Bill Clinton blames ‘mainstream media’ for Hillary’s defeat to Trump

The US has accused Russia of meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, but has failed to provide evidence

Former US President Bill Clinton has blamed “mainstream media” coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy for her loss in the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. Democrats have also for years accused Russia of helping Trump defeat Clinton, despite no evidence ever been found to back the allegations. 

In an interview with MSNBC that aired on Monday, the former president discussed an excerpt from his book, ‘Citizen: My Life After The White House’, published in November, highlighting the “rage” he felt after Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, despite polls predicting her victory. 

The 42nd American president took aim at media outlets for their focus on his wife’s controversial use of a private email server for official correspondence instead of a protected, government-controlled one, during her time as US secretary of state between 2009 and 2013. 

Clinton, who in his book described the 2016 election as the “darkest election possible in the United States,” claimed the media blew the email scandal out of proportion.

“It’s easier for us to know what happened in 2016 in some ways than what happened in 2024 in terms of all of it because in 2016 you had two highly unusual things,” the former president told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.

“First of all, the mainstream media told the American people repeatedly that the biggest issue was Hillary’s emails – that’s what they said, not just Fox.”

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The narrative about Hillary Clinton’s emails made the headlines in the later stages of the 2016 campaign, casting a shadow over the Democratic candidate. At the time, US intelligence agencies claimed that Russia hacked the email of senior Democrats as part of a wide-ranging operation to damage Clinton’s campaign and assist Trump.

“When in fact, even the Trump State Department said she neither sent nor received a single solitary email on her personal device marked classified,” the former president noted, insisting that his wife “followed the rule that then existed, the rules were changed after she left office.”

Democrats have blamed Clinton’s loss to Trump on ‘Russian meddling’, triggering years of speculation about ‘collusion’ between the Republican candidate and the Kremlin.

Their claim that Trump had ties with Moscow was based on a ‘dossier’ fabricated by a British spy. From there, Democrats insinuated that WikiLeaks’ publishing of internal Democratic National Committee documents and personal emails of Clinton’s campaign manager had something to do with Moscow, while ‘Russian bots and trolls’ posted ‘misinformation’ on social media, which somehow undermined the election. 

The FBI investigated Clinton for using a private email server for her correspondence as secretary of state and concluded that she and her team had been “extremely careless,” but found no evidence of foreign intrusion.