Hillary Clinton Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria at the 2019 Women in the World Summit

I'm here fighting for women's rights and for women's equality. It is not about the leader, the power of our democracy is in us. Any little girl who's who's practicing their speech on the telly you never know. We have our voices and we are not going anywhere. A better future is within our grasp and together we are going to make it happen. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Hi. Welcome Hillary Clinton. So happy to be here. Pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Today, April 12th, four years ago, you announced for the presidency of the United States. I did. If there's one piece of advice you have for the 18 Democrats who are trying to do what you did about running against Donald Trump, what would it be? Wow. Okay. I am absolutely delighted to see this incredibly diverse field and especially to have more than one woman running for president of the United States is exciting. But I think you really have to do two things simultaneously and it's it's challenging. You do have to present what you want to do. What is your vision? What is your hope for our country? How do you see the future? What are you going to propose that will make a difference in the lives of Americans and maintain the values, the ideals of America in a very complex world? So you bear that responsibility. At the same time, you have to be able to counter and ignore where possible, respond where necessary to the diversion and distraction that we see, unfortunately, working by the current incumbent in the White House. And so you have to do that balancing act. And I think that we have excellent candidates who are demonstrating their ability to do that. But, you know, really, Fareed, what it comes down to, because, yes, I kicked off my campaign four years ago today and I think about what an amazing experience it was traveling the country, talking with people, listening to people, making the case for the kind of America that I want for my children and grandchildren. But I also think about what I said at the very end of that campaign when I addressed all the little girls and told them to keep dreaming and told them to, you know, be powerful, be ready to take on risks, be brave. Because it comes down to not just the candidate. It comes down to all of us. Our country, our democracy, they need all of us. They need all of you. And so while the candidates are doing the best job they can, I hope that people, voters, citizens, are thinking about what they can do to make sure that, you know, we live up to our best selves and that we elect someone who will reflect our positive self and not our negative and will not appeal to the lowest common denominator but try to lift us up and move us with confidence and optimism into the future. So one of those candidates running, Pete Buttigieg, just gave an interview to the Washington Post where he said Hillary Clinton went around telling the country America is great already. And the implication was, I think, Trump was able to appeal to people's anxieties, their fears, that they sensed that things were going wrong, that the America that they loved was changing, and that you appealed too much to the hope that, in fact, a Democrat needs to understand that people are feeling pain, they're feeling that there are problems, and those problems need to be addressed in some way. Do you think that's a reasonable critique? Well, I don't want to comment on any of the candidates because, like I say, I think that they all have a lot to contribute, not only to the Democratic Party but to the country, and it'll be up to voters to decide who our nominee is. But I would say this, I really do believe that we always have to appeal to our better selves because the wolf is at the door, my friends. Negativity, despair, anxiety, resentment, anger, prejudice, that's part of human nature. And the job of a leader is to appeal to us to be more than we could be on our own, to join hands in common effort. And I absolutely, though, agree with the thrust of your question because the campaign that was run in 2016 was dark. It was negative. It did provide a long list of scapegoats. So if you did have problems in your life, if you were feeling left behind and left out, there were answers as to why that was happening that the other candidate, the opposing party, was going to offer to you. So I am well aware of the power of that, and I think you wrote an article recently about the power of appeals to nationalism and how we see that not just in our country but elsewhere in the world. I just believe that it is important to say where there are legitimate concerns, and I address that. I mean, I did put out what I would do to bring jobs to places that were left out, to deal with inequality in our economy, to try to make sure everybody had quality, affordable health care. That's what I've been standing for, fighting for, working for my entire public life. So I was well aware that we had problems that we have to solve, but it's been my experience that anger, resentment, prejudice are not strategies. They stop people from thinking. They don't enlist people in the common effort to try to find solutions. So I believe that we have to start where people are, and the country is very divided, and there are a lot of really positive, optimistic people and events happening, and then there are people who absolutely feel left out, unheard, dismissed, marginalized. But what we've got to try to do is appeal to everybody, and I still believe that we will do better as a country in recognizing honestly our problems but appealing to our common sense and our common hopes to try to deal with those problems, and that's what, you know, that's what I believed in, that's what I ran on, and that's what I think is best for the country. Bernie Sanders has just put out a Medicare for All plan. Four of the Democrats running have already co-sponsored the bill. You thought about this a lot. Estimates are it will cost two to three trillion dollars in additional tax revenues every year. Do you think it's a good idea? Well, look, I think setting goals are always a good idea because you want to be measured by the goals that you set, and getting to universal health care that includes every single American that provides the