Former President Bill Clinton said he blames the “mainstream media” for the loss of his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
The 78-year-old made the comments while promoting his new book “Citizen” in an interview on MSNBC with Joe Scarborough.
“It’s easier in some ways for us to know what happened in 2016 than what happened in 2024,” Clinton said.
‘Because in 2016 you had two very special things. “First, the mainstream media repeatedly told the American people that the biggest problem was Hillary’s emails,” he continued.
Clinton argued that it wasn’t just conservative news media like Fox News that was paying non-stop attention to Clinton’s emails, but all media.
Clinton’s use of a personal email server as secretary of state plagued her with near-constant reporting during the 2016 campaign.
In July, then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not recommend charges in the investigation into her email use, but just days before the election he publicly announced that the FBI was reviewing additional emails in the investigation was.
Ultimately, the investigation found no evidence that Clinton had deliberately mishandled classified information.
Former President Bill Clinton said in an interview promoting his new book that he blames the “mainstream media” for the loss of his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in 2016, with the continued reporting of her emails .
Even Trump’s State Department said she has not sent or received a single email on her personal device marked ‘secret,’ one. And second, she followed the rules as they existed at the time. The rules changed after she left office,” Clinton said on MSNBC.
He said the whole story was ‘written as if she had done something horrible.’
Clinton argued that Comey’s actions made the situation worse and shared that Clinton was an extremely “down the line” person.
The former president even said that his wife didn’t even tell him when the US captured Osama bin Laden because President Obama told the team not to tell anyone.
“It was ridiculous to the extent that people actually started making up a smear about her,” Clinton said.
“And I think they did it because they thought if they said something bad about Trump, they had to say something bad about her,” he added.
Ultimately, Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, but lost the Electoral College vote to Trump, who later became president.
2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton answers questions about her emails during the campaign. Ultimately, she won the popular vote but lost the election to Donald Trump. The email investigation found that she had not intentionally mishandled classified information
The Democratic president also shared his thoughts on the 2024 election and the major hurdle Vice President Kamala Harris faced heading into the November election.
He said many voters believed Trump’economically successful before COVID hit.”
Clinton also said the Democratic presidential candidate “had an almost impossible job.”
He pointed out that Harris became the nominee after President Biden dropped out of the race in July and there was no time for primaries.
Clinton said Harris was “basically a stranger to the people.”
“People knew what they liked about Trump and what they didn’t,” Clinton said. “And about 54 percent of them would have happily voted for someone else, but people didn’t feel like they knew about Harris.”
Clinton also said Trump has essentially inherited the Obama-era recovery.
“There was no inflation, and people felt it,” he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris concedes the 2024 election to President-elect Donald Trump. Former President Bill Clinton said she had a “nearly impossible task” in the campaign with President Biden’s late departure
The former president said Democrats should ‘go back and meet people where they live and talk to them about what they are interested in.”
He pointed out that Biden will leave office with the most jobs created in a four-year term of any president in history, but that number is still nowhere near the number of people affected by inflation.
‘I don’t even think the real problem is whether you should be verbally more left or center. “I think you have to talk like people… who will make a difference in the outcome of the election,” he said.
“You don’t have to sell what you believe in, but you do have to meet people where they live.”