Hillary Clinton speaking on Capitol Hill, December 2016, Photo : Screenshot/NBC News
Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, says she will not run for president again although she is “not done with politics.”
The former secretary of state, whose new book “What Happened” is set to be published on Tuesday, spoke on CBS-TV on Sunday to announce that she would not seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
“Is your political career over?” Mrs. Clinton was asked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Clinton responded. “As an active politician, it’s over. I am done with being a candidate,” she added. “But I am not done with politics, because I literally believe that our country’s future is at stake.”
Mrs. Clinton spoke days before the release of her new book, “What Happened,” which accounts her experience in the 2016 presidential election.
The former Democratic nominee reflects on her loss to President Trump in the 2016 campaign and ultimately takes responsibility for the defeat. But she also points to outside factors that she says played a role in her loss, such as alleged Russian election meddling and the federal probe into her private email server.
Mrs. Clinton even openly questions the actions taken by former President Obama and former Vice President Biden during and after the campaign. Despite her loss, Clinton told CBS she takes pride in having run a traditional campaign, compared to Trump’s unconventional campaign.
The book, published by CBS-owned Simon & Schuster, includes an accounting for many of the missteps and strategic errors that Clinton said she made during the campaign, and for which she explicitly takes responsibility.
“The most important of the mistakes I made was using personal email,” Mrs. Clinton said during the interview.
The book includes a lengthy defence of her decision, after becoming secretary of state, to use an email account hosted on a server in the basement of her Chappaqua, New York, home for official business. It also delves into an accounting of the investigations and media scrutiny she faced during the 2016 campaign.
Mrs. Clinton pins particular blame on then-FBI Director James Comey’s decision to speak publicly about his agency’s investigation a few days before the election. She also discusses at length alleged Russian interference in the election, Trump’s ties to Russia, and developments through the first half of 2017.
Another mistake that Clinton admitted in the book was her decision to deliver paid speeches to Wall Street firms after leaving the State Department. While her speeches to investment bank Goldman Sachs Group and other companies were meant to be “interesting” to her audiences, they weren’t newsworthy, she wrote.
Still, they gave her opponents — first, Senator Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary race, and then Trump — ammunition to use against her. “My opponents spun wild tales about what terrible things I must have said behind closed doors and how as president I would be forever in the pocket of the shadowy bankers who had paid my speaking fees. I should have seen that coming,” Mrs. Clinton wrote.
“When you know why you’re doing something and you know there’s nothing more to it and certainly nothing sinister, it’s easy to assume that others will see it the same way.”
Ultimately, it was “a mistake,” she said.
The former first lady’s loss in 2016 is considered one of the biggest upsets in modern U.S. political history and a huge challenge to the Democratic party, which found itself out of touch with small town and rural America.
