Hillary Clinton thinks that former NBC host Matt Lauer's demise is "karma" for how he questioned her about her private email server during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Clinton was in Philadelphia on Thursday promoting her campaign memoir, What Happened, when she was asked about Lauer being fired this week over allegations of sexual misconduct, the Philly Voice reported. Lauer faced a storm of criticism last year when several journalists and commentators deemed his questioning of Clinton at a candidate forum unfair and even sexist.
"Every day I believe more in karma," Clinton said of Lauer.
She went on to describe how "men who shaped the narrative" of the campaign harmed her but are now under fire for sexual harassment, echoing how her supporters have tied Lauer's alleged misconduct to his treatment of Clinton. She also repeated her past arguments about the election, primarily blaming a host of outside factors for her defeat.
"She didn't take a lot of the blame herself," Philly Voice contributor Stephen Silver wrote of Clinton at the book event.
"When it came to the forces that she felt contributed to the election result in 2016, Clinton checked off everything from Russian interference to the James Comey letter to an unfair news media to voter suppression efforts," Silver added.
Clinton also called on more women to follow her lead and run for office as a way of rooting out sexism.
"The only way we will get sexism out of politics is to get more women in politics," she said.
Clinton was also heckled by a man with a history of disrupting events, such as a Christmas mass. He shouted "Pizzagate is real" from the upper deck near the end of the event. She took his behavior as evidence of the problems that America faces.
"This is how deep the rot goes," she said.
Silver noted that the event was sold out but the hall was "not quite full," with an audience about two-thirds female. He also wrote about an extended bout of coughing Clinton went through, something that occurred repeatedly during her presidential campaign as well.
At one point early in the evening, Clinton launched into an extended coughing fit, the kind of thing that tended to lead to theories during the campaign that the candidate was concealing some sort of illness. Weiner attempted to fill the time by making a self-deprecating joke about her own last name, but knowing that Clinton's history with a man of that particular surname is what led to the notorious Comey Letter, she may have not found it so funny.
Clinton is something of a divisive figure, and has been such for going on three decades. But with one exception, there was no divided reception Thursday night—among a theater full of people who paid hundreds of dollars to see the first female presidential nominee in Philadelphia one more time.