Hillary Clinton told donors in a conference call
Saturday that FBI Director James Comey delivered a double whammy to
her candidacy in the final days of the campaign by taking another
look at emails related to Clinton's private server before abruptly
saying he found no wrongdoing.
A member of her national finance committee who was on the call
told CNN that Clinton placed at least some of the blame on Comey
for her stunning defeat to Donald Trump.
She said the first letter from Comey, sent to Congress on
October 28, stopped the momentum she had built after three debates
and the release of Trump's "Access Hollywood" tape.
She said the second letter, which came nine days later and
exonerated Clinton, simply fired up Trump supporters and didn't put
any on-the-fence voters who had been leaning her way at ease.
She said the FBI development was too much to "overcome," the
donor on the call told CNN, but she acknowledged there were other
headwinds facing her campaign that they didn't adequately
combat.
But several Democrats interviewed in the aftermath of the
election say Clinton is hardly blameless, pointing to her original
decision in 2009 to create a private email server outside of
government systems during her time as secretary of state.
"If there had been no private server in the first place there
would not have been an FBI investigation," Jim Manley, a longtime
Democratic strategist, wrote in a Twitter message on Saturday.
On the call, Clinton urged supporters to move forward and keep
fighting for their beliefs.
The conversation, which lasted about 30 minutes, was not open to
the press. Another Democrat on the call said Clinton described the
loss as "heartbreaking."
As she said in her concession speech Wednesday, Clinton told
supporters that she was sorry for not being able to defeat
Trump.
The call was far from a full accounting of the stunning upset,
but rather a chance for Clinton to thank her supporters directly
after the hard-fought campaign.
She was not overtly critical of Trump, two participants on the
call told CNN, but she did urge those to rise up and continue
fighting against divisive rhetoric targeting immigrants and
others.
She did not engage in a back-and-forth over other factors that
contributed to her loss, including what many Democrats said was a
failure to articulate an economic message that appealed to
working-class voters across the Rust Belt.