Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., did not reiterate Sunday whether she thought former president Bill Clinton should have resigned over the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the 1990s, saying only “it would have been a very different conversation” had the controversy occurred in 2017.
“My point is that the tolerance that we had 25 years ago, what was allowed 25 years ago, will not be tolerated today, is not allowed today,” Gillibrand told MSNBC. “And that we have to have the kind of oversight and accountability that society needs so that we can protect people in the workplace.”
The comments from Gillibrand, who replaced Hillary Clinton in the Senate when Clinton joined the Obama administration in 2008, did not go as far as remarks she made to the New York Times on Thursday, in which she said Bill Clinton should have left office after his affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky came to light.
While Gillibrand, a key sponsor behind the Member and Employee Training and Oversight On Congress (ME TOO Congress) Act, welcomed a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into her colleague Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., she refused to urge him to resign.
However, she had no reservations when it came to calling for a closer examination of sexual misconduct accusations leveled at President Trump.
“We should not just ignore him,” Gillibrand said. “We should be having a much larger conversation about what we expect of our elected leaders. And the — that it should never be this lowest common denominator of boys will be boys. That’s an outrageous statement to be said.”
