Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) told Fox News on Thursday that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is taking her “life away” with her “Russian asset” remark.
“This is my life that we’re talking about here,” Gabbard said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“For me as a soldier, as every service member does, I took an oath of loyalty to our country — the country that I love, willing to put my life on the line for our country — deploying twice to the Middle East to do so,” said Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
“So when you have someone as powerful as Hillary Clinton seeking to smear my reputation and essentially implying that I’m a traitor to the country that I love, what she essentially is doing is taking my life away,” she added.
Gabbard announced this week she was suing Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, for $50 million in damages after Clinton said on a podcast that Gabbard was “a favorite of the Russians” and was “totally” a “Russian asset.”
Gabbard also explained how she came to the $50 million number she is seeking in an interview with reporters on the campaign trail. Footage of the moment was posted to Twitter by NBC News.
“It should have been for $50 billion. What is your life worth to you? What is your honor and loyalty, your identity worth to you?” the congresswoman asked, rhetorically. “What she has done has very directly attacked who I am as a person” she continued.
The lawsuit says Clinton has not apologized or retracted her comments, which it characterized as “devastating to a United States politician’s reputation.”
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill has called the lawsuit “ridiculous.”
In a podcast released in October, Clinton said Republicans were “grooming” a Democratic presidential candidate for a third-party bid. She also referred to Gabbard, without mentioning her by name, as a favorite of the Russians.
“They’re also going to do third-party. I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said.
“She’s the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset, I mean totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate,” Clinton said.
Stein was the Green Party candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Stein said the idea that she was a Russian asset is an “unhinged conspiracy theory” in an October op-ed for The Guardian.