Clinton speech recalls activism in Nixon era

Defeated Democrat also assails Trump budget proposal.

Hillary Clinton delivered a subtle dig at President Donald Trump on Friday, offering some parallels between his presidency and that of late President Richard Nixon.

While delivering a commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, a private women’s liberal arts school in Massachusetts, Clinton, without naming Trump, recalled how many young people in the 1970s reacted to Nixon’s re-election and later battles with the Justice Department.

“We were furious about the past presidential election of a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace with his impeachment for obstruction of justice,” she said, pausing to note she was referring to Nixon.

Actually, Nixon was not impeached, though many in Congress, including members of his own party, called for it. Clinton said his later resignation came after he fired “the person heading the investigation into him at the Department of Justice.”

In 1973, Nixon ordered Justice Department officials to fire a special prosecutor who was looking into taped conversations recorded in the Oval Office as part of the Watergate investigation. A year later, in August 1974, Nixon resigned.

Some political observers — mostly Democrats — have compared Trump’s recent firing of FBI Director James Comey, who was overseeing an investigation of possible collusion between Russians and Trump’s campaign, to Nixon’s actions. Last week, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, called for Trump to be impeached.

Clinton, who has made few public appearances since Trump defeated her in last year’s presidential election, also assailed the Republican’s new budget proposal.

She called the budget, which proposes cuts to education and Medicaid, “an attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us — the youngest, the oldest, the poorest, and hard-working people who need a little help to gain or hang on to a decent, middle-class life.”

In a statement, the Republican National Committee said Clinton was “lashing out” after her election loss.

Clinton graduated from Wellesley in 1969 and last delivered a commencement address at the school in 1992.

AP Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers the commencement address at Wellesley College on Friday in Wellesley, Mass. Clinton is a 1969 graduate.