JAMES COMEY
Clinton is furious that Comey, then the FBI director, publicly revealed the re-opening of the secret email server investigation just before election day – and has said so time after time after time.
THE FBI
Comey’s entire organization does not escape her wrath.
‘The FBI wasn’t the Federal Bureau of Ifs or Innuendoes. Its job was to find out the facts,’ she writes in What Happened.
VLADIMIR PUTIN
‘There’s no doubt in my mind that Putin wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win,’ she told USA Today in September last year while promoting What Happened.
It was hardly a new theme. As early as December the New York Times obtained audio in which she told her donors: ‘Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election.’
THE RUSSIANS
Putin’s entire apparatus gets a name-check. In May she told the Codecon convention how ‘1,000 Russian agents’ had filled Facebook with ‘fake news’.
She told NPR ‘my path toward November was being disrupted with Russians’.
WIKILEAKS
The ‘transparency website’ is consistently ranked along with Comey by Clinton at the top of her blame list.
She told NPR : ‘Unfortunately the Comey letter, aided to great measure by the Russian WikiLeaks, raised all those doubts again.’
And she writes of its founder Julian Assange in What Happened: ‘In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions.’
LOW INFORMATION VOTERS
‘You put yourself in the position of a low information voter, and all of a sudden your Facebook feed, your Twitter account is saying, “Oh my gosh, Hillary Clinton is running a child trafficking operation in Washington with John Podesta.”,’ she told the Codecon convention in May.
‘Well you don’t believe it but this has been such an unbelievable election, you kind of go, ‘Oh maybe I better look into that.”
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
‘We have an electoral college problem. It’s an anachronism,’ she told Vox.
ANTI-AMERICAN FORCES
‘I think it’s important that we learn the real lessons from this last campaign because the forces that we are up against are not just interested in influencing our elections and our politics, they’re going after our economy and they’re going after our unity as a nation,’ she told Codecon in May.
‘What is hard for people to really accept – although now after the election there’s greater understanding – is that there are forces in our country – put the Russians to one side – who have been fighting rear guard actions for as long as I’ve been alive because my life coincided with the Civil Rights movement, with the women’s rights movement, with anti-war protesting, with the impeachment.
EVERYONE WHO ASSUMED SHE WOULD WIN
‘I was the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win,’ she told the Codecon convention.
BAD POLLING NUMBERS
Clinton says polls in key states did not serve her.
‘I think polling is going to have to undergo some revisions in how they actually measure people,’ she told the Codecon convention.
‘How they reach people. The best assessments as of right now are that the polling was not that inaccurate, but it was predominantly national polling and I won nationally.’
BARACK OBAMA
Clinton has two beefs with Obama: one of them being that he won two terms. Clinton says that succeeding an incumbent is almost impossible for a Democrat.
‘No non-incumbent Democrat had run successfully to succeed another two-termer since Vice President Martin Van Buren won in 1836,’ she writes in What Happened.
But she also says his response to the Russian campaign of interference wasn’t enough.
‘I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack,’ she writes in What Happened.
WHITE WOMEN
‘I believe absent Comey, I might’ve picked up 1 or 2 points among white women,’ she told Vox in September.
‘White woman… are really quite politically dependent on their view of their own security and their own position in society what works and doesn’t work for them.’
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The newspaper was blamed as early as May at the Codecon conference in Rancho Palos Verde, California.
She singled out its managing editor Dean Baquet – the paper’s most senior editor – and said of coverage of her email issue under his direction: ‘They covered it like it was Pearl Harbor.’
JOE BIDEN
Biden could have run against her and didn’t. But Clinton writes: ‘Joe Biden said the Democratic Party in 2016 ‘did not talk about what it always stood for—and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.’
‘I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class.’
BERNIE SANDERS
‘His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign,’ she writes in What Happened.
‘I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not.’
BERNIE BROS
‘Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist,’ she writes in What Happened.
PEOPLE WANTING CHANGE
‘I thought, at end of day, people would say, look, we do want change, and we want the right kind of change, and we want change that is realistic and is going to make difference in my life and my family’s life and my paycheck,’ she told Vox.
‘That’s what I was offering. And I didn’t in any way want to feed into this, not just radical political argument that was being made on other side, but very negative cultural argument about who we are as Americans.’
MISOGYNISTS
Asked by CNN’s Christine Amanpour at the Women for Women International event in new York in May if misogyny was to blame she said: ‘Yes, I do think it played a role.’
TELEVISION EXECUTIVES
‘When you have a presidential campaign and the total number of minutes on TV news, which is still how most people get their information, covering all of our policies, climate change, anything else was 32 minutes, I don’t blame voters,’ she told The View.
‘They don’t get a broad base of information to make decision on. The more outrageous you are, the more inflammatory you are, the higher the ratings are.’
NETFLIX
Hillary does not do Netflix and chill – or if she does, she doesn’t find it very relaxing.
‘Eight of the top 10 political documentaries on Netflix were screeds against President Obama and me,’ she claimed at the Codecon convention.
‘If you look at Facebook the vast majority of the news items posted were fake. They were connected to as we now know the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages,’ she told Codecon.
Usually mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, the micro-blogging site is seen by Clinton as one of the reasons for her loss.
She told the Codecon convention in may that Trump had a method in his tweets.
‘They want to influence your reality. That to me is what we’re up against, and we can’t let that go unanswered,’ she said.
CONTENT FARMS IN MACEDONIA
‘Through content farms, through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will – lies, that’s a good word too – the other side was using content that was flat out false,’ she told the Codecon convention in May.
