In an interview, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made her White House ambitions clear: She is not planning to run for president again.

But the former first lady and 2016 Democratic nominee for president said that she will do “everything” in her power to ensure “that we have a president who respects our democracy and the rule of law and upholds our institutions.”

When asked by CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell if she plans on running for president again, Clinton replied, “no, no.”

“But I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that we have a president who respects our democracy and the rule of law and upholds our institutions,” she added.

When asked about what might happen if her 2016 opponent, Donald Trump, should run again, Clinton said that “he should be soundly defeated,” and put the onus on the Republican Party to  stand up to the former president.

“It should start in the Republican Party,” Clinton said. “Grow a backbone. Stand up to this guy.”

“Heaven forbid if he gets the nomination, he needs to be defeated roundly and sent back to Mar-a-Lago,” Clinton added. 

Speaking about the Jan. 6 investigation, Clinton accused Trump of leading a “a seditious conspiracy against the government.”

"I would not be honest if I didn't say I think there was a seditious conspiracy against the government of the United States, and that's a crime,” Clinton said, adding: “Led by Donald Trump, encouraged by Donald Trump.”

“I was the secretary of state,” Clinton said. “I spent, you know, many days on airplanes, flying from place to place, encouraging people to have a real democracy. And one of the hallmarks of a real democracy is the peaceful transfer of power.”

“Was I happy when I beat Donald Trump by nearly 3 million votes but lost the Electoral College? No, I was not happy,” she continued. “Did I ever for a nanosecond think, 'I'm gonna claim victory and try to get the Democrats to refuse to certify the election?' No."

Clinton said that she watched the House Select Committee's Jan. 6 hearings closely this summer, praising vice chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., for her "great, historic service" to the country, and praised the witnesses who testified, particularly the young women.

"That goes to a point about being a gutsy woman," Clinton said. "The couple of young women who have come forward out of the Trump White House, they have been vilified. They had to have known that they were going to be criticized. But I give them enormous credit for speaking the truth and doing the right thing." 

Clinton also addressed the recent search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago by the FBI, a probe that led to government documents being seized from the former president’s Florida estate. 

An Aug. 8 search by the FBI uncovered more than 100 classified documents stored at the private club, including some marked top secret, the Justice Department said. The FBI also found more than four dozen empty folders labeled classified, the DOJ said. 

According to the search warrant, federal law enforcement is investigating Trump for removal or destruction of records, obstruction of justice and violating the Espionage Act, though it is unclear whether he will face any charges. Trump has publicly claimed he declassified all the documents that were seized.

Trump’s allies have attempted to draw a comparison between the search of Mar-a-Lago to Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state. At the time, then-FBI Director James Comey said that Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” but did not recommend charging her.

On Saturday, Trump ally South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said recently that “if it's just about mishandling classified information, we've had a standard set when it came to Hillary Clinton.”

Graham appeared to be doubling down on his comments in a recent Fox News interview from last month, where he said that “if there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”

Clinton pushed back against those assertions, saying that she was in a “very different situation.”

“I think it's a really different comparison to what's going on here when it appears that the Justice Department and the FBI have been incredibly patient, quiet, careful, until they finally apparently thought that national security was at stake,” she told CBS News.

“I can’t believe we’re still talking about this, but my emails…,” Clinton wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “As Trump’s problems continue to mount, the right is trying to make this about me again. There’s even a ‘Clinton Standard.’”

“The fact is that I had zero emails that were classified,” Clinton claimed, adding: “Comey admitted he was wrong after he claimed I had classified emails. Trump’s own State Department, under two different Secretaries, found I had no classified emails."

In 2016, Comey said that in regards to Clinton's emails, "only a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information." Comey later clarified in testimony before the House Oversight Committee that he was talking about a very small portion of the tens of thousands of emails his office reviewed, and that they were not properly marked as classified, meaning that there was "reasonable inference" that Clinton would "immediately" conclude they were not classified.

In 2018, Comey told ABC News that while Clinton's handling of emails was "really sloppy," he "should've worked harder to find a way to convey that it's more than just the ordinary mistake, but it's not criminal behavior."

In a separate interview on ABC’s “The View” on Wednesday, when asked if Trump should face charges, Clinton said that “we should not rush to judgment” and let the investigation play out.

“I don't want to pre-judge, I've been pre-judged wrongly enough,” Clinton told host Joy Behar. “I’m not going to pre-judge somebody else.”

“I think the key is, what the facts and the evidence are, what the FBI and the intelligence community learn about these documents, how they ended up there, who else saw them,” Clinton continued. “Because apparently they've been moved around. It's not like they were in a vault, they were in a storage room.”

“I think that we have to wait, and we have to … we have to have I think two minds about this,” Clinton added. “No one is above the law, and the rule of law in a democracy has to be our standard. But we should not rush to judgment. We should take it seriously, we should be concerned about it, and we should follow the facts and the evidence.”