Clinton: There are ‘lots of questions’ about legitimacy of Trump’s election

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton says there are still a number of questions surrounding the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election due to Russian interference in the race.

“I think there are lots of questions about [the election’s] legitimacy and we don’t have a method for contesting that in our system. That’s why I’ve long advocated for an independent commission to get to the bottom of what happened,” Clinton told Mother Jones in an interview published Friday.

“This is the first time we’ve ever been attacked by a foreign adversary, and then they suffer no real consequences, and so I’m worried that we’re not learning all of the lessons,” she continued. “The forces at work outside of my campaign are not going away. Somebody else is going to be running for Congress or governor or eventually president. We’ve got to know how to protect ourselves.”

“I think as we learn more about it, we know that the web of connections between people on Trump’s team and Russian representatives just gets more dense,” she added. 

Clinton’s comments come as federal and congressional probes into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s election meddling make headway. 

The probes have focused on the roles played by social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to spread false information on the internet aimed at misinforming voters. 

Special counsel Robert Mueller announced last month that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business associate Richard Gates had been indicted on charges of conspiracy against the United States, tax fraud and money laundering. 

Mueller also announced that former Trump campaign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials during the campaign. 

Papadopoulos offered to set up a meeting between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the campaign, which goes against Trump’s and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s original claims that they had never discussed meetings with Russian officials.