Hillary Clinton on Wednesday blamed deep cooperation between Donald Trump and Russia for her loss and said she hopes investigators will quickly connect the dots that show Trump’s culpability.
She admitted that during the campaign, people rejected her and her team’s assessment that Russia was working with Trump to hand Trump the White House, but that she was dismissed.
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“We were basically shooed away,” she said at a tech conference in California on Wednesday. “Like, oh, you know, there she goes, vast right-wing conspiracy, now it’s a vast Russian conspiracy.”
“Well, it turned out we were right, and we saw evidence of it,” she said.
That line is a reference to her own comment in the late 1990s when she told NBC that allegations that President Bill Clinton had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky were part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring him down. That comment was later dismissed with the Clinton affair was confirmed.
Clinton said based on what she’s seen so far, she is “leaning Trump” when it comes to who was to blame for her election loss.
“I think it’s pretty hard not to,” she said. “I think the marriage of the domestic fake news operations, the domestic RNC Republican-allied data, you know, combined with the very effective capabilities that the Russians brought, you know, basically, the group running this was the GRU, which is the military intelligence arm of the Russian military, and they have a very sophisticated cyber operation.”
“In bed with WikiLeaks, in bed with Guccifer, in bed with DCLeaks, and you know, DCLeaks and Guccifer which were dropping a lot of this stuff on me, they haven’t done anything since early January,” she said. “So, I mean, their job was done. They got their job done.”
“I believe that what was happening to me was unprecedented,” she added.
Clinton has been ridiculed for refusing to blame her own performance for her loss to Trump. But she also admitted that she also had the expectation of winning.
“I also think I was a victim of the very broad assumption that I was going to win,” she said.
