Bill Clinton also said James Comey “cost her the election.” | AP Photo/Danny Johnston Bill Clinton: Trump knows how to get 'angry, white men to vote for him'

President-elect Donald Trump “doesn’t know much,” former President Bill Clinton told a local newspaper earlier this month, but “one thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him.”

Clinton spoke to a reporter from The Record-Review, a weekly newspaper serving the towns of Bedford and Pound Ridge, New York, not far from the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York. The former president held court on Dec. 10 in Pleasantville, New York, where he took questions from the reporter and other customers inside a small bookstore.


On the question of Russian cyberattacks damaging the candidacy of his wife, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, the former president said “you would need to have a single-digit IQ not to recognize what was going on.” But he blamed FBI Director James Comey for her loss, telling those gathered around him that he had “cost her the election” by announcing with less than two weeks to go before the election that the bureau was examining fresh evidence related to her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

Clinton’s comments were published in the newspaper’s print edition, on Dec. 16, but have not been published online.

The former president confirmed that he had, in fact, received a phone call from Trump on the day after the election and that the Manhattan billionaire was strangely cordial, “like it was 15 years ago” when he was friendly with the Clintons and would socialize with them. Clinton said Trump told him that Hillary Clinton “was tougher than I thought she’d be.”

He also scoffed at the regular claim from Trump and his team that the president-elect’s Election Day win represented a “landslide” victory, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote. “Landslide? I got something like 370 electoral votes,” Clinton said, correctly recalling his 1992 total. “That was a landslide.”