An angry Hillary Clinton was quick to blame a host of factors Sunday for why she lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, the interview coming days before the release of her 500-page campaign post-mortem.
Clinton, whose book What Happened is to be released September 12, told CBS News in an interview the many reasons for which she thinks she lost the election — focusing primarily on the letter from FBI Director James Comey announcing in October the reopening of the investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
“I watched how analysts who I have a great deal of respect for, like Nate Silver, burrowed into all the data and said that ‘but for that Comey letter, she would have won,'” she said.
Clinton and members of her team have pointed to the so-called “Comey letter,” as well as alleged interference by the Russian government, as the two central reasons for her defeat. However, Clinton has given a number of speeches in which she has pointed to a wide range of other reasons for it.
On Thursday, she appeared to blame angry voters in front of an audience in New York City:
“I think the kind of leadership I was offering was not satisfying enough for certain people, and it wasn’t enough for me to say, ‘Look, I understand, and here’s what I want to do to help’ if I didn’t display more anger so that they could feel I got their anger,” she said.
But in the CBS News interview, she quickly named a host of other reasons as well, citing the Russians “weaponizing information, negative stories about me” and pointing to the leak by WikiLeaks of John Podesta’s emails.
“We now know Facebook was taking money from Russian companies to run negative stories about me,” she said. “If you look at all of this, yes it affected me and my campaign. But I am more concerned now going forward that we haven’t come to grips with what it means for future elections.”
She also pointed to alleged “voter suppression that we now know had been in the works and really put into effect in a lot of states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, etc.”
Finally, she blamed “sexism and misogyny, which are endemic to our society” and promised that there is a chapter about it in her upcoming book.
More reasons for her election defeat are likely to emerge with the release of What Happened.
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY
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