Democrat Hillary Clinton on Saturday blamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey for her surprising defeat in the United States presidential elections on Tuesday. Clinton made the statement during a conference call with her top campaign funders.
The Democratic presidential nominee Clinton was projected as the favourite in the presidential elections in almost every national poll in the United States. However, Donald Trump's unprecedented victory left many shocked across the states, prompting widespread protests. Soon after the election results, thousands of people took to streets to protest Trump's win shouting slogans of 'Not my president, not today.'
The FBI director, James Comeny, had reopened the inquiry into Clinton's use of a private email server, just days ahead of the US elections. Comey went against the FBI tradition of avoiding decisions which could hamper the elections result and sent a letter to the Congress just 11 days ahead of the election date stating that the FBI was reviving the Clinton email case after a new trove of emails had been found. The FBI subsequently gave Clinton a clean chit just a day before the elections.
Ever since her concession speech, Clinton has kept a low profile, however, in her 30-minute conference call she said that Comey's decision to send a letter to the Congress about reviving her case brought the controversy back into the news which resulted in the drop of numbers during the final week of the elections. The FBI, in July, had announced that it would not charge Clinton in her private email server investigations.
Just a week before the elections, Clinton was leading in major polls in many battleground states, she told the donors, "We dropped, and we had to keep really pushing to regain our advantage, which going into last weekend we had. We were once again up in all but two of the battleground states, and we were up considerably in some that we ended up losing. And we were feeling like we had to put it back together," the New York Times reported.
Clinton also told her donors that her team had made a memo which evaluated the changing opinion polls leading up to the election and it was seen that Comey's letter to the Congress proved to be a major turning point days before the elections.