benefits that everybody needs throughout the has been my goal for more than 25 years. I've worked on it. I have the scars to show for it, so I am all in favor of setting that goal. The specifics, though, matter, and it really does matter how people are going to feel when you say to them, I think we can get to universal health care. Here's how we're going to do it, and here's what will happen to you and your situation. Right now, we know we have Medicare, which is a godsend for older Americans. It doesn't provide all of the benefits, obviously, for people younger than Medicare recipients, obviously. It doesn't have pediatric benefits. It doesn't have OBGYN benefits or obstetrical benefits, but it does provide a really solid base. People supplement their Medicare with additional privately purchased policies, so we've got Medicare, which is already a mixed system, public and private. We have Medicaid, which is only a public system. We have the VA system, which is predominantly a public system. We have employer-sponsored health care, so we have a mix, and I want to set the goal, which is what I did every time I talked about health care, but I think that we've got to be very honest with the American people about what it will cost and what you will get and how we make the transition. I have been a longtime supporter of a public option for Medicare. In other words, you begin to drop the age and you begin to allow people to buy into Medicare, starting at 60, going down to 55, but right now, I would say our biggest challenge is to protect the Affordable Care Act from the constant efforts by the Republicans to end it. You've got to be able to talk about all of this at one time. Look, I know it's easier to talk about just one thing over and over again, but I think the Affordable Care Act needs all of our support right now, and remember, the Affordable Care Act covers a lot of people who are not only on the exchanges. If you're a young person, you can stay on your family's policy until you're in your mid-20s. If you are a person with a pre-existing condition, you can obviously not be stopped from getting health insurance, and look at what Trump has tried to do. First, he tried to get rid of it, which thankfully he was stopped, and I will be forever grateful to John McCain for casting that vote, and so he got stopped in the Congress, and now his Justice Department is not defending the Affordable Care Act, which is usually what the Justice Department does for federal laws, and there are judges. There's already been one who has said, no, it's unconstitutional, so if that court decision goes forward, it will be back in the Supreme Court, and who knows what will happen there, and there is no replacement, so in many ways, this 2020 election could be about health care. It could be about the efforts to end and deny people with pre-existing conditions, rip away health care from young people on their parents' policy, begin the process of going back to where we were, where we had a very high number of people who were not eligible for Medicare, not eligible for Medicaid, and did not have employer-sponsored health care, and if we're back in that position, then I think that Democrats have to come forward with a very positive plan that they can explain that people will feel like is really going to help them, and that's what I would expect to see happen. But in a way, there are two possibilities. One is that the Democrats make supporting and defending the Affordable Care Act the centerpiece, as you were suggesting. The other is that they go for Medicare for all, which Trump has already characterized as socialism, and so what I'm wondering is, do you worry that the Democratic Party may be moving too far left on some of these issues and can be easily portrayed in a way that will not be helpful politically? Well, I hope not, because what I would like to see Democrats do is both. Defend the Affordable Care Act. People need it right now. I was so touched by the countless numbers of people I met and the stories they told about what it meant to them and how critically important it was to their family to get health care that they could actually count on and afford. So yes, you have to defend the Affordable Care Act. You have to defend it in court, in the Congress, but at the same time, set that big goal, because look, if we were starting over and we didn't have this very convoluted system, we would all try to come up with an approach that would deliver quality, affordable health care. Now, I personally have been impressed by countries that have a mixed system, and by that I mean the government takes the primary responsibility, but you still have the capacity to buy additional coverage, that you have the capacity to cover certain kinds of procedures and benefits that you and your family need. That works really well in Germany, Australia, many other places. So this deserves a full debate. So I'm all for people staking out their position. I would like to see us have a Democratic Congress, both House and Senate, and a Democratic president who would be working through all the details, because that's where the rubber hits the road. What are the details? How do we pay for it? What does it cover? Who is going to get what they need? Does it mean that you can't have a transition period? There are a lot of complicated questions, and that's what President Obama did when the Affordable Care Act emerged, because he did have a Democratic Congress, but even then, there were a lot of tough questions asked. It's what I tried to do back in 93 and 94, and we laid a lot of the predicates out there for people to have to say, okay, if we're going to do this, we can't deny people on pre-existing conditions and so much more. That's what we should be doing in our country. We shouldn't be lobbying insults and attacks at one another. We should be recognizing that we can solve problems if we actually work together, and if we look at the evidence. I'm tired of people living in fact-free zones, making up stuff that has no relation to reality. When you look at the crisis in immigration, and there is a crisis in terms of all these asylum seekers coming, is President Trump right in saying essentially, look, you can't take everyone in. We have to be tough on this issue. Otherwise, we will get overwhelmed, and again, is there a danger