Hillary Clinton on Sunday offered a bleak assessment of President Trump's relations with Vladimir Putin, saying the American leader is getting "played" by the Russian president on a range of issues.
Appearing with former President Bill Clinton at a Las Vegas casino theater in the finale of the couple's months-long paid speaking tour, Hillary Clinton said Putin's KGB background allowed him to mentally size up — and manipulate — Trump over the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 campaign, nuclear talks with North Korea and a range of other issues.
"I don't understand exactly the pull out Putin has over him," said Clinton, who served as secretary of state in President Barack Obama's first term, after eight years as a senator from New York. "A lot of these tough guys on the international scene expect you to push back. Right now, we are ceding so much territory to him."
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Hillary Clinton, 71, has time to deliver paid speeches after losing the 2016 presidential race to Trump, a businessman and celebrity who had never before held public office. She's a frequent Twitter and verbal target of Trump. He's repeatedly taunted her for coming up short in a race virtually all the punditry corp and analysts expected her to walk away with.
Her barbs against Trump in Las Vegas were actually a notch milder than her appearance Saturday night with Bill Clinton in Los Angeles, Calif. At that event Hillary Clinton said she is advising candidates about what it is like to have an election "stolen."
"You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you," Clinton said at the L.A. event. Clinton's 2016 campaign was targeted by Russian interference efforts, which included stolen emails from her campaign chairman that were leaked to the public, and a social media disinformation effort.
Read also: 'Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated' - Hillary Clinton
On Sunday night the Park MGM hotel theater, which hosted their Las Vegas appearance, appeared about 70 percent filled. Tickets that had been advertised for hundreds of dollars were, shortly before show time, slashed to the low double digits. Most of the Clintons' appearances have pulled in less-than-capacity audiences. Their opening night, in Toronto last fall, filled only about half of available seats.
