In an on-stage interview at the 2017 Code Conference on Wednesday, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went full Alex Jones conspiracy theorist on all the nefarious factors that stole the election from her (none of which included her campaign utterly neglecting the Rust Belt states that ultimately cost her the presidency). The most important factor, of course, was the Russia-Trump Collusion, for which there is still no evidence despite the Left’s months-long concerted effort to dig up something, anything to prove it. While Clinton repeatedly returned to RussiaTrump, she also expounded on a few more of the insidious players who thwarted her presidential dream, including the mainstream media, the Democratic National Committee, Facebook, Twitter bots, and stupid Americans who can’t tell the difference between fake news and real news (read: news that benefits Republicans vs. news that benefits Democrats).
The sit-down with Hillary was co-hosted by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who mostly offered up opportunities for Clinton to vent and attempted to give her wild-eyed conspiracy theories a sense of gravitas (video of full interview below). The three spent a large portion of the interview discussing Russia’s meddling with the election, during which Clinton alleged that “1,000 Russian agents” and “millions” of Russian Twitter bots were almost certainly coordinating with the Trump campaign. Here’s an excerpt of Clinton’s convoluted conspiracy theory:
Clinton: Through content farms, through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will … The other side was using content that was just flat-out false, and delivering it in a very personalized way, both sort of above the radar screen and below. And you know, look, I’m not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination. That really influenced the information that people were relying on. And there have been some studies done since the election that if you look — let’s pick Facebook. If you look at Facebook, the vast majority of the news items posted were fake. They were connected to, as we now know, the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages. They were connected to the bots that are just out of control. We see now this new information about Trump’s Twitter account being populated by millions of bots. And it was such a new experience. I understand why people on their Facebook pages would think, “Oh, Hillary Clinton did that, I did not know that. Well that’s going to affect my opinion about her.” And we did not engage in false content. We may have tried to put every piece of information in the best possible light, and explanations, but we weren’t in the same category as the other side.
After complaining that she “inherit[ed] nothing from the Democratic Party” — which “was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong,” while Trump was supposedly handed some unfairly cutting edge data operation — she returned to the Republicans and Russians supposedly colluding to spread “false stories.” That’s when she brought up the mysterious “machine learning” and “algorithms” and the Macedonia-based “fake news sites” which helped bring her down:
Clinton: Now, the question is, where and how did the Russians get into this? And I think it’s a very important question. So, I assume that a lot of people here may have — and if you haven’t, I hope you will — read the declassified report by the Intelligence community that came out in early January. … Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know from my experience as a Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to get. They concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence voters in the election. They did it through paid advertising we think, they did it through false news sites, they did it through these thousand agents, they did it through machine learning, which you know, kept spewing out this stuff over and over again. The algorithms that they developed. So that was the conclusion. And I think it’s fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign? And how did they know what messages to deliver?
Swisher: Who told them?
Clinton: Who told them? Who were they coordinating with, or colluding with? Because the Russians historically in the last couple of decades and then increasingly, you know, are launching cyber attacks, and they are stealing vasts amounts of information, and a lot of the information they’ve stolen they’ve used for internal purposes, to affect markets, to affect the intelligence services, etc. So this is different because they went public, and they were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it, and they were running … You know, there’s all these stories of guys over in Macedonia who are running these fake news sites and I’ve seen them now and you sit there and it looks like a sort of low-level CNN operation …
Eventually, Swisher asked Clinton directly if she believed Trump was ultimately the man coordinating with the Russians, to which she responded, ”Yes … yes. I’m leaning Trump.”
Clinton: Yes … yes. I’m leaning Trump. I think it’s pretty hard not to. I think that the marriage of the domestic fake news operations, the domestic RNC Republican allied data, you know, combined with the very affective capabilities that the Russians brought. You know, basically the group running this was the GRU which is the military intelligence arm of the Russian military and they have a very sophisticated cyber operation, in bed with WikiLeaks, in bed with Goosefer, in bed with DC Leaks.
Clinton also blamed the “domestic fake news operation” on Facebook and other platforms for failing to properly curate stories to her advantage. Also to blame was the media, who failed to buy her campaign’s supposed early warnings about Russia hacking the election. Oh yeah, and she was also a “victim of the very broad assumption I was going to win.”
Clinton began the interview by trying to completely dismiss EmailGate as a “nothing-burger,” and in the process dishonestly described her decision to set up an unauthorized, unsecured private email server and then repeatedly obstructing the investigation into it as “something that others had done before”… She also wanted the audience to accept that the undeniably anti-Trump media, including the New York Times, was in fact biased against her, having covered the email scandal “like it was Pearl Harbor.” Amazing. Here’s an excerpt of the exchange:
Clinton: The overriding issue that affected the election that I had any control over — because I had no control over the Russians, too bad about that, but we’ll talk about it, I hope — was the way that the use of my email account was turned into the biggest scandal since lord knows when. And you know, in the book I’m just using everything that anybody else said about it besides me to basically say this was the biggest nothing-burger ever. It was a mistake, I’ve said it was a mistake, and obviously if I could turn the clock back, I wouldn’t have done it in the first place, but the way that it was used was very damaging.
Swisher: And you didn’t handle it? That’s a mistake on your part? Or they way it was used was a mistake on your part? Because we’re trying to get at what you think you misjudged.
Clinton: Well, if you went all the way back, doing something that others had done before was no longer acceptable in the new environment in which we found ourselves. And there was no law against it, there was no rule, nothing of that sort. So I didn’t break any rule, nobody said, “Don’t do this,” and I was very responsible and not at all careless…. But what was done, and I think it was interesting, I know you had Dean Baquet here from the New York Times yesterday, and they covered it like it was Pearl Harbor. And then in their endorsement of me, they said, “This email thing, it’s like a help desk issue.” So it was always a hard issue to put to bed, but we put it to bed in July and then it rose up again.
Video of the entire interview below (read the full transcript at Recode):
