Bill Clinton. Spencer Platt/Getty Images Bill Clinton did not mince words when asked by the editor of a small New York newspaper for his thoughts on President-elect Donald Trump.

The editor of the Bedford-Pound Ridge Record Review, a community newspaper in Westchester County, New York, bumped into Clinton at a local bookstore last week, where the former president proceeded to give candid answers about a series of election-related topics to a group that had gathered around him.

One man asked Clinton whether he thought Trump was smart, to which the former president said "he doesn't know much."

"One thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him," Clinton said.

Pointing to FBI Director James Comey's letter announcing the bureau's renewed interest in Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server just days before the election, Clinton said it "cost her the election" and "we were seven (percentage) points up" before the letter was made public.

The former president also criticized Trump's response to the suspected role of Russia's meddling in the US election. Reports after the election indicated that US intelligence agencies believed Russia intentionally worked to help elect Trump.

"You would need to have a single-digit IQ not to recognize what was going on," Clinton said.

Clinton also brushed off Trump's claim that he won the election in a landslide by defeating the former secretary of state by a 306-to-232 electoral-vote margin.

"Landslide?" Clinton said. "I got something like 370 electoral votes [in 1992]. That was a landslide."

But in their postelection phone conversation, Clinton said, Trump came across as cordial and incredulous "like it was 15 years ago," when the two men were in the same social settings.

Clinton also shot down a suggestion of President Barack Obama nominating Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court before leaving office, saying "anyway, I don't think she'd want it."