that the Democrats cede the issue to him? I'd read to you what David Brooks wrote in the New York Times about this issue. He says Democrats aren't having a primary campaign. They are having a purity test, the idea being that everyone has to demonstrate, particularly on immigration, how pure they are, which again might cede the field to Donald Trump, who can say, look, I'm the only guy who's willing to actually enforce the law. Well, if that were true, but it's not. Here's why. If you really were serious about dealing with immigration, which I am and believe we must, we do not and cannot have open borders. That is not in anybody's interest, but we also can't demagogue the issue and expect to solve the problem. For people who want to deny there's a problem, or people who don't want to solve the problem but want to use it as a political issue, they're both, in my view, failing. And so here's what we should be doing and we could be doing if the president wanted to solve the problem as opposed to keep beating it as a political drum to try to rally his supporters. What is asylum? Asylum is a request by a person who, under our law, has the right to come and say, there are reasons why I cannot stay in my home country. I am seeking asylum. Now, how do you resolve asylum cases? You resolve them by eventually having somebody appear before an immigration judge to have their case heard. Now, if you really wanted to solve this problem, you would double, you would quadruple the number of immigration judges, you would hire more people, you would send them to the border, you would begin to organize a system so that people could be quickly processed in a legal and humane way, you would not be separating families and putting babies in cages. You know, we're really good about doing things if we decide we want to do them. You would have enough decent, humane housing, you would have people who were in a system. One of the worst things this administration has done is to separate those children and have no system that actually would tell you where they are. I mean, I would go to the big tech companies and I would say, okay, you've got, you know, 15 days, give me a system so that I can keep track of everybody. I'm not going to lose anyone, no baby, no older person, everybody is going to be in the system and we're going to have enough judges down there, we're going to have decent housing conditions and we're going to start hearing those cases. That is what someone who wanted to solve the problem would be doing as opposed to either denying it or politicizing it, and that's what I hope eventually will be done. Do you believe William Barr's summary of the Mueller report? Well, how can we? I mean, how can we? We deserve to see the Mueller report and if there is material that for whatever reason should not be shared publicly, it should be shared with the Congress. You know, I do have a life that you cannot make up, and one of the things that I did as a very young lawyer was work on the impeachment staff of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 investigating Richard Nixon. So I know what can be made available, what the court has to be asked to permit to be made available. I know what the Republicans did when they were in charge of the Congress in demanding information from the Justice Department that had never been offered before, very sensitive information. It was all turned over to the Republican Congress. So we're in this bit of a twilight zone, aren't we? There's a report that, depending upon which figure you believe, is somewhere between maybe 300-400 pages long, and it is not being delivered to the Congress, which has an absolute right to see it. It is not being presented to the public. So I think that what we saw in Congress with the Attorney General's presentation in both the House and the Senate is someone who considers his principal duty to be protecting Donald Trump, not protecting the rule of law and the democracy that the Justice Department should be defending. And I remember when Nixon was really upset because there was an investigation going on, and he fired people who would not do his bidding until he finally ended up with somebody who would do his bidding. But it didn't save him because the information that had been collected was made available to the Congress, to the courts, and eventually to the public. So I would hope that the law is followed, that the information is provided, that the American public and the press has a chance to go through these 300-400 pages with as few redactions or cross-outs as possible. And I think the Congress has to take a very hard look at what their remedies are if they are not given that information. And they do have remedies to go to court and the like, but it should not be necessary. This information should be provided. You know, as someone who has been in the eye of the storm all of these years, I think that everybody deserves their chance to tell their story. I believe in facts and evidence and law. But this was an investigation that had a serious purpose to determine what role the Russians played in our election, to try to understand the kind of bizarre connections between Russians and members of the Trump campaign and people close to Trump. These are really important questions. And it's not just because we should, for historic purposes, really find out what did happen. It's because we need to be prepared to prevent from whatever happened in the past happening again that would influence wrongly our election. Julian Assange is in the news. Some might say a kind of nemesis of yours. Do you think that he is going to bear the consequences of the WikiLeaks dump relating to Chelsea Manning and all that information about the U.S. government? Should he also face the consequences of the WikiLeaks dump that hacked into your DNC emails, which had such a negative impact on your campaign? Well, let me tell you what I know, because I don't want to speculate. What I know is that he's been indicted, not for disclosing the information, but for conspiring to hack into a military computer by helping Chelsea Manning break the password so that information could be then delivered to WikiLeaks and then disclosed. Now, I do have a personal connection to this, because this happened in 2010 when I was Secretary of State. So there was a great deal of military