Now that's just a tribalist attempt at excusing "one of your guys" with any excuse you can come up with no matter how illogical.

The speed with which the consequences unfold is irrelevant to responsability, only the awareness that there could be such consequences or lack thereof.

If somebody sets up a factory which releases contaminated water that poisons the region's water table with carcinogenic material resulting after several years in many people there dying of cancer, are those who set up a factory leaking carcinogetic materials not responsible anymore because of the time it took for people to end up dead?

Same thing with tobacco manufacturers once they had the scientific reports that tobacco caused lung cancer. Were they not responsible for continuing to sell their product without warning people of the dangers just because it took decades for the users of their product to die?

Whilst they didn't mean to kill people, they knew it could and went ahead anyway, hence they are responsible - just because it took years and was indirect doesn't reduce the responsability.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the repeal of Glass-Steagal led to the 2008 Crash - it's one of those rare measures where one can show a direct line between that specific piece of deregulation, retail banks engaging in massive speculative investing and them having to be saved as they would have taken depositor's money as they went down: what Glass-Steagal did was exactly to force the banks to keep the retail operations separate from proprietary investment hence with it in place even if the banks had a separate arm doing speculation which failed, depositor's money would never have been at risk and only said investment arm would have gone under.

There is no question Clinton was unaware of the possible consequences of repealing Glass-Steagal because that act had been very explicitly put in place after the Great Crash and the Great Depression exactly to stop another major Crash and Depression, which was widelly discussed at the time.

Clinton was responsible for the direct consequences of repealing Glass-Steagal because retail banks could never had started investing in a speculative way and end up sinking and taking depositors money with them with Glass-Steagal in place since that its purpose was exactly to stop that (and it worked for over half a century) - so it's there's a first order causal relation between the repealing in 2000 and the retail banks starting going under in 2008 - and because at the time he repealed Glass-Steagal he knew it had been put in place exactly to avoid a major Crash and Depression - he both did the deed and was aware of the possible consequences.

The only question there is around it was if he was reckless, deeply incompetent or Machiavelic (if he acted to benefit from it expecting problems would take years to come and hence be somebody else's) in chosing to repeal that act which he knew was meant to stop major crashes and depressions and which had worked successfully doing just that for over half a century.