‘They were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it, and they were running, y’know there’s all these stories, about y’know, and you know I’ve seen them now, and you sit there and it looks like you know sort of low level CNN operation, or a fake newspaper.’
CAMPAIGN FINANCE
‘You had Citizens United come to its full fruition.’ she told Codecon in May.
‘So unaccountable money flowing in against me, against other Democrats, in a way that we hadn’t seen and then attached to this weaponized information war.
THE MEDIA
‘American journalists who eagerly and uncritically repeated whatever WikiLeaks dished out during the campaign could learn from the responsible way the French press handled the hack of Macron,’ she writes in What Happened.
Now-president Macron had a massive tranche of his emails hacked and released shortly before the French voted. Many outlets did not report on their contents.
STEVE BANNON AND BREITBART
‘Provided the untrue stories,’ she told the Codecon convention in May.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
‘I set up my campaign and we have our own data operation. I get the nomination. So I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party,’ Clinton said told the Codecon convention in May.
‘I mean, it was bankrupt. It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.’
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
The Republicans were far better prepared for a campaign than the Democrats she claimed, when it came to money and data, telling the Codecon convention: ‘So Trump becomes the nominee and he is basically handed this tried and true, effective foundation.’
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
The data-targeting firm ultimately owned by Robert Mercer, the billionaire Breitbart backer, and his family, is said to have targeted voters to drive them away from Clinton.
‘They ultimately added something and I think again we’d better understand that. The Mercers did not invest all that money for their own amusement,’ she told the Codecon convention.
WOMEN PROTESTERS
The massive demonstrations in Washington and other cities in the wake of the election were organized as an immediate response to Clinton’s shock defeat.
But that did not stop Clinton from writing in What Happened: ‘I couldn’t help but ask where those feelings of solidarity, outrage and passion had been during the election.’
MATT LAUER
The NBC Today show anchor quizzed both candidates at a ‘commander-in-chief forum’ on board Intrepid in New York.
But Clinton – who went first in the back-to-back interviews, complained about Lauer focusing on her secret server and whether it raised questions over her trustworthiness.
‘Lauer had turned what should have been a serious discussion into a pointless ambush. What a waste of time,’ she writes in What Happened. She later delighted in his firing for sexual misconduct, saying in December: ‘Every day I believe more in karma.’
WHITE VOTERS
‘White voters have been fleeing the Democratic party ever since Lyndon Johnson predicted they would,’ she told Vox.
DEMOCRATIC DOCUMENTARY MAKERS
‘We’re not making the documentaries that we’re going to get onto Netflix,’ she told Codecon.
She was asked by the interviewer: ‘This is because Hollywood isn’t liberal enough?’
‘No, it’s because Democrats aren’t putting their money there,’ she replied.
BENGHAZI INVESTIGATORS
The attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in the Libyan city of Benghazi on September 11, 2012, happened when Clinton was Secretary of State. It claimed four American lives, and was the focus of intense investigation by Congress.
Clinton told the Today show: ‘Take the Benghazi tragedy – you know, I have one of the top Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, admitting we’re going to take that tragedy – because, you know, we’ve lost people, unfortunately, going back to the Reagan administration, if you talk about recent times, in diplomatic attacks.
‘But boy, it was turned into a political football. And it was aimed at undermining my credibility, my record, my accomplishments.’
VOTER SUPPRESSION
Suppressing her voters was named by Clinton as one of the major factors in her defeat in her interview on the Today show when she rattled off her laundry list. ‘What was at work here?’ she said.
‘In addition to the mistakes that I made, which I recount in the book, what about endemic sexism and misogyny, not just in politics but in our society, what about the unprecedented action of the FBI director, what about the interference of an adversary nation, what about voter suppression?’
It was a return to a theme – she suggested it was a problem in Wisconsin in an interview in May with New York magazine.
‘I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,’ she said.
‘Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win.’
MITCH McCONNELL
The Senate majority leader is accused of stopping the Obama administration from revealing what Clinton says the Russians were up to, helping tip the balance against her because he did not want a third successive Democratic term in the White House.
‘Mitch McConnell, in what I think of as a not only unpatriotic but despicable act of partisan politics, made it clear that if the Obama Administration spoke publicly about what they knew [on Russia], he would accuse them of partisan politics, of trying to tip the balance toward me,’ she told the New Yorker.
THE SUPREME COURT
Clinton claims the Supreme Court watered down the Voting Rights Act at the Codecon convention.
‘You had effective suppression of votes,’ she said.
‘I was in the senate when we voted 98-0 under a Republican president, George W Bush, to extend the Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court says ‘oh we don’t need it any more’ , throws it out, and Republican governors and legislatures began doing everything they could to suppress the votes.’
Clinton appears to be referring to Second 4(b) of the Act being ruled unconstitutional by the court in 2013, because it relied on out of date data which meant it was not in line with the 15th Amendment.
FATHERS, HUSBANDS, BOYFRIENDS, AND MALE BOSSES
Clinton says that James Comey’s actions in re-opening the FBI investigation allowed men to influence their wives or girlfriends.
‘Women will have no empathy for you because they will be under tremendous pressure – and I’m talking principally about white women – they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers, and husbands, and boyfriends and male employers, not to vote for ‘the girl’,’ she told NPR.
THE INVISIBLE STATE
The newest addition to the list: named by her confidante Lanny Davis as the reason she lost at a reading of his book while Hillary nodded along in approval.