Hillary Clinton Opens Up For First Time On Why She Thinks She Lost The Election

Hillary Clinton opened up about the effects the targeted email hacking by Russian actors had on the results of the presidential election.

A revealed CIA report showed the agency had concluded that Russians hacked Democratic email accounts with the intent of harming Clinton's campaign and helping that of Donald Trump.

Clinton spoke to a group of campaign donors in Manhattan on Thursday night.

There, the New York Times reported, she addressed her anger at the Russian attacks, claiming them as one of the major reasons she lost the election.

She said that the Russians aimed to "undermine our democracy" and that Vladimir Putin acted on a personal vendetta against her. Clinton said,

Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election.

The other major reason she addressed was the FBI releasing a letter saying they were reinvestigating her emails just before Election Day.

That letter was kind of unprecedented, given that the FBI had been keeping other investigations into both Clinton and Trump quiet throughout the election. It was also misleadingly panic-inducing.

On Thursday night, Clinton said,

Swing-state voters made their decisions in the final days breaking against me because of the FBI letter from Director Comey.

Clinton did bring up the Russian email hacking during the campaign, but it was not met with as much attention as the latest revealed CIA report got.

Of course, we will never be able to figure out exactly how much the Russian email hacking (and subsequent hacked email leaks by WikiLeaks) and the FBI letter actually affected votes.

But there is no question that they had an effect.

And, of course, there were many other factors that helped Clinton lose, including a decades-long attack on Clinton from the Republicans, poor strategic decisions from the Clinton campaign on where to go campaign and plain old American racism and misogyny.

Citations: The Hill, New York Times