A leaked recording of a conference call between Hillary Clinton and top party donors reveals Clinton puts her election defeat down to FBI director James Comey's interference in the campaign.
With voting day just two weeks off, Comey broke with protocol to announce that a further criminal investigation into Clinton emails was underway. Nine days later he just as surprisingly cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing in the follow-up investigation.
Did Comey throw the election to Donald Trump? Clinton's not alone in believing that. Some 20-million votes were cast while Clinton was under Comey's engineered shadow.
"There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful," Mrs Clinton told the donors on a farewell conference call on Saturday.
"But our analysis is that 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."
According to US media, she added that Mr Comey's later recommendation that she should face no charges had energised Mr Trump's supporters.
I believe her. I don't doubt for a second that Comey deliberately threw a last-minute wrench in Clinton's gears. He may not have known how damaging the impact would be but he had to have known that there would be no time for Clinton to undo the damage.
Was this a coincidence, a matter of happenstance? Well we know that police investigators are trained not to write off events of this sort as coincidence, not until there's something that shows they weren't intentional. Comey, a Republican, does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
11 comments:
Some 20-million votes were cast while Clinton was under Comey's engineered shadow.
These were mail in votes.
Even the right wing ENB radio in the USA reported this.
Reminds me of Chisty Clark's last minute hail Mary 'Jobs from fracked gas ploy that won her the last Provincial election.
Politics is a dirty dishonest business no matter who you support.
TB
He is a real idiot. There is no reason why he couldn't have followed well established protocol and waited a few weeks until after the election before publicly acknowledging that the FBI was investigating more emails.
I don't think he was being dishonest, but just got so caught up in the FBI's internal problems with "emailgate" leaks that he lost sight of the fact that because the election was happening and he needed to stay quiet for a bit, leaks and the FBI's reputation bedamned.
Foreign politicians would probably find it to their advantage to study recent Canadian history.
We have Brexit, which probably would not be happening if the British parliament (especially the opposition Labour and Lib-Dems) had studied their recent Canadian history and insisted upon a clear question, and a clear majority.
And, as TheMoundOfSound earlier blogged, we have emailgate in which Comey is reprising the roll of Zaccardelli.
And Anonymous is correct in noting the fickleness of the left wing vote. It cost the NDP the last election in B.C. because Dix couldn't mobilize enough voters, despite the polls being hugely favourable towards him. Similarly Clinton would have won if she could have got Dems out to the ballot box, and not been so complacent.
This from Greenwald is pretty damning.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/11/glenn-greenwald-trump-will-have-vast-powers-he-can-thank-democrats-for-them/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
I hope they haven't dumped the piece. I've saved it if they have.
The thing I have been thinking, Mound, is the toll a campaign like this, with its subsequent loss, must be taking on Clinton. Like her or not, she put everything she had into it, and to lose after all of that must be devastating both psychically and physically. She is no doubt a profoundly disillusioned woman.
Thomas Frank was on CBC this morning with his analysis of the election, "Trump won because the Democrats betrayed the working class".
Forget anything Hillary Clinton says; she's a technocrat. I liken Clinton with Stephen Harper, both policy wonks who love to have their fingers on the reins of power but who have no feel for the plight of common people.
I hope Justin Trudeau listened to Thomas Frank's analysis of the American election. I hope the BC NDP listened. Political parties have to pay attention to the working class.
Trump didn't win - Clinton lost.
Trump got fewer votes than either McCain or Romney, and Clinton failed to get the votes out.
Anon 12:45, Trump got fewer votes than McCain, Romney and CLINTON! Indeed, as counting continues, Clinton's on track to win more votes than any other US presidential candidate in history except Barack Obama!
If the result had been reversed, with Trump winning the popular vote and Clinton winning the EC, could you imagine the howls of outrage about a "fixed election"?
Thanks for this, Anonymous. Anyone who thinks HRC was complacent or didn't care about people (like Harper no less!) haven't been paying attention; or have been paying too much attention to the right-wing vilification campaign.
The obvious question is how much damage did Comey cause. According to EJ Dionne in the WaPo, quite a lot:
... lest anyone doubt that the outsized attention given to the matter of Clinton’s use of a private server was decisive, consider that 45 percent of voters said that her use of private email bothered them “a lot,” and they voted better than 12-to-1 for Trump.
Anyong....I wonder how much Comey was paid by the Trump Jonesing crew to commit this dastardly deed?
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