WASHINGTON — (CNN) Bill Clinton on Thursday passed up an opportunity to hit back at Donald Trump over the billionaire businessman’s recent attacks on the former president’s past infidelities and suggestions they could harm his wife’s campaign.
“I have no interest in getting involved in (Republican Party) politics or doing anything except working to help Hillary,” Clinton told reporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“Donald Trump says a lot of things,” he added, dismissing the increasingly sharp rhetoric.
Earlier in the day, Trump posted a new video to Instagram casting himself as the “true defender of women’s rights” as a montage of images showing Bill Clinton with Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton at Bill Cosby’s side flash across the screen.
The only voice in the clip belongs to Hillary Clinton, who declares, “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights,” a now famous phrase the then-first lady used in 1995, in Beijing during an address to the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women.
A newspaper headline heralding her husband’s infidelity appears under her words.
Clinton also appears next to Cosby as he addresses a campaign rally during her 2000 run for Senate in New York. The comedian, now at the center of dozens of sexual assault allegations going back nearly 50 years, endorsed her Senate candidacy at the time.
Unmentioned here: Trump in early 2015 came under fire for describing Cosby as “tremendous” and a “gentleman” during an episode of “Celebrity Apprentice.” He responded on Twitter, saying the scene was “taped just before the terrible Bill Cosby revelations came to light.”
The video also takes aim at former Congressman Anthony Weiner, who resigned in 2011 after being caught sending sexually explicit online messages and photos to multiple women. Weiner is married to Clinton’s close aide, Huma Abedin.
In an attempt to undermine her appeal to women voters, Trump has repeatedly sought to tie Hillary Clinton to the sexual scandals that clouded parts of her husband’s administration.
Some old polls show he could be playing to into his rival’s hands. Bill Clinton’s highest ever favorability rating as president came in December 1998, according to Gallup, just after the House impeached him.
Despite concern from some in GOP circles, Trump has repeatedly said the scandals are “fair game.”
During a December 30 rally in South Carolina he called the former President “one of the world’s great abusers of the world” and recently tweeted that “Hillary abused those women.”
The Clinton campaign has mostly ignored Trump’s broadsides, but in a late December statement spokeswoman Christina Reynolds called his language “demeaning” and said “Clinton won’t be bullied or distracted” by his attacks.
The candidate passed up the opportunity to comment herself when asked by CNN after a December 29 event in New Hampshire.
The-CNN-Wire ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
(Photo: CNN)
