Matt Frei, Channel 4 News: Madam Secretary, thank you very much for doing this interview.
You wrote in the first chapter of your book of the day after the defeat.
You said, ‘I thought I had let everyone down, because I had.’
How did you let them down?.
Hillary Clinton: Because I didn’t win, and not only did I not win, but I lost to someone
who I believe during the campaign would be a very divisive figure and was not ready to
be President.
And so it’s an odd experience having won more votes, but having the lost the opportunity
to serve as President.
And I felt very sorry about that.
And one thing, if I had lost to another kind of Republican, I would have been disappointed,
no doubt about it, but this was something different.
How much of it was your own failure as a candidate?
It was certainly part of it, as I write in the book, and I try to be as candid as I can.
I think there were several problems with my candidacy.
One, the kind of leadership I was offering based on my experience, the preparation, the
ideas I had, what I knew I could do because I had served in the Senate for eight years,
I’d been Secretary of State for four years, was not a perfect match with the anger and
the resentment that a significant percentage of the electorate felt.
So how would you have answered that anger?
Should you have been more angry during the campaign?
Should you have channelled some of that anger?
No, I think that’s a difficult question to answer because I don’t think anger’s
a strategy.
But I think I could have done more to reflect it and to be clearly sympathetic with the
legitimate part of the anger.
Because there are two kinds of anger.
There was economic anxiety, where people were feeling they hadn’t recovered, they weren’t
back on a track to be economically self-sufficient, successful.
Then there was all the cultural anger on race and immigration and all the rest.
But there was also anger against you.
People really hated you.
They were driven to the polls by hatred of Hillary?
Well, there was a lot of negativity on both sides, that's true, but I came out of the
Secretary of State job with a 69 percent approval rating.
I was, by many measures, the most popular public person at that time in America.
And certainly in the Obama cabinet...
administration.
They really did a job on me, Matt, and I was not as successful in beating it back.
And, of course, then they had the the help of the Russians.
Which was something unprecedented.
The fact is you actually lost vote share by one percent amongst women, running against
an openly misogynistic candidate who had bragged on tape about assaulting women.
That is astonishing.
How is that possible?
Well, let's look at the facts.
Number one, I actually got, you're talking about white women, because I won women overall.
But you went down from 44 percent, Obama, to 43 percent.
No, no, no.
According to Nate Silver?
Among white women, among college-educated white women, I eked out a very small, a really
tiny, win.
I actually got more votes from white women than President Obama had in 2012.
However, there were three things at work, one a long problem with Democratic nominees
and white voters period.
That goes back to my husband and before.
Secondly, there was a lot of anxiety about my vote share among white voters in part because
I was standing up on race and guns and things that are quite culturally controversial.
And finally I would say, I don't blame voters for not voting for me.
They were given a lot of wrong information and that critically wrong information came
right at the end, as I write in the book, from this letter from the FBI Director Jim
Comey.
So I was winning among women by all of our measures, white women again we're talking,
because I won overwhelmingly among black and Latina women.
I was winning and then my momentum stopped and the numbers dropped.
But one could say that you really should've got every single female vote in the country
after the fact that Donald Trump was openly misogynist?
HC:Yes, he was, and there’s no doubt about that.
And how did you not get every female vote in the country?
Well, because gender doesn’t yet serve as the kind of motivator for voting that race
has in our country.
But it is also because your dynastic appeal, or perhaps it was the opposite, the fact that
you’re called Clinton, the fact that you’re the First Lady, basically trumped any novelty
- if you forgive the term - of being the first female President of the United States.
People looked at your name and your legacy more than they looked at your gender.
But that doesn’t explain why I lead all the way through, why I won the primary by
four million votes, why I was winning.
We had a great convention, I was thought to have won all three debates.
That doesn’t explain it, Matt.
So that’s why I had to really dig deep, and, yes, I take responsibility.
Obviously, there were things I must have been able to do differently in order to have won.
But at the end there was this really perfect storm, and so you had the Comey letter and
you had - and we will get to this - the enormous impact of the Russian theft of emails, the
release of them by Wikileaks, that basically are now a part of the Russian Intelligence
apparatus, and the weaponisation of that.
So these were all new phenomena.
MF:So you are still blaming others more than yourself?
No, look, I take responsibility, I don’t blame others, but I think it’s important
that people remember what happened.
I think it’s easy to say, well she wasn’t a good candidate, then why did I lead all
the way to the end?
Why did I get nominated overwhelmingly?
Did people lie at the polls?
