Politics Clinton: 'I was on the way to winning' until Comey, Russia intervened 'I take absolute personal responsibility,' Clinton said, though she made no mention of any specific flaws in her campaign.

Leading Democrats across the country have been calling for a full accounting of Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald Trump since November. They didn’t get it Tuesday, when the former secretary of state spoke with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

In Manhattan for a Women For Women International charity luncheon, Clinton once again pointed her finger at Russian interference and FBI Director James Comey’s influence as the proximate reasons for her defeat, in her most extensive remarks yet on the topic.


For the first time, Clinton publicly took on some of the blame: “I take absolute personal responsibility,” she said. “I was the candidate. I was the person on the ballot. And I am very aware of, you know, the challenges, the problems, the, you know, shortfalls that we had.”

But she noted, as she has to her friends and donors repeatedly since November, “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. And the evidence for the intervening event is, I think, compelling, persuasive.”





As the Democratic Party struggles to move on from the November loss and searches for a strategy to fight back, the finger-pointing about Clinton’s campaign has intensified. While no Democrats doubt that Comey’s intervention and the drip-drip WikiLeaks release of campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked personal emails played a significant role in Trump’s stunning victory, many are also quick to question a number of the Clinton campaign’s strategic decisions.

Among the complaints: that the candidate never traveled to Wisconsin, and rarely visited Michigan, that she never articulated a sufficiently affirmative economic message to pair with her criticisms of Trump, and that she couldn’t overcome her high negative numbers and the perception that she was out of touch with everyday voters after delivering highpaid-paying speeches.

Clinton’s team has not released any formal campaign postmortem, though her operatives have combed through the voter data and rehashed some of their strategies internally. The candidate herself first blamed Comey on a private half-hour conference call with donors just four days after her loss.

Even as some Democratic Party leaders have sought to move on from 2016, however, Trump himself often dwells on it, regaling friends, reporters and crowds with reminders of his Electoral College victory while piling on Clinton, who is only in recent weeks emerging from a silent period.

On Tuesday, Clinton said she was proud of her staff and the volunteers who contributed to her campaign, which she acknowledged “wasn’t a perfect campaign.”

She seemingly took solace in the fact that her campaign “overcame a lot,” she said, such as “an enormous barrage of negativity, of false equivalency and so much else.” And she cited polling guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who said Clinton would “almost certainly” have become president if not for Comey’s October letter to Congress that shook up the race in her opponent’s favor.

Unfortunately, Clinton said, the election came days after the letter was released (“there was just a lot of funny business going on around that,” she said), not before.

“Within an hour or two of the ['Access Hollywood'] tape being made public, the Russian theft of John Podesta’s emails hit WikiLeaks. What a coincidence,” Clinton sarcastically said. “So, I mean, you just can’t make this stuff up. So did we make mistakes? Of course we did. Did I make mistakes? Oh my gosh, yes. You know, you’ll read my confession and my request for absolution.”

“But the reason why I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days,” she argued. “And I think you can see I was leading in the early vote, I had a very strong — and not just our polling and data analysis — but a very strong assessment going on across the country about where I was in terms of, you know, both the necessary votes and electoral votes. And remember: I did win more than 3 million votes than my opponent.”

Asked whether misogyny had anything to do with her loss, Clinton speculated that it did, saying that if she’d become the first female U.S. president, it would have sent a powerful message.

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She also pointed out that, based on American political history, it would have been unlikely for a Democratic nominee to succeed a two-term Democratic president.

Clinton had little positive to say about the new president. She said she privately supported his decision to launch a missile strike in Syria last month but said she isn’t “convinced that it really made much of a difference.”

And she mocked him for dictating diplomacy via Twitter and getting into trouble with his blustery rhetoric on health care, subtly jabbing Trump for saying recently that “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

“I wasn’t going to appeal to people’s emotions in the same way that my opponent did, which I think is, frankly, what’s getting him into all kinds of difficulties now in trying to fulfill these promises that he made because, you know, health care is complicated,” she said.

As for dealing with North Korea, “negotiations are critical,” Clinton said. “But they have to be part of a broader strategy, not just thrown out on a tweet some morning that, ‘Hey, let’s together and, you know, see if we can’t get along and maybe we can, you know, come up with some kind of a deal.’ That doesn’t work.”

The former secretary of state said she’s happy for Trump to bash her on Twitter if it keeps him from digging deeper holes.

“If he wants to tweet about me, I’m happy to be the, you know, the diversion, because we’ve got lots of other things to worry about,” Clinton said. “And he should worry less about the election and my winning the popular vote than doing some other things that would be important to the country.”

And, she said, she’s not going away: “I’m now back to being an activist citizen and part of the resistance.”

