Hillary Clinton Blames Russian Hacks, FBI Letter For Her 2016 Election Loss To Donald Trump In Meeting With Donors

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, in a meeting with campaign donors Thursday, did not mince words when assessing how exactly she figured she had lost the election. Two things, she said, really killed her in crucial swing states: The late-release of a letter from FBI Director James Comey that raised questions about potential mishandling of classified materials and Russian interference.

Both were "unprecedented."

“Make no mistake, as the press is finally catching up to the facts, which we desperately tried to present to them during the last months of the campaign,” Clinton said at the New York City event, according to an exclusive report from the New York Times. “This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.”

Concern has been building recently around the Russian hacking, which appeared to favor now-President-elect Donald Trump. Those hacks outed emails from the Democratic National Committee and from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. The release of those documents, first in the summer and then on a daily schedule in the weeks before the election, focused negative attention onto Clinton’s campaign at a crucial time when voters were determining who to support.

Podesta himself penned a blistering op-ed published in the Washington Post Thursday criticizing the FBI for not following up on the hacked Democratic National Committee emails.

“I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials,” Podesta wrote, contrasting that alleged lack of follow-through with the year-long probe the agency conducted to analyze Clinton’s use of a private email server while at the State Department.

The FBI cleared Clinton for her use of emails twice after those probes. The second time came just two days before the 2016 election when Comey sent a letter to Congress indicating that the agency had not changed its opinion on whether or not to charge Clinton.

Trump won the election with 306 Electoral College votes while Clinton took 232. Clinton, however, won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes.