Michigan Congressman Calls Hillary Clinton a 'Trump Asset' After Gabbard Comments

Representative Justin Amash of Michigan has weighed in on the controversy surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comments that Russia is grooming a Democratic candidate to disrupt the 2020 presidential election by running on a third-party platform.

The independent congressman tweeted early Saturday: "The thing we know for sure is that Hillary Clinton is a Donald Trump asset."

Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who is widely presumed to be the subject of Clinton's remarks, already took time to lash out at Clinton on social media, issuing a scathing series of tweets Friday afternoon. Gabbard's Twitter thread concluded with a direct call-out to Clinton: "It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly."

Amash echoed Gabbard's accusations of unseen forces working against the Democratic candidate, but his point was that Clinton herself had unwittingly supported President Donald Trump's election by being so distasteful to voters, and was turning voters away from the Democratic Party again.

In a follow-up tweet issued shortly after 1 a.m., the congressman wrote: "Hillary does—and did—drive many people into the arms of Donald Trump. Her attack on Tulsi does likewise. In my district, Trump did worse than any Republican in modern times and still beat Clinton by a fair margin. Many Ds in the Midwest rejected her. I didn't vote for either one."

Amash is uniquely qualified among current Washington lawmakers to comment on shifting party allegiances: the Michigan representative was first elected to Congress in 2010 on a Tea Party Republican platform, with an endorsement from former Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul. He served four terms as a Republican—and even helped found the hard-line conservative Freedom Caucus—but on July 4, Amash announced that he was leaving the GOP to become an independent.

The decision was a long time coming for Amash, whom the website Reason called "a leading thorn in the side of Donald Trump," who "sounds less Republican by the day" back in 2017. In an interview with the site, Amash expressed his hope that the two-party system would die off. "I think the parties are a problem. That became more clear to me when I entered Congress...I can see a lot of the inability to move forward on more Libertarian ideas is because we have this two-party system that really controls all of the levers."

Amash will face his first election as an Independent candidate in 2020.