Hillary Clinton claims Trump response to NY terror attack aims to 'set Americans against each other'

US President Donald Trump is often criticised over his remarks on national and global disasters. On Wednesday (1 November), his former election contender, Hillary Clinton voiced her disappointment in the president, accusing him of not having empathy and using the recent New York terror attack as an excuse "set Americans against each other".

"What you want in a president, is to bring a country together, talk about what happened with the event they're concerned about but not point fingers, not scapegoat and not try to set Americans against each other," the former secretary of state said during an interview with The Daily Show's Trevor Noah.

"He just doesn't have any empathy. You can disagree with someone over all kinds of partisan issues but you want a president who can try to put himself into the shoes, the feelings of someone else," she added, "and he has not been able to do that."

Following news of the attack Trump blamed the "Diversity Visa Lottery Program", which allowed the terrorist to come into the US The president later tweeted that the accused deserved the death penalty after killing eight people and injuring an additional 12.

During her visit to The Daily Show's sets, Clinton also addressed the investigation into Trump's connections with Russia. Most recently, the Potus shared that his former contender funded an investigation into his ties with Russia and described it as "fake" and collusion on the part of the Democrats.

"It was research that started by a Republican donor during the primary, and then when Trump got the nomination for the Republican Party, the people doing it came to my campaign lawyer and said, 'would you like us to continue it?'" Clinton explained, adding that "most serious people" understood that funding the Steel dossier was different from Trump's campaign allegedly working with the Russians to influence the elections.

Her campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, received the research from Fusion GPS, which had originally been paid for by the Free Beacon. "He's an experienced lawyer, he knows what the law is, he knows what opposition research is," she added.

Special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI are currently investigating the dossier to find proof of Trump's connections with Russia, but Clinton believes news of the enquiry was made public a little too late.

"From my perspective, it didn't come out before the election, as we all know, and what also didn't come out, which I think is an even bigger problem... is that the American people didn't even know that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign because of connections with Russia starting in the summer of 2016," she told Noah.

"I know that voters should have had that information. That's something that may have influenced some people. And it's part of what happens in a campaign, where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out into the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn't come out until after the election, and it's still being evaluated, but the fact of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia should have come out."