Hillary Clinton takes "responsibility” for loss, but says others contributed
Speaking at the Code Conference in California, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she takes responsibility for her campaign's missteps, while at the same time arguing that she lost last November's election largely for reasons beyond her control.
"I take responsibility for every decision I made, but that's not why I lost," Clinton said.
Clinton called media coverage of her campaign "unprecedented" and criticized "weaponized information" from fake news sites as major factors in her unsuccessful campaign.
"Over the summer we went and told anyone we could find that the Russians were messing with the election and we were basically shooed away," she said. "We couldn't get the press to cover it," she later added.
She specifically called out media coverage of her private email scandal, in which she used an unauthorized private email server to conduct communications during her time as secretary of state in the Obama administration.
"They covered it like it was Pearl Harbor," Mrs. Clinton said of the press.
"The overriding issue that affected the election that I had any control over — because I had no control over the Russians — was the way the use of my email account was turned into the greatest scandal since Lord knows when," she said.
Clinton also looked to social media, saying sites like Facebook and Twitter have been "victimized by deliberate efforts to shape the conversation and push it towards conspiracies, lies, false information."
Clinton, however, admitted that she had not been a "perfect candidate."
"I never said I was a perfect candidate, and I certainly have never said I ran perfect campaigns-- but I don't know who is, or did," she said. "Were there things we could have done differently? You could say that about any campaign," she later said.
As for her next move in politics, Clinton is getting involved with political action organizations such as "Onward Together," which she founded this month.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "I have a big stake in what's happening to this country."