Democrat Hillary Clinton on Tuesday said she would have won the United States presidential elections last year, if it were not for Russian hackers' interference and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey's letter in the last stage of the campaign.
Comey, just a week before the elections, had sent a letter to Congress stating that the FBI was reopening investigations into the Clinton email case based on new information. Though the FBI director later cleared Clinton of charges, the damage was done.
Clinton told a New York conference on Tuesday that she was bogged down by Comey and WikiLeaks, which released campaign chairperson John Podesta's emails ahead of the elections. Podesta's and many senior Democrats' emails were allegedly hacked by Russians.
"If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president," Clinton told a women's conference moderated by CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
"It wasn't a perfect campaign, but I was on the way to winning until a combination of Comey's letter and Russian WikiLeaks," the Democrat said of the loss to Republican Donald Trump. "The reason why I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days," Reuters reported.
The Democrat put misogyny as one of the prime reasons for her defeat in the presidential polls. Clinton said becoming the first female US president would have been a "really big deal."
Clinton, however, took personal responsibility for the campaign's mistakes.
"I was the candidate, I was the person who was on the ballot. I am very aware of the challenges, the problems, the shortfalls that we had," Clinton said.
She also said she was convinced that Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to tilt the scales towards a Trump presidency. The Democrat also criticised US President Donald Trump for his foreign policy views, particularly North Korea, and his tweeting habit.
"I'm back to being an activist citizen - and part of the resistance," Clinton said.
