe that, you know, there’s no legal basis, no constitutional basis for that.”

Clinton’s remarks come just a day after she told NPR that she “wouldn’t rule it out” when asked by a host whether she was considering “questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now.”

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However, she told NPR at the time that she didn’t believe there was a legal basis for doing so.

She did emphasize in her interview with Mic that recent findings in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did raise questions about whether Russia played a deeper role in the 2016 election.

“I think depending upon what is found in those investigations, it won’t be just me, it will be millions of Americans who raise questions about the legitimacy of the election,” Clinton told Mic.

One area that Clinton wants to see investigated further is Russia’s use of American companies to influence U.S. citizens’ political beliefs. In particular, she pointed to Facebook as a company that was “taken advantage of” by Russia during the election, referencing a recent report that Facebook published thousands of political ads on its platform over the past two years linked to fake accounts based in Russia.

“I think as we’re finding out the way our own companies, particularly Facebook, have been taken advantage of by the Russians, we need to find out what other companies either were doing or had done to themselves by some kind of connection and try to, you know, prevent that from happening again,” she said.