Hillary Clinton on Wednesday broadly spread around the blame for her loss in last year’s presidential election, pointing to suspected Russian cyberattacks, the Democratic National Committee’s data operation and a “very broad assumption that I was going to win.” 
 
 Clinton, interviewed onstage in California at a tech conference by Recode’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, made a point to say that she took responsibility for her campaign and “every choice” she made, as she has in other public appearances this year. “But,” she said, “that’s not why I lost.” 
 
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 Clinton again argued that the letter former FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress about her private email server just more than a week before the election was what prompted her to lose critical ground at the end. 
 
 Comey wasn’t the only target of Clinton’s ire on Wednesday, though, as she assailed the news media for their coverage of the Comey controversy (reporters covered it like it was “Pearl Harbor,” she charged) and the campaign more broadly, citing a lack of substantive policy reporting on television. 
 
 The attitude toward her campaign, she posited, was a result of the assumption that she would defeat Donald Trump, and she said it hurt her. 
 
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 “I was the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win,” she said. 
 
 Clinton hit at the Democratic National Committee, too: The DNC, she claimed, handed her an inferior data operation when she won the party’s nomination last summer, while the Republicans had invested heavily in data infrastructure between 2012 and 2016. 
 
 On the topic of Russian interference in the election, Clinton described the hacks into the DNC and her campaign chairman’s private email account and various “fake news” websites as the country “weaponizing” technology in an unprecedented misinformation campaign against her. 
 
 And while she did not explicitly accuse Trump’s campaign of colluding with the Russians on the cyberattacks — a topic of ongoing federal investigation and something the White House has repeatedly denied — Clinton said she believes that the Kremlin had help from Americans in some form. 
 
 “The Russians, in my opinion ... could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they have been guided ... by Americans,” Clinton said. 
 
 “I think it’s fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign, and how did they know what messages to deliver?” she said. “Who told them? Who were they coordinating with, and colluding with?” 
 
 She made a joke about Trump’s much-scrutinized relationship with Russia later on during the interview, when the topic of the president’s highly publicized tweet of the non-word “covfefe” came up. She thought it was a “message to the Russians,” she said to laughs. 
 
 She took other hits at Trump, too, calling him a “very impulsive, reactive personality” in response to an audience question and describing his reported plan to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement as “totally incomprehensible” because of the economic opportunity she said it presents. 
 
 Clinton also commented on the state of the Democratic Party, declining to name possible 2020 presidential candidates but calling on people to focus on coming gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as the 2018 midterms. Flipping the House is “certainly realistic” and should be a goal for Democrats, she said, but acknowledged the need to get organized enough to do it. 
 
 When asked directly by Swisher, Clinton said she is not running for office again. But she also said she has no intention of vacating the public stage, as some of her critics, and some Democrats, want her to do. 
 
 “I'm not going anywhere,” Clinton said. “I have a big stake in what happened in this country. I am very unbowed and unbroken about what happened because I don’t want it to happen to anybody else.” 
 
 Clinton spoke at the annual Code Conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California. ||||| Hillary Clinton doesn’t believe she or her campaign made any significant mistakes in the 2016 election. But speaking at the Code Conference on Wednesday, she had a long list of others she blames for her defeat. 
 
 She points the finger at Russia, fake news, the sorry state of the Democratic Party, sexism, and the media that covered the email scandal “like Pearl Harbor,” among others. 
 
 The Russian government 
 
 At the top of the list is the Russian government, which she believes orchestrated a vast campaign of fake news to discredit her candidacy. 
 
 “If you look at Facebook, the vast majority of the news items posted were fake,” Clinton told Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, editors of the Vox Media site Recode, which sponsors the conference. “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.” 
 
 It’s not actually clear that “we now know” any of this. There was a lot of fake news swirling around Facebook in the closing weeks of the campaign, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it was the “vast majority.” The claim that there were 1,000 Russian agents spreading fake news comes from a March statement by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), but he described these as unconfirmed reports, not proven facts. 
 
 Clinton also notes that WikiLeaks released Clinton adviser John Podesta’s stolen emails — widely believed to have come from Russian hackers — within hours of the release of Donald Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape. 
 
 Clinton speculated that the Trump campaign may have coordinated with the Russians to make sure the leaked information had maximum impact, arguing that it would have taken guidance from domestic political operatives to make sure the Russians released stolen documents at times when they would have the most effect. 
 
 Sexism 
 
 Clinton rejected the suggestion that giving six-figure speeches to Goldman Sachs and other special interest groups had hurt her candidacy. 
 
 She insinuated that the issue was tailored unfairly around gender: "Men got paid for the speeches they made, and I got paid for the speeches I made. It was used, I thought it was unfairly used, and all of that, but it was part of the background music." 
 
 She also downplayed the decision in general: 
 
 “I gave speeches to many, many groups,” she said. “I never thought that anybody would throw out my entire career of standing up and speaking out and voting against and voting in favor of what I thought were good policies because I made a couple of speeches.” 
 
 The media 
 
 Clinton blames the media for covering her email scandal — which she dubbed “the biggest nothingburger ever” — “like it was Pearl Harbor.” 
 
 She said she was hobbled by the sorry state of the Democratic Party at the time she won the nomination. 
 
 “I get the nomination, and I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party,” Clinton said. “It was bankrupt. It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into the DNC to keep it going.” 
 
 Democrats, she said, “are not good historically at building institutions, and we've got to get a lot better.” She added that “that includes content,” arguing that the media had not done a good job of explaining how Barack Obama had saved the economy from a major depression in 2009. 
 
 “I also think I was the victim of a very broad assumption that we were going to win,” Clinton said. “I was swimming against a historic tide. It's very difficult to succeed a two-term president of your own party.” ||||| "Weaponized information" was one of the key factors that swung the U.S. election, former presidential candidate and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday. 
 
 Clinton spoke from the annual Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. 
 
 The former first lady, who also served in the U.S. Senate, has been exploring her role as a citizen since losing November's election to Donald Trump. Clinton has also been concerned about tech threats, like alleged Russian hackings and WikiLeaks, according to a profile in New York magazine published last week. 
 
 "The overriding issue that affected the election that I had any control over — because I had no control over the Russians — was the way the use of my email account was turned into the greatest scandal since Lord knows when," Clinton said. "This was the biggest 'nothing burger' ever." ||||| The interactive