During a conference call with campaign donors on Saturday, Hillary Clinton placed some of the blame for her loss on the letter from FBI Director James Comey announcing that investigators would review new emails related to the probe into her email use, according to several reports.
“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” she said, according to the Washington Post. “But our analysis is that (FBI Director James B.) Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”
“We dropped, and we had to keep really pushing ahead to regain our advantage — which going into the last weekend, we had. We were once again up in all but two of the battleground states, and we were up considerably in some that we ended up losing. And we were feeling like we had put it back together,” Clinton added, according to the Washington Post.
The former secretary of state also indicated that the second letter from Comey again clearing Clinton of wrongdoing actually pushed Trump supporters to the polls.
“Just as we were back up on the upward trajectory, the second letter from Comey essentially doing what we knew it would — saying there was no there there — was a real motivator for Trump’s voters,” Clinton said, according to the Post.
Sounds accurate to me.
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence but every time I look at what Comey did and how he did it, I still can’t help but wonder.
I don’t care whether it was malice or incompetence. The result was the same. Why the hell hasn’t he lost his job yet? If I acted that maliciously or incompetently - it doesn’t matter which - in my job, I would be digging deeply into the classified ads now.
What kind of analysis was done? I’m guessing it was a bunch of navel gazing.
This is certainly plausible, but it seems to me Clinton’s team gravely misread the electorate and their internal polling appears to have been off.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think they fully expected to win some or many of the battleground states…despite Comey’s letters and his unforgettable incompetence.