Hillary Clinton may not be president, but that hasn't dampened her political ambitions.
Clinton said she's not leaving the political arena anytime soon, and calls for her to do so are little more than "rank sexism."
The former presidential candidate also said of Sean Hannity accidentally referring to her as "President Clinton": "I'm still ready."
She appeared Wednesday on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, where host Trevor Noah asked, “Looking at the Democratic Party now, looking at Hillary Clinton, one thing far too many people say— and I have my own opinions on this— is why won’t you just go away?”
Clinton replied: "You know, some of it is just rank sexism. Let’s just be honest about it. I never heard anybody say that to Al Gore or John Kerry or John McCain or Mitt Romney, all the men who lost election in addition the last 17, 18 years. Some of it is just that."
She went on to speculate that some of these calls for her to quit politics might be motivated by the media's "guilt" for how they treated her unfairly in the 2016 campaign:
Some of it, I will say, is media guilt. You know, when they now have to face the way they covered this campaign, and the fact that they didn’t pay any attention to policies— which, you know, I thought would be important and spent a lot of time saying, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do on an infrastructure plan, what we’re going to do to improve the affordable care act, and everything I worked on.” They were so totally entranced by the reality TV element of it, and the entertainment value of it, that I’m told— and some members of the press have privately said to me— look, they missed it. They missed it. They thought I was going to win so they could beat up on me without consequence, and they didn’t really stand up against a the loof the ridiculous lies and accusings against me. So I think there’s that.
In the same appearance, Clinton attacked Trump for calling for immigration reform after the New York City terror attack -- despite having called for gun control in the immediate aftermath of the the Las Vegas atrocity.
"So he just doesn’t have any empathy," Clinton said of Trump. "And you can disagree with somebody over all kinds of partisan issues, but you want to have a president who can try to put himself into the shoes, the feelings of somebody else."
Elsewhere in the interview, Clinton stressed that despite her campaign having purchased Trump gossip from Kremlin officials that was shopped around the media during the 2016 campaign, this was "of course" completely different from accusations the Trump camp "colluded" with Russia.
"Of course, there is," a difference she said. "And, you know, I think most serious people understand that. This was research started by a Republican donor during the Republican primary. And then when Trump got the nomination for the Republican Party, the people doing it came to my campaign lawyer and said, you know, 'Would you like us to continue it?' And he said, yes. He's an experienced lawyer. He knows what the law is. He knows what opposition research is."
Clinton then vented that the FBI's investigation into Trump, which was reportedly spawned from this opposition research, did not surface during the campaign.
"And, you know, from my perspective, [the Trump dossier] didn't come out before the election, as we all know," she said. "And what also didn't come out-- which I think is an even bigger problem as I write in the book-- is that the American people didn't even know that the F.B.I. Was investigating the Trump campaign because of connections with Russia starting in the summer of 2016."