The former president waded into an array of topics at the TimesTalk event, including the continuing investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III (“He’s played this thing straight,” Mr. Clinton said); Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president in 2016 (“Preferred alternative of the Russians,” he called her); and whether President Trump should be impeached (“We have to wait and see what he says and the rest of us can weigh in,” he said of the Mueller inquiry).

“We should wait for Mr. Mueller to do his work and protect him when he does,” Mr. Clinton said of impeachment talk, urging Democrats to focus instead on the midterm elections.

Mr. Clinton did say that Mr. Mueller was “getting killed in the media in the fight over whether the F.B.I. put spies in the Trump campaign, which is absurd.” Mr. Trump has made repeated unconfirmed accusations that federal investigators put a spy inside his campaign.

Mr. Clinton also spoke in some depth about the role of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign against his wife, Hillary Clinton.

“Do we know whether it made a difference or not? We don’t,” he said. “We know that Jill Stein, preferred alternative of the Russians, got more — the difference in her vote in 2012, 2016 was more than the difference in the election in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. That doesn’t mean the Russians did it, but it’s — it makes you scratch your head.”

The race was close enough that “Comey’s late announcement could swing it,” Mr. Clinton said of the announcement in October by James Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time, that he was reopening his investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email practices.

And given the race’s tight final margins — Mr. Clinton rattled off some figures from memory — he speculated that “maybe the Russians did have a decisive impact,” though he said a “sneeze could have tossed it.”