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Former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has blamed Federal Bureau of Investigation, Wikileaks and Russian hackers for her defeat in the November 8 presidential elections.
Clinton, 69, was speaking to Christiane Amanpour of the CNN during an interview at Women’s International Forum regarding the current political issues in New York.
"If the election had been on October 27th, I'd be your president. And it wasn't, it was on October 28th and there was just a lot of funny business going on around that,” Clinton said.
United States President Donald Trump has said Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey was the ‘best thing’ that ever happened to his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton ahead of the last year’s general elections.
Trump’s remarks came hours after Clinton said in an interview that Comey, Wikileaks and Russian hackers were responsible for her defeat.
He said the Democrats had used the ‘phony’ Russian hacking story as a justification for their loss in the November 8 presidential elections.
‘FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!’ Trump, 70, said in a late night tweet.
‘The phony... ...Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election,’ he said in another tweet.
‘Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?’ he tweeted.
“It wasn’t a perfect campaign. There is no such thing. But I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey's (sic) letter on October 28th and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me, but got scared off,” she said.
“The evidence for that intervening event is, compelling, persuasive,” she said.
“Ask yourself this, within an hour or two of the ‘Hollywood Access’ tape being made public, the Russian theft of John Podesta’s emails hit WikiLeaks. What a coincidence. So, I mean you just can’t make this stuff up,” Clinton said.
Responding to a question on North Korea, Clinton called for a regional effort.
“There has to be a regional effort to basically incentivise the North Korean regime to understand that it will pay a much bigger price regionally, primarily from China, if it pursues this reckless policy of nuclear weapons development and very dangerously for us, the missiles that can deliver those nuclear packages to places like Hawaii and eventually, the West Coast of the US,” she said.
Noting that she takes the North Korean threat very seriously, Clinton said she does not believe that the US alone is able to really put the pressure on this North Korea regime that needs to be placed.
“Now, the North Koreans are always interested, not just Kim Jong-un, but his father before him, were always interested in trying to get Americans to come to negotiate, to elevate their status and their position, she said.
“We should be very careful about giving that away. You should not offer that in the absence of broader strategic framework to try to get China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, to put the kind of pressure on the regime that will finally bring them to the negotiating table with some kind of realistic prospect for change,” Clinton said.
During the interview, Clinton described Syria as another one of those wicked problems which everybody is desperately trying to figure out how to stop the civil war, how to prevent Iran from increasing its influence, how to prevent Russia from having a real foothold in the Middle East, which is something that they are desperately seeking.
“So now Turkey and what it’s going to do is a big question mark, as well. So there’s lots that this strike had really nothing to do with that are critical issues that still have to be addressed,” she said.