I would be president if FBI letter, leaks didn’t happen
WASHINGTON : Six months after her stunning defeat in the run for the White House, Hillary Clinton has returned to public life. This time, she said on Tuesday, as a “citizen activist” and “part of the resistance”, a loose coalition of those opposing President Donald Trump.
She kicked off her new career with pointed criticism of Trump’s Syria bombing—which she supported but thought was not backed with a strategy—offer to talk to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, and a swipe at his tweeting.
The former secretary of state was uncharacteristically blunt and unscripted, specially in her assessment of her defeat, which she was reliving for a book — a “painful process … as you might guess” — she was writing about the campaign.
“If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president,” Clinton said in an interview-style public event in New York with CNN’s Christian Amanpour.
On October 28, FBI director James Comey sent congress a note, which promptly became public, that the agency was taking another look at the case about Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, which he had announced closed earlier. “I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off,” she said, but not for the first time.
This time, however, she went further and suggested collusion between Trump’s campaign and the release of hacked communications of her campaign chair John Podesta and the Democratic party’s computer network by the Russians.
Just as outrage was building on the release of a tape about Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women, came the WikiLeaks announcement — some “coincidence”, noted Clinton — of 50,000 hacked emails belonging to Podesta.
FBI CHIEF SAYS HE HAD TO TELL CONGRESS
FBI director James Comey said Wednesday he believed it would have been “catastrophic” to keep Congress in the dark about new developments in the Clinton email investigation. Comey, in the most impassioned and public defense of how he handled this case, also said it made him feel “mildly nauseous” to think his actions in October could have influenced the race won by Trump over Clinton.
(with agency inputs)