Former President Bill Clinton is blaming Russia for wife Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
In “Citizen: My Life After the White House” (Knopf), Clinton ruminates on what he’s been doing since 2000. One candid excerpt admits his anger at what happened in 2016, when presumptive favorite Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.
The ex-president says he “couldn’t sleep for two years” and experienced “outbursts of rage” from those results, creating an atmosphere where he “wasn’t fit to be around.”
“The whole thing is hard for me to write,” Clinton wrote. “I apologize to all those who endured my outbursts of rage, which lasted for years and bothered or bored people who thought it pointless to rehash things that couldn’t be changed,” the 42nd president said.
Clinton blames several factors for his wife’s defeat, including former FBI Director James Comey’s email investigations, a hostile press, and particularly Russian influence on social media.
“Almost two years after the election, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a highly regarded social scientist, said Russia’s cyber attacks piled on top of Comey’s interventions were effective enough to persuade voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to vote for third parties or stay at home,” he wrote.
“If so, Putin’s enablers were Comey and the political press.”
Clinton also addressed his relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein, a former associate who allowed the former president to fly on his controversial “Lolita Express” airplane. Clinton admits that he took the rides, but never visited Epstein’s island retreat, where underage orgies allegedly occurred.
“The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward. I wish I had never met him,” the former president lamented.
“I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing,” he wrote. “He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it, and by the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him. I’ve never visited his island.”
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