Hillary Clinton: Yeah, It Was Comey


On a conference call today, Hillary Clinton blamed her last-minute loss on FBI Director James Comey:

Speaking with Democrats who raised over $100,000 for her failed bid for the presidency, the former secretary of state said Comey’s second letter — just three days before the election — did more damage than the first, which landed just 11 days out, according to one individual on the call, who described her tone as clearly sad but hopeful.

Clinton told participants that the campaign’s data saw her numbers plunge after the first letter, then rebounded. But the second letter, she said, awakened Donald Trump’s voters.

So Comey’s first letter, which revived suspicions that Clinton had done something wrong, hurt her, but the second letter was even more damaging. Although it theoretically cleared her, its real effect was to remind everyone that “charges” had been on the table in the first place. And of course, the nation’s headline writers played right along:

For what it’s worth, we now know that both the Trump campaign and the Clinton campaign agree that Comey’s intervention played a significant role in the election. It wasn’t Clinton’s only problem, but at this point it’s just special pleading to pretend that it wasn’t a key reason for her loss. If it weren’t for Comey, nobody would be talking about the white working class or disenchanted millennials or third-party candidates. We’d be talking instead about the implosion of the Republican Party and arguing over who Clinton should choose as her Treasury Secretary.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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