I HAD IT WON
HIL: COMEY, WIKI COST ME WHITE HOUSE
HILLARY CLINTON accepted responsibility for her 2016 election loss on Tuesday — before blaming FBI Director James Comey, Russia, WikiLeaks and misogyny for her defeat.
“It wasn’t a perfect campaign. There is no such thing,” Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour at a Women for Women International event in Midtown. “But I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off.”
“If the election had been on Oct. 27, I would be your President,” Clinton said.
The former secretary of state has blamed WikiLeaks, which published emails stolen from her campaign, and Comey, whose letter revealed the FBI had reopened its probe into Clinton’s email server, for her stunning Election Day defeat before — but not her gender.
“Yes, I do think it played a role,” she said, adding that misogyny is “very much a part of the landscape politically, socially and economically.”
Clinton has been working on a book about her failed campaign, which said she has been a “painful process.”
The tome is expected to hit shelves in September. Clinton joked that it would include her “confession” about the errors she made on the campaign trail, and she said she takes “personal responsibility” for losing.
But Clinton didn’t explain any of those mistakes during the talk, and only focused on her usual suspects for Donald Trump’s surprise win.
Clinton, who said she now lives as an “activist citizen and part of the resistance,” revealed little about her book-inprogress.
Her publisher, Simon & Schuster, only lists it as an “untitled memoir” that will feature essays “inspired by the hundreds of quotations she has been collecting for decades.” The publishing house has not announced Clinton’s advance.
Speaking Tuesday, Clinton offered only muted criticism of the man now sitting in the Oval Office.
She earned applause from the crowd by joking about Trump’s Twitter obsession with the election — and the 3 million votes that gave Clinton a popular-vote win.
“He should worry less about the election and my winning the popular vote than doing some other important things for the country,” she said of Trump.
But the President once again revisited his victory in a series of late-night tweets on Tuesday — seemingly knocking Comey and referring to himself in the third person.
“FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!” Trump tweeted.
“The phony . . . Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?” he added. Still, Clinton said she supported Trump’s recent air strike on Syria, though she was “not convinced it really made much of a difference” in the country’s conflicts.