Can’t Move On: Podesta Reboots the Hillary-Defeat Blame Game

Former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta blamed Russia, the FBI and the prevalence of “fake news” — everything but the candidate and her campaign — for Democrats’ crushing loss to President Donald Trump, during an interview Tuesday.

Podesta piled the excuses on heavy during a livestream event with The Washington Post Tuesday, just one day after he had accepted personal responsibility for Clinton’s loss during an interview with Politico.

“But [the Russians] were also very active in propagating and distributing fake news, working with these alt-right sites and in conjunction with them.”

Podesta, in particular, stewed over revelations contained in the roughly 60,000 emails from his gmail account that were hacked and released by WikiLeaks.

Clinton was externally “undermined and damaged” by the leaked emails Podesta said.

“All that had a kind of swirl and had some impact and I think certainly was as — again, not the Clinton campaign but as the U.S. government said — what started as a program to really undermine the faith in democratic institutions, the faith in the electoral process became morphed into a program to damage and weaken Secretary Clinton, who I think probably [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Russians thought was going to be successful,” Podesta insisted.

Podesta also took particular issue with the timing of the first email dump.

“This was a Friday afternoon and low and behold, a half an hour later as everyone had turned their attention to Billy Bush and Donald Trump and boys on the bus, Wikileaks and Julian Assange started dropping my emails, and that continued on through the process right up and through to election day,” Podesta said.

In addition, the former Clinton campaign chairman blamed “fake news” stories and “alt-right media guys like [Fox News host] Sean Hannity” for crushing Clinton’s presidential aspirations. According to Podesta, Clinton’s political platform, her messaging and her actions had little to do with her loss.

“But [the Russians] were also very active in propagating and distributing fake news, working with these alt-right sites and in conjunction with them,” Podesta said, insisting that this “echo system” of fake news outperformed the “top 20 real news stories from legitimate sites like The Washington Post and The New York Times.”

Although Podesta went into great detail Tuesday concerning the external factors that he believes brought about Clinton’s loss, he struck a more contrite tune the day before when talking to Politico.

“We bear responsibility and it’s a great burden, and I feel it every day,” Podesta had said then. “I mean, we lost this election; we won the popular vote by 3 million votes, but we lost the Electoral College and lost the election to Donald Trump. So, we have a burden of his having the keys to the White House, and you know, codes to the nuclear football.”

Even though he mentioned his grievance about former FBI Director James Comey’s impact in the Monday interview, Podesta did not shy away from claiming it was the campaign’s “responsibility” that voters rejected Clinton.

Podesta’s Tuesday interview with The Post struck a similar tone to the one Clinton herself used earlier in May when she attributed her loss to misogyny, Comey and Russia.

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“I was on the way to winning when a combination of Jim Comey’s 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,” Clinton had said during a Women for Women forum.

Despite Podesta’s and Clinton’s repeated complaints, not every Democrat believes a Clinton victory was a shoo-in before the Russian hacking and Comey’s announcement.

Former White House Communications Director Jen Psaki, who served in former President Barack Obama’s administration, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” earlier in May that she believed Clinton wasn’t “guaranteed” victory before external meddling took place.

“Was sexism a factor? Yes. Was Comey a factor, was Russia a factor? Absolutely,” Psaki had said. “But I’ve watched a lot of focus groups. I’ve looked at a lot of polling over the years, and the perception of her was baked into the cake for about 10 years.”

“I would encourage any Democrat running this year … to look at the focus groups that Priorities USA did. They did them in Wisconsin and in Michigan. And they looked at, they talked to Obama/Trump voters,” Psaki added. “And what came out of them, those focus groups, was something very alarming for Democrats, which is the perception that we’re fighting for the rich people, we’re fighting for the one percent. And if we don’t change what we’re doing, if we don’t listen more, we will keep losing.”