Former President Bill Clinton said he blames the ‘mainstream media’ for his wife former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.
The 78-year-old made the comments while promoting his new book ‘Citizen’ in an interview on MSNBC with Joe Scarborough.
‘It’s easier for us to know what happened in 2016 in some ways than it is what happened in 2024,’ Clinton said.
‘Because in 2016, you had two highly unusual things. First of all, the mainstream media told the American people repeatedly that the biggest issue was Hillary’s emails,’ he went on.
Clinton argued it was not just conservative news outlets like Fox News that focused nonstop on Clinton’s emails but all the media.
Clinton’s use of a personal email server as secretary of state plagued her during the 2016 campaign with near constant coverage.
That 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 the FBI was reviewing additional emails in the probe.
In the end, the investigation found no evidence 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 his wife former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 with the constant coverage of her emails
‘Even the Trump State Department said she neither sent nor received a single solitary email on her personal device marked classified, one. And two, she followed the rules as they then existed. The rules were changed after she left office,’ Clinton said on MSNBC.
He said the entire story was ‘written as if she had done something hideous.’
Clinton argued Comey’s actions made it worse and shared how Clinton was an extremely ‘down the line’ person.
The former president even shared his wife didn’t even tell him when the U.S. got Osama bin Laden because President Obama told the team not to tell anyone.
‘It was ludicrous to the extent to which people went to essentially fabricate a smear on her,’ Clinton said.
‘And I think they did it because they thought they had to mention something bad about her if they said something bad about Trump,’ he added.
In the end, Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, but lost the Electoral College vote to Trump who went on to become president.
2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton answering questions about her emails during the campaign. In the end, she won the popular vote but lost the election to Donald Trump. The email probe found she did not deliberately mishandling classified information
The Democratic president also shared his thoughts on the 2024 election and how big a hurdle Vice President Kamala Harris faced heading into the November election.
He said a lot of voters believed Trump was ‘economically successful before COVID hit.’
Clinton also said the Democratic presidential nominee ‘had an almost impossible job.’
He pointed out Harris became the nominee after President Biden dropped out of the race in July and there was no time to have primaries.
Clinton said Harris was ‘in effect, a stranger to people.’
‘People knew what they liked about Trump and what they didn’t,’ Clinton said. ‘And about 54 percent of them were, would have happily voted for somebody else, but people didn’t feel that they knew about Harris.’
Clinton also said Trump did in fact inherit the Obama-era recovery.
‘There was no inflation, and people felt that,’ he said.
Vice President Kamala Harris conceding the 2024 election to President-elect Donald Trump. Former President Bill Clinton said she had an ‘almost impossible job’ in the campaign with President Biden’s late exit
The former president said Democrats need to ‘go back and meet people where they live and talk to them about what they’re interested in.’
He pointed out Biden will leave office with the most jobs created in one four year term of any president in history, but that number is still no where near the number of people who were impacted by inflation.
‘I don’t even believe the real problem is whether you should be more verbally left or center. I think you’ve got to talk like people… who will make the difference in the outcome of the election,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to sell out what you believe in, but you do have to meet people where they live.’