information. There was also a great deal of State Department diplomatic information, because part of the reason you have an ambassador in a country is to pick up information and report it back to the State Department. So there were memos and what were called cables that were very honest, very candid, describing leaders and saying, you know, we heard this and we met about that. And it was useful information, because if you're trying to figure out how to deal with a country, you want to have that material. So when all of this was exposed, we had to scramble like crazy, because in that trove of material, there were names of people, people who had helped our embassy or our military in Afghanistan or Iraq, human rights activists, people who had been prisoners of conscience, who were trying to convince the United States, meeting with our embassy personnel to help them. So there were names of people. I had to make the decision to try to remove people, get them out of danger, create identities for them to make sure they weren't going to be hurt. So I take it seriously. What about the DNC hack? He hasn't been indicted for that. Should he be? I don't know. As Secretary of State, you met many, many world leaders. One of them whom you met often was Benjamin Netanyahu. Do you think that the administration's strategy toward Israel, which seems to be to largely accommodate Prime Minister Netanyahu, give him what he wants, recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the move of the embassy, in the hope that this will produce a deal between the Palestinians and the Israelis? Does that strike you as realistic, given what you know about Bibi Netanyahu? I don't know. We'll find out if there is such a deal ever presented, which it hasn't been yet. But I worked closely with him, and I had a very positive working relationship. And I also was honest with him. He was honest with me. I didn't think it was useful to pander. I thought it was better to provide our best assessment. I worked with him to end a Hamas attack on Israel back in November of 2012. It was really complicated. I had to go to Jerusalem, meet with him. I had to go to Ramallah, meet with Abbas and the Palestinians, go back to Jerusalem, go to Cairo, meet with the then Muslim Brotherhood president. So I've had a lot of hands-on, first-person experience with him. He's very smart. He's very determined. Whether the kinds of actions that this administration has taken will in any way move toward a two-state solution, I think, is an open question. And I worry that toward the end of the election, Bibi was talking about annexing all the settlements, which you would start from a very difficult position, trying to reach some kind of resolution. I am a very strong supporter of Israel's security, of Israel's democracy, but I also believe that Palestinian people deserve to have more support, more autonomy, more efforts to practice self-government. How we get there, and I watched my husband make an offer to the Palestinians on behalf of the Ehud Barak Israeli government that if they had accepted it, they would have had a state now for more than 15 years, but they didn't. I watched my time in the Senate, and then as Secretary of State, with all the efforts that were undertaken, not only by the United States to be an honest broker, but by other countries, by the UN, and none of it has been resolved. So we'll see. He's obviously been re-elected. He gets to govern for probably another five or so years. So let's see if there is any kind of movement, because everyone who cares about Israel knows that in the absence of some resolution, you know, the demography is changing, and the Palestinian population is increasing far faster than the Israeli population. So how do you reconcile that? And that's going to be a real test of leadership, and I hope that everybody's ready for it. President Trump says, in dealing with Saudi Arabia, that you cannot do much more than they have done in pushing on any kind of consequences for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, because Saudi Arabia is, at the end of the day, the central banker of the world's oil. I think, as Donald Trump says, if you push Saudi Arabia too hard, oil will go to $150 a barrel. We'll have a recession. What would you have done, what would you do if you were at the State Department today in response to the Khashoggi murder? Well, today it's unfortunately kind of late, isn't it? So if it had been in the immediate aftermath of this brutal murder, which I don't think anyone doubts had to be ordered from the highest levels of the Saudi government, there should have been a much stronger response by the United States. We cannot single-handedly in any way reach in and change the Saudi government. That's beyond our power to do so. But you can certainly set standards, and the United States historically has been the guarantor of human rights and of the hope that the countries of the world will not revert to crass behavior, including the murder of political opponents or journalists. We stand up against Russia when they do it, Iran when they do it, China when they do it, and we should have been much more vocal in standing up against the Saudis. They finally got around to using sanctions against some of the principal identified personnel. But you know, even if you're dealing with a country, and I dealt with countries that commit gross human rights abuses, I negotiated with leaders who were really difficult to sit across from because you knew what their behaviors were. But at the end of the day, the United States has to stand for something besides barbarism. We have to stand for a society that is constantly trying to, you know, create the institutions that will support a rule of law, that will support human rights, that will, you know, give us the position of leadership in the world to speak out and speak out forcefully. When we retreat from that, and we basically say we're not going to interfere for whatever the excuse is, I mean, right now the United States has actually surpassed Saudi Arabia in the production of oil and gas, and we don't need the Saudis like we did before. But we want to continue to work with them, but not on any terms. There has to be some, at least rhetorical, if not actionable steps taken. And I just think that when you retreat from that, when you surrender