Washington: Hillary Clinton lashed out at President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Thursday night, describing the hacking against her campaign and the Democratic National Committee as an “attack against our country” that had been motivated by Putin’s “personal beef against me.”
At a Manhattan event to thank her major campaign donors, many of whom are still despondent about her defeat by Donald Trump, Clinton said the hacking was motivated by Putin’s anger at her over an accusation she made when she was secretary of state that Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections were rigged.
“This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country,” Clinton said, according to audio of the event that was obtained by The New York Times. “We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.”
She cast the cyberattacks as direct retaliation for actions she took as secretary of state to protest fraud in the Russian elections.
“People were outraged because they thought they were on a trajectory of better freedom, better opportunity, and they watched that and were appalled,” Clinton said. “Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election.”
Clinton’s first public remarks since the intelligence community concluded that the hacks were specifically aimed at harming her campaign came as the Democratic Party tries to regroup and grapple with how its nominee had lost an election she had been overwhelmingly expected to win.
Clinton and her aides have insisted the loss had to do with what she described Thursday as two “unprecedented factors”: the involvement of the Russians and the suggestion by the FBI director, James B. Comey, days before the election that the investigation into her use of a private email server might be reopened.
But other Democrats have insisted the party needs more self-reflection and blamed the Clinton campaign for relying too heavily on a coalition of black, Latino and young voters, while overlooking the white working-class voters who gave Trump a victory of 77,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“I mean these are good people, man!” Vice-President Joe Biden told CNN last week. “These aren’t racists. These aren’t sexist.”
Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent from Vermont, who challenged Clinton in the Democratic primary, has called for “a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business” and said Trump effectively channelled “the anger and angst and pain that many working-class people are feeling.”
Clinton didn’t address those concerns in the forceful remarks she delivered in a ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, just blocks from Trump Tower. The donors, who had collectively helped raise roughly $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion) to put into her effort, cheered as Clinton, with her former running mate Sen Tim Kaine, Democrat from Virginia, nearby, reminded them she had bested Trump in the popular vote by 2.8 million votes and had narrowly topped President Barack Obama’s vote tally in the 2008 Democratic primary.
She said she had lost the Electoral College to Trump largely because of Comey’s actions and Russian hacking. “Swing state voters made their decisions in the final days, breaking against me because of the FBI letter from Director Comey,” Clinton said, pointing to a data analysis by Nate Silver, the editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight.
Privately, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, has told friends that the couple wished Obama had more forcefully stated before the election that Russia had intervened to weaken his wife’s campaign, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations. A spokesman for Bill Clinton declined to comment.
On Friday, Obama said at a news conference that he had promptly told the public about intelligence reports that Russians had hacked the DNC, but didn’t want to prematurely discuss conclusions about the motive of the cyberattacks.
“I wanted to make sure everybody understood we were playing this thing straight,” Obama said. Otherwise, he added, “It would have become immediately just one more political scrum.”
Trump has cast the government’s conclusions on Russian hacking as a partisan ploy by Obama. He falsely stated that Obama had waited until after the election to raise the issue: “Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?”
Throughout the campaign, Clinton sought to portray Trump as a pawn in Putin’s attempts to weaken American democracy, including accusing him in their final debate in Las Vegas of being the Russian president’s “puppet.” Trump replied: “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.”
Clinton said she supported a bipartisan congressional inquiry into the election meddling and that it should be modelled after the commission that investigated the September 11 terrorist attacks. She cast the hacking as a Cold War-era tactic, with the Kremlin hoping “Americans will either wittingly - or unwittingly - begin to cede their freedoms to a much more powerful state.”
Since her defeat, Clinton has kept a low profile. Her main appearances have come in the form of selfies that have turned up on social media taken by passers-by who have spotted her walking her dogs near her home in Chappaqua, New York. The Clintons have also turned up at New York City restaurants and social functions, including her granddaughter’s ballet recital.
Last week, she spoke in Washington at a retirement tribute to the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, D-Nev., where she denounced the proliferation of fake news and said, self-deprecatingly, “after a few weeks of taking selfies in the woods, I thought it would be a good idea to come out.”
But friends say the brave face Clinton has put on in public obscures how enraged and shellshocked she and Bill Clinton remain about her surprise loss.
Last month, a supporter, Amy Mereson, ran into Clinton in the woods and asked how she was feeling. “Angry,” Clinton replied, according to Mereson’s Facebook post. “It’s a terrible thing that happened.”
