A ten-year-old audio has been leaked exposing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton saying that the US should have manipulated Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 to prevent a Hamas victory. Clinton lamented the fact that the US didn’t “determine who was going to win.”
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,”
then-New York Senator Clinton told the Jewish Press, a New York-based weekly newspaper, several months after the January election.
The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room.
Speaking to the Jewish Press about the 25 January, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the US-preferred Fatah (45 seats). She said:
“And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”