Hillary Clinton says "the most important" of her mistakes that lead to her 2016 election defeat was her use of personal email as secretary of state.
In her first television interview, with CBS News "Sunday Morning" host Jane Pauley, Clinton declared the "forces… at work in 2016 were unlike anything that I've ever seen or read about. It was a perfect storm" — including the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
"The most important of the mistakes I made was using personal email," she confessed. "That was my responsibility. It was presented in such a negative way and I could never gets out from under it."
But also she flashed some defiance at then-FBI Director James Comey, who after announcing in July 2016 that he'd not recommend any criminal charges against her for mishandling classified information with the private email server, still called the misuse "extremely careless."
"I don't know quite what audience he was playing to, other than-- maybe some, you know, right-wing commentators, right-wing members of Congress, whatever," Clinton said dismissively.
She also railed at Comey for announcing before Election Day that there'd be an examination of her emails that were found on a home computer of Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of her close aide, Huma Abedin.
It came "11 days before the election," Clinton said. "And it raised the specter that, somehow, the investigation was being reopened. It just stopped my momentum."
"At the same time he does that about a closed investigation, there's an open investigation into the Trump campaign and their connections with Russia," she continued.
"You never hear a word about it. And when asked later, he goes, 'Well, it was too close to the election.' Now, help me make sense of that. I can't understand it."
Clinton also was unapologetic for her campaign trail gaffe in which she charged "You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables."
"I thought Trump was behaving in a deplorable manner," Clinton said. "I thought a lot of his appeals to voters were deplorable. I thought his behavior, as we saw on the 'Access Hollywood' tape, was deplorable. And there were a large number of people who didn't care. It did not matter to them. And he turned out to be a very effective reality TV star."
She said her opponents were "already energized" before the slam, but conceded, "I'm sorry I gave him a political gift of any kind," adding: "I don't think that was determinative."
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