No, I think there were intervening events that caused people to worry, to have second
thoughts, and I think it’s important to go into those, as I do in the book, because
Russia’s not going away as a threat to Western democracy, and what we’ve got to figure
is - what happened?- in order to prevent it from happening again.
Are you saying that your election was robbed by a combination of Comey's intervention at
the last minute and Russian interference?
I think there's a good argument that can be made to that effect.
Certainly the Russian interference affected voters' decision making.
People say, well, did it affect the outcome?
When you have a massive propaganda effort to prevent people from thinking straight because
they're being flooded with false information and you have people who are searching, trying
to make sense of it, but every search engine, every site they go into, is repeating these
fabrications, then, yes, it affected the thought processes of voters.
And my loss, one positive thing that came from it is that people in Europe could see
very clearly and understood the role that Russia was playing, because they were clearly
trying to elect my opponent.
So if it hadn’t been for Russian interference would you now be President of the United States?
Well, it was such a close election as you know.
II won the popular vote overwhelmingly and lost the electoral college vote by a very
slim margin, 77,000 votes, yes.
So that’s a yes then?
Well, I'm not going to go that far because we're still investigating all of this and
I hope that someone will get to the bottom of it for the future, not so much for the
past.
You ran in 2008 and you lost against Barack Obama and I remember your husband at the time
was incensed by the fact that Obama was doing so well.
In the primary campaign he called the Obama phenomenon a fairytale.
You lost, to some extent then, because you were a candidate of the establishment in an
era of insurrection.
So could one not say that if you hadn’t been this ambitious the second time around,
your ambition is the thing that stands between the world and President Joe Biden?
Well, he didn’t run.
Well, he would’ve run if you hadn’t run.
Well there’s no evidence of that.
He would’ve run if you hadn’t run.
I write about ambition in the book, because I’ve never heard a man be asked about his
ambition.
People in our country can run for whatever reason they choose and that should include
women as well.
Of course.
And I was clearly encouraged to run by President Obama, I write about that in the book.
I was supported by the people who helped to elect him.
So, yes, it was certainly my motivation, because I thought I would be a good president, and
I still, sitting here today, think that I would be a good president.
And there was a new kind of campaign that was being run on the other side that nobody
has ever faced before.
But I ask the question because there is something extraordinary about the fact that you, the
first female president in the United States, were felled by an openly misogynist candidate.
Is it that, having been first First Lady before, that people didn’t look at you as much as
Angela Merkel of the United States, but as Eva Peron?
I don’t think so.
I think that’s very dramatic, even melodramatic.
I don’t think so.
I ran for the Senate in New York, a place that had never elected a woman, a very tough
political environment.
I got elected twice, I’m very proud of that.
I ran against Barack Obama.
It was a really tough primary, extremely close, unlike this last one.
He turns around and asks me to be in his cabinet because he knew that I could make a contribution.
And that was all who I was.
But maybe you were around for too long?
There was no novelty.
You had the experience, but there was no novelty factor
You’re talking about the person I ran against in the primary, the person you mentioned who
didn’t get in and was not actually competing.
My goodness, they’ve been around a long time too.
As readers who’ve told me, who’ve read the book, it lays out a case, and I’m happy
to have any discussion with anyone who has a different theory.
But the evidence points to the Jim Comey letter and the Russian interference as being the
factors at the very end of that campaign.
Do you think regarding Russian interference that President Trump could be impeached at
the end of this process?
Bob Mueller and 16 investigators are looking into Trump and Russia.
I don’t know because there are different ways that a president can be held accountable.
That’s what the investigations are about.
And at the end of the process, whether it’s congressional or the special council, there
will be findings.
Whether they will include the President or not, we’re going to have to wait and see.
What I’m more concerned about is what he’s actually doing in office now, much of which
I warned about when I was running against him and that is the real problem I think we
face.
You said he was a clear and present danger to the United States and indeed the world.
Do you still believe that?
Unfortunately I do.
There’s some real-world examples right now.
Apparently he’s going to decertify the Iran nuclear agreement and it’s a very major
mistake.
There is no evidence that on the nuclear programme Iran has cheated in the agreement that the
UK and other powers, along with the United States, entered into with Iran.
So basically for political reasons or for personal reasons - it’s unclear which - he
is basically throwing open the door to Iran’s nuclear programme one more time.
I think that is very dangerous.
Whether it’s North Korea or Iran, is he endangering world peace?
Well, he certainly is behaving in an impulsive way that confuses people, which I think is
not good for the stability of the world.There could be accidental interpretations of his
tweets and his bellicose statements that I think might prove to be quite dangerous, so
yes.