that, you surrender a lot of our power. You know, we do have the biggest economy, still. We do have the largest military, still. Those are important. But what we stand for has always been more important. People have followed us. People have not wanted to get on the wrong side of us because of what we represent. And when you walk away from that, when you make fun of it, when you deride it, we lose power. This is not just a nice thing to do. This is leverage. This is how we try to create a world of laws, not of strong men, and we try to enforce those views of how the world should work. And the current administration has an affinity toward dictators. They have an affinity toward knocking out all of the institutions that have been built up to restrain nations. I mean, when you blow the top off and say that you are supporting autocrats, dictators, nationalists, you are forgetting the lessons of the 20th century. We fought the bloodiest war in human history twice. We dealt with gulags. We dealt with concentration camps. We dealt with the worst that people are capable of doing. Why did we set up institutions like NATO or the EU? Why did we pass something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Because we wanted to contain those impulses. We wanted people to be held accountable. So when you walk away from that, whether it's in Saudi Arabia or Russia or anywhere else, you are contributing to the unleashing of those very basic primal instincts. We didn't change human nature by creating this institutional framework, but we contained it, and we set standards for it, and we were able to win a cold war because people never gave up on freedom and the hope that they would have a better future. When we recede from that, we recede from America, and we recede from America's power and influence in the world, and that is a dreadful mistake. Technically, our time is up, but I'm going to ask you one more question, because it relates to this extraordinary summit that Tina Brown has put together. Tina Brown, in an op-ed in the New York Times, said, women lead differently than men, that they have different qualities, different characters. Do you think that's true? Do you think that the world would be different if it were led by women? Of course! I don't just say that. I believe it. It's not that every woman would govern differently. We know that, but let's just take the example of the horrific terrorist attack in New Zealand and the response of the Prime Minister, right? And I had a chance to meet with her about a year ago while she was very pregnant, and we talked about all kinds of things, but we talked about, you know, having a baby when you're in a public position and how you balance all of that, the things we talk about with our friends, or in my case with my daughter and her friends now, and she showed the heart not only of a leader, but of a mother, and her reaching out to the Muslim community in New Zealand sent a message about how leaders should behave in the face of horrific violence conducted for ideological reasons, and I think that that was as strong a signal as we could get that, given the chance, many women will govern and lead differently. I want to just end with this story. I just had dinner the other night with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman elected president in Africa. She was elected twice to be president in Liberia, a country that survived barely a terrible civil war. How did that civil war end? It ended because leaders like Ellen and others enlisted the women of Liberia, the market women, Christian and Muslim alike, to make it clear they were not going to put up with the war anymore. There was a conference that was called to try to end the civil war that was being held in Ghana. No women were involved, no women were invited, and so those women, those market women and their leaders made their way to Ghana where they camped out around the building where the negotiators were meeting, and they would not let the men out until they had ended the civil war. And there is lots of evidence that, including women in the economy, in politics, in conflict resolution, leads to better, more sustainable outcomes. And if you're interested in what happened in Liberia, where women truly made the difference, there's a great movie about it called Pray the Devil Back to Hell. And there are other examples like that around the world. And all of you who are here and this wonderful conference that Tina conceived and now has put on for 10 years, gives us this moment in time to listen to people, but also to ask ourselves, what can I do? You may never run for office, you may never be appointed to some big position somewhere, but there's something everybody can do. Speaking out, speaking up, supporting organizations, nonprofits and others, supporting candidates who you believe in who can make a difference. So, yes, I think that we saw this in the midterm election when all those women were elected to the House of Representatives. And maybe most importantly, they're led by one effective tough woman, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. So, yes, it makes a big difference. Hillary Clinton, pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much, Farid. Thank you all. Hi. I'm coming out. I'm coming out. Thank you, Hillary. That was absolutely fabulous. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Okay. So, I just cannot thank you enough, Hillary, again, for bringing your passion, your expertise, your incredible intellect. It's both invigorating, thrilling, and I've got to say, enraging that we don't have you where you should be, but I can't thank you enough. And thank you, Farid, too. You have all the same adjectives, but you're used to hearing them. And I wanted to thank everyone for coming to this incredible 10th anniversary event. We began by asking, can women save the world? So, I just want to hear from all of you, what is the answer? Okay. Women rock the cradle, but they also rock the world. We're on fire, girls, ladies, all of us, and we're going to take it from here and go do exactly what Hillary said, which is to come up with our own way of responding, and we're going to think about what that is and go forth and multiply. So, thank you all so much for coming. It's been incredible. Thank you to my wonderful team. Thank you again, Hillary.