Hillary Clinton keeps popping up on podcasts to take swings at the man who ended her political career.
Democrats swear their next majority will chase lower prices, not old scores.
And Clinton just tacked a few extra names onto the list without blinking.
Clinton Read Off the Whole Target List
Hillary Clinton sat down with Kara Swisher again recently for On with Kara Swisher, the latest stop in a string of joint appearances the pair lined up ahead of the November 3 midterms.
She opened with a dig every Democrat in Washington, DC has been itching to make.
“He’s a lame duck,” Clinton said of President Trump. “You may not know that, but he is a lame duck.”
Then she spelled out what comes next. Clinton told Swisher that Trump is “soon going to have a Democratic Congress trying to rein him in, hold him accountable, and investigate him, his administration, his family, his supporters, and allies.”
Count the categories. Trump. His administration. His family. His allies. And tucked right in the middle, his supporters.
Congress has always kept an eye on the executive branch, and nobody expects a Democrat House to send Trump’s Cabinet a fruit basket. But “his supporters” covers a whole lot of ground. More than 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2024, from the retired trucker with the sticker on his bumper to the church lady who mailed in a $25 check.
Maybe Clinton meant big donors and activist outfits, not the folks at the VFW fish fry. Maybe the word just slipped out. But she listed supporters and allies as two separate groups, and that leaves the plain meaning sitting right there on the table.
And notice how she talked about a Democrat Congress like a dinner reservation already on the books. Plenty of forecasters still doubt Democrats can flip the Senate at all.
Funny thing about lame ducks, too. Nobody usually needs a full Congress and a stack of subpoenas to rein one in.
Hillary Wrote the Book on Partisan Probes in 2015
Clinton once knew exactly what to call an investigation aimed at a political rival’s standing.
In September 2015, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) went on Fox News and bragged about the select committee investigating the Benghazi attack. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said. He went on to tell viewers, “Her numbers are dropping.”
Clinton pounced. She called the remarks “deeply distressing,” and her campaign turned McCarthy’s own words into a television ad. At the first Democrat primary debate that October, she told the audience the committee was “a partisan vehicle” that Republicans used “to drive down my poll numbers.”
The flap helped sink McCarthy’s first bid for Speaker.
So by Clinton’s own rule, a congressional probe built to damage a political figure counts as a partisan weapon. She made that case for months, on debate stages and in paid ads.
But now Clinton is the one announcing the political goal before a single hearing lands on the calendar. “Rein him in” describes a mission with the destination already picked out. The subpoenas just supply the horsepower.
At least McCarthy looked sheepish once his clip made the rounds. Clinton delivered hers into a podcast microphone like a campaign promise and moved right along.
Donald Trump Had His Shot at Payback and Took a Pass
The 2016 rematch makes the whole thing even richer.
During their October 9, 2016 debate in St Louis, Clinton told the crowd it was “awfully good” that a man with Trump’s temperament wasn’t “in charge of the law in our country.” Trump shot back, “Because you’d be in jail.”
Pundits and editorial boards treated that line like a five-alarm threat to the republic.
Then Trump won. And on November 22, 2016, the President-elect sat down with reporters and editors at the New York Times and said, “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t.”
He also warned that prosecuting them would be “very, very divisive” for the country.
The Times later reported that Trump privately talked about having the Justice Department go after Clinton during his first term, and his own White House lawyer talked him out of it. No charges. No trial. No perp walk. Clinton spent those years selling a bestselling memoir about losing and soaking up applause on a speaking tour.
So the man Democrats warned would jail his enemies left the Clintons alone. The woman who lectured him about temperament now hands out investigation assignments on a podcast.
Arctic Frost Showed Where “Supporters” Leads
Anybody who thinks investigating Trump supporters amounts to a harmless figure of speech hasn’t been watching closely.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith to run the classified documents and January 6 investigations. Smith built his elector case on top of the FBI’s Arctic Frost probe and rushed constitutionally dubious charges in an effort to force Trump into show trials in heavily Democrat Washington, DC before the 2024 election.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) later released whistleblower records showing that Arctic Frost pulled 92 Republican groups and individuals into its scope. The list included the Republican National Committee, the Republican Attorneys General Association, and Turning Point USA, the group Charlie Kirk built before an assassin murdered him at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.
“Arctic Frost wasn’t just a case to politically investigate Trump,” Grassley said.
Grassley’s office also revealed that the FBI collected phone toll records from eight Republican senators and one House member.
None of that should surprise anyone who knows Smith’s record. He ran the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section when prosecutors went after former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, and the Supreme Court threw out that conviction unanimously in 2016.
That’s what going after supporters looks like once real power gets involved. Bank records. Senators’ phone logs. A conservative youth group on a federal target list.
A House committee can’t lock anybody up, of course. But it can haul a small donor in front of the cameras, subpoena a volunteer group’s bank statements, and force ordinary people to hire lawyers they can’t afford. The process punishes plenty of folks who never see the inside of a courtroom.
And Clinton just told the whole country, in plain English, that the next Democrat majority plans to cast that net wide.
In November 2016, Donald Trump told the New York Times he didn’t want to hurt the Clintons. Hillary Clinton just put Trump’s family and supporters on her list.
Sources:
RealClearPolitics, “Hillary Clinton: A Democratic Congress Will Investigate Trump, ‘His Family, His Supporters, And Allies,’” October 28, 2026
NPR, debate transcript excerpt, October 2016
Lawfare, “National Security Highlights of the Second Presidential Debate,” October 2016
Mediaite, “‘I Don’t Want to Hurt’ Them: Trump Expands On Reversed Decision to Not Prosecute Clinton,” November 22, 2016
Fox News, “Trump will not pursue charges against Clinton, aide says,” November 22, 2016
The Globe and Mail / New York Times, “President Trump tried to order Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton,” November 2018
Associated Press via Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “Infected emails in Clinton trove,” October 1, 2015
Associated Press via WSLS, “Another GOP congressman says Benghazi panel meant to hurt Clinton,” October 15, 2015
Associated Press via The Himalayan Times, “Clinton ad seizes on McCarthy’s Benghazi comments,” October 2015
Senate Judiciary Committee, “Grassley Joins America Reports to Discuss his Oversight of the Arctic Frost Investigation,” September 2025
KX News, “Cramer & Hoeven comments: FBI Arctic Frost probe,” October 9, 2025
The Gazette, “Biden-era FBI targeted 92 conservative groups and figures, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point,” 2025