And when you think about it, why, if you're having a serious threat from the development
of nuclear weapons in North Korea, and the potential capacity for them to have missiles
that could carry a nuclear weapon to Japan, even to the United States, why would you also
pick a fight with Iran?
So, the choices he’s making are ones that I think are destabilising and dangerous.
So, yes, he is endangering world peace, that’s what you’re saying?
Well he certainly is causing many people to worry about the future and that could be dangerous
because there could be miscalculations.
The one word that always came up when people mentioned Hillary Clinton was email.
How much do you regret the private email server?
The way that you allowed the other side to define that as an example of your sense of
entitlement, establishment and all the rest of it?
I say in the book that it was a dumb mistake, but it was a dumber scandal.
And the press bought into it hook, line and sinker in the United States, and that’s
why it was the most covered story.
Everything I said in the beginning turned out to be true in the end.
It didn’t matter.
We had put it to rest.
There was an investigation which I knew would lead nowhere, it led nowhere, it was over
in July.
And then on October 28, it was raised again.
So of course voters are going to think, what is going on?
And there’s a lot of anecdotal, as well as research data, which basically had people
saying, I was going to vote for her, but I can’t if she’s being investigated again.
Which was nonsense.
You have one thing in common with Donald Trump.
You both hate Jim Comey.
Well, I have a lot more basis for it than he does, and I don’t hate anybody.
I have just raised the questions about the decisions he made, which are, to this day,
inexplicable.
Harvey Weinstein.
Friend of yours.
He gave lots of money to your campaign over time.
Not a lot.
How much?
Oh I don’t know, 12, 16 thousand dollars, something like that.
Have you given it back, given it to charity?
We’re going to, yep.
How long will it take?
Surely you can just write a cheque and give the money back, can’t you?
Well, it has to come out of our campaign funds, so there’s a little more..
but it will be done.
But that’s not the issue, the issue really is how terrible his behaviour was and finally
women have come forward to speak out about it, which they hadn’t before for all the
reasons that they relate.
You are a beacon of feminism, you talk for women’s rights, you knew Harvey Weinstein
well.
At what stage, and you must have known the rumours about him…
No, no, I did not.
I did not know.
Everyone knew rumours about him, not specific cases, but everyone knew that Harvey Weinstein,
apparently in his circle was a little bit..
you know.
Well, all I can tell you is that I did not hear those things.
Look, we just elected a person who admitted sexual assault to the presidency.
So, there’s a lot of other issues that are swirling around these kinds of behaviours
that need to be addressed.
And I think it’s important that we stay focused and shine a bright spotlight and try
to get people to understand how damaging this is, and the women coming forward is the only
way that that story will be told.
In America we seem to be turning the clock back, we’ve got a misogynist as president
and you've got openly white supremacist racists on the streets of Charlottesville.
What on earth is going on?
One thing that has happened, Matt, is that in the Trump campaign the white supremacy
point of view, and those who practise it, was given great opportunity to be part of
the campaign, to express themselves, people in major positions, people who had before
been pushed, pushed to the margins of our politics, like David Duke, the former Ku Klux
Klan grand wizard, were embraced by the Trump campaign.
You know, people who used to have maybe 12 followers online all of a sudden had thousands
because Donald Trump running for president was retweeting their white supremacist, racist
comments.
He went for the base.
For his base.
And you didn't go enough for your base.
You missed a trick there, didn't you?
No.
You could've done the same thing for your crowd?
No, no, I think that's way too simplistic.
I think what he did was to unleash feelings that were not that far below the surface.
But which had been kept in check.
George W. Bush rejected that kind of behaviour, John McCain publicly, when he ran against
Barack Obama, rejected comments that were aimed at Obama.
So Republican leaders in recent times have tried to walk a different line.
Not that they maybe didn't take votes from people who felt that way, but they did not
pander to them.
And then along comes Trump who from the very first day of his campaign, goes against immigrants,
goes against Mexicans, calling them, you know, criminals and rapists and the like.
And then he was off to the races.
Whatever scapegoat you wanted, whatever prejudice you held, was going to be fed by Donald Trump.
President Trump has said that he will run again.
Yes, he’s already starting to collect money.
He could win again, couldn’t he?
We don’t know, we have no way of knowing.
Right now his approval is very, very low.
He’s down to what we think of as his hardcore base, so 30-34 per cent.
And people who voted for him, maybe not because they approved of him but because they wanted
a Supreme Court seat, which they got, or they wanted a big tax cut, which they’re trying
to get, may or may not continue to support him.
And he will probably get challenges from the Republican party.
What is your biggest regret in one word?
Losing.