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British TV journalist Matt Frei asked Hillary Clinton if she’s still blaming others more than herself for her election loss in an interview Friday.
Frei asked about her appeal to the voter during the 2016 presidential election, saying that her status as a Clinton prevented her gender from helping her.
"Your dynastic appeal or perhaps it was the opposite: The fact that you were called Clinton the fact that you were first lady basically trumped any novelty—if you forgive the term—of being the first female president of the United States," he said. "People looked at your name and your legacy more than they looked at your gender."
Clinton answered by laying out the amount of support she received and then blaming former FBI director James Comey and the Russians for her defeat.
"That doesn’t explain why I led all the way through, why I won the primary by 4 million votes, why I was winning, we had a great convention," she said. "I was thought to have won all three debates. That doesn't explain it, Matt, so that's why I had to really dig deep."
"And, yes, I take responsibility. Obviously, there were things I must have been able to do differently in order to have won," Clinton continued. "But at the end, there was this really perfect storm, and so you had the Comey letter and you had the enormous impact of the Russian theft of emails, the release of them by WikiLeaks, basically now a part of the Russian intelligence apparatus, and the weaponization of that. These were all new phenomena."
"So you're still blaming others more than yourself?" Frei asked
"No, I take ultimate responsibility, I don't blame others, but I think it's important that people understand what happened," Clinton said. "It easy to say, ‘You know she wasn’t a good candidate.’ Then why did lead all the way to the end, why did I get nominated overwhelmingly?"
"Did people lie at the polls?" Frei interjected.
"No, I think there were intervening events that caused people to worry, to have second thoughts," she said.