Trump fires back at Clinton: ‘Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?’

Dylan Stableford
·Senior Writer

Hillary Clinton predicted that President Trump would tweet his reaction to her discussion of the 2016 campaign on Tuesday.

During a live interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour at the Women for Women International luncheon in New York City, Clinton touted her popular vote victory over him and argued that she would be president had it not been for Russia’s meddling in the election and FBI Director James Comey’s 11th-hour letter to Congress about the investigation into her use of a private email server.

And late Tuesday, Trump delivered.

“FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!” the president tweeted. “The phony Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?”

Clinton said she took “absolute personal responsibility” for her loss in November, but she later placed blame on Comey and the Kremlin for derailing her White House bid at a crucial moment.

“If the election had been on Oct. 27, I would be your president,” Clinton said. “I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off.”

That day, Comey released a letter saying the agency was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state. (A week later, Comey said in a follow-up letter that bureau found nothing to change its conclusion that Clinton was careless but did not break any laws.)

During the discussion, Clinton pointed to the assessment of FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who believes she would have won if it weren’t for Comey’s letter.

Related: Clinton: I’m ‘part of the resistance’

“Comey had a large, measurable impact on the race,” Silver tweeted in early December. “Harder to say with Russia/Wikileaks because it was drip-drip-drip.”

Clinton said misogyny played a role in her downfall, too.

“Did we make mistakes? Of course we did. Did I make mistakes? Oh my gosh, yes,” she added. “But the reason I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days.”

The 2016 Democratic nominee also took a swipe at Trump, who won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote.

“I did win more than 3 million votes than my opponent,” Clinton said to applause.

Trump was not the only member of the White House to react to Clinton.

“You Ignored WI,” Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, tweeted. “Called us deplorable/irredeemable. Had oodles of $$ & no message. Lost to a better candidate.

Conway signed her tweet from a “Woman in the White House.”

Later Tuesday, Clinton also spoke at Planned Parenthood’s 100th anniversary gala, where she took Republican men to task for their attempts at defunding the women’s health organization.

“As we speak, politicians in Washington are still doing everything they can to roll back the rights and progress we’ve fought so hard for over the last century,” Clinton said. “I mean, could you believe those the photos of groups of men around that conference table deciding to strip away coverage for pregnancy and maternity care?”

She added: “This was a disturbing blast from the past.”

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