Clinton blames FBI, Russia for her presidential loss

By Safvan Allahverdi

WASHINGTON (AA) - Former presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton on Tuesday claimed she was very close to winning the 2016 presidential election until her bid was derailed by FBI Director James Comey and Russia.

Speaking to CNN at a Women for Women event in New York, Clinton accepted partial responsibility for her loss, but also said Comey and Moscow were to blame.

"I was on the way to winning until a combination of James Comey's letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off," Clinton said.

She cited polling analyst Nate Silver who she said maintains Clinton would have become president if not for the October letter sent by Comey to Congress that swayed the contest in favor of her opponent, President Donald Trump.

"If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president. And it wasn’t," she said. "There was just a lot of funny business going on around that."

Still, Clinton acknowledged that mistakes within her campaign also led to her loss.

An email controversy linked to Clinton's time as America's top diplomat became the Achilles' heel of her campaign. It was revealed that between 2009 and 2013 she used a private email server, potentially exposing classified information.

And in the final months of the primaries, sensitive details of the internal workings of the Democratic Party were exposed, appearing to bring to light the party leaderships' preference for Clinton over her challenger, Bernie Sanders.

The revelations led to the ouster of former Democratic Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz who was supposed to ensure party leaders remained neutral during the primary process.

U.S. intelligence agencies have blamed the hacking campaign that exposed the scandal on Russia as part of a wider "influence campaign" in the run up to the Nov. 8 polls.