NEW YORK // Hillary Clinton has blamed her election defeat on FBI director James Comey and Russian president Vladimi Putin, saying they ‘scared off” people who might have voted for her.
The man who defeated her, president Donald Trump immediately took to Twitter to dismiss her claims.
In a tweet, Mr Trump said Ms Clinton was lucky to have got away with not being investigated over her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. The FBI director was “the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds,” he tweeted. As for the allegations of Russian interference, “the phoney Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election.”
Speaking at length for the first time about her election defeat, Ms Clinton said, “The reason why I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days.”
She pointed the finger at Russian interference and at the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, who revealed just 10 days before the November 8 election that he was re-opening the email investigation.
“I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28th and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me, but got scared off,” Ms Clinton said. “If the election had been on October 27th, I’d be your president.”
In January the US intelligence community announced it had concluded Russia did interfere in the election — and that president Putin himself ordered a campaign to undermine the US democratic process, to harm Clinton’s electability and help Mr Trump win.
Ms Clinton said the Russian president was “not a member of my fan club,” adding, “He certainly interfered in our election and it was clear he hurt me and helped my opponent.”
The former candidate for the Democratic party recalled how the release of an old videotape on October 7 which showed Mr Trump crudely discussing groping women, was swiftly followed “within an hour or two” by WikiLeaks publishing the Russian theft of Clinton staffers’ emails.
“What a coincidence. You just can’t make this stuff up,” she said.
Ms Clinton has never spoken so fully about the election. Her remarks — made at a charity luncheon in New York — echoed CIA comments branding WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service” abetted by the likes of Russia. However, she also accepted “absolute personal responsibility” for a series of campaign blunders that contributed to her defeat.
At 69, the former first lady, US senator and secretary of state said she was returning to activism. “I’m now back to being an active citizen and part of the resistance,” she said.
She is also Clinton is writing a book about her experiences, to be published later this year, and said it has been a “painful process” to relive the campaign and the mistakes she made.
“You’ll read my confession and my request for absolution,” she said.
* Associated Press and * Agence France Presse
