Hillary Clinton aimed directly at the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and Fox News in a Thursday speech to the New York State Democratic Party convention, and as usual, post-2016 Clinton has their number. “It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get,” she said.

Currently, Republicans are squawking about a false reading of a legal filing from special counsel John Durham, with Trump calling for the death penalty for Clinton and her 2016 campaign team over the filing, which contains little new information and no substantial allegations. Fox News mentioned Clinton 200 times in one day as it works to blow Durham’s work into a full-fledged conspiracy theory (with the active help of Durham, who was appointed by Trump Attorney General William Barr to undermine investigations into Trump’s Russia connections).

Clinton nailed what’s going on here, including a little warning shot to Fox News.

“So now his accountants have fired [Trump] and investigations draw closer to him and right on cue, the noise machine gets turned up,” she said. “Fox leads the charge with accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again. And as an aside, they're getting awfully close to actual malice.”

”Actual malice” is a legal standard by which even public figures can get libel judgments against the media.

Fox News personality Sean Hannity responded. “Malice, really? It's called news,” he said, stretching the bounds of the definition of “news” even by Fox standards. “Hillary, we invite you to bring it on.”

She probably won’t bother, but considering that Fox News is facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from voting machine maker Dominion—a lawsuit the network lost a bid to have dismissed in December—its lawyers might want to take a look at just what its public faces are saying when they mention Clinton 200 times in a day.

Clinton also addressed the Republican Party itself, highlighting its recent resolution describing the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

“When the Republican Party officially embraces violent insurrection as legitimate political discourse. When storming the Capitol, assaulting police officers, trying to overturn an election, are being normalized, we are in uncharted territory. And make no mistake, our adversaries around the world are watching," she said. "Republicans are defending coup-plotters, they're curbing voting rights at precisely the moment when democracy needs champions, when we should be standing together against autocracies like Russia and China.”

Clinton’s specific take on Trump and her take on the Republican Party tie together: The Republican embrace of lawlessness is so broad and so deep that it needs to create people like Clinton as villains at the head of vast conspiracy theories to distract from its own sordid realities.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos