A day after a heated exchange with protesters, Former President Bill Clinton is offering a near-apology for his behavior at a campaign event for his wife, Hillary Clinton.
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Hillary Clinton refused to reveal what exactly she said to her husband after he shouted down Black Lives Protesters at a rally Thursday in Philadelphia. “Maybe you thought they were good citizens, [Hillary] didn’t”.
“You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter”, he told a protester.
But in Philadelphia last week, faced with such signs as “Hillary is a murderer”, Bill Clinton angrily defended his wife’s 20-year-old characterization.
While Clinton’s reforms did offer “truth-in-sentencing” incentives that offered billions of dollars to states to adopt harsh parole provisions for violent offenders, only four states said the TIS grant was a key factor in their decision to enact tougher sentencing laws, according to a report from the US General Accounting Office.
MSNBC host Al Sharpton stated that “the way that President Clinton responded, in terms of his kind of reprimand and lecturing”, of Black Lives Matter protesters, “was inappropriate” on Monday’s “The Place for Politics 2016” on MSNBC. “I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t because I engaged in some when I was a kid but I never thought I should drown anyone else out”, Mr Clinton said of his exchange with the protesters.
“I realized I was talking past her the way she was talking past me”, Clinton said of one of the female protesters.
Earlier in Philadelphia, Sanders, a US senator from Vermont, doubled down on his criticism that Clinton is unqualified to be president as the two campaigns became increasingly testy less than two weeks before New York’s election contest.
“I can tell you this”, Clinton said. And added that while he was asking the protestors to listen to him, he wasn’t listening to them either, and said, “We gotta stop that in this country”.
The former president did not apologize for his remarks yesterday but admitted that some outcomes of the 1994 bill “cannot be justified”. The former president was defending his 1994 crime bill, which opponents argue increased mass incarceration and put an unfairly high numbers of black Americans in prison for nonviolent offenses.
So could bill cause problems for Hillary Clinton and her race for the white house?
In the past, Bill Clinton has also suggested his crime bill went too far, but on Thursday he defended it aggressively after being periodically interrupted in Pennsylvania, which holds a primary later this month.
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Erica Mines, the other protester, said she is still “processing” the whole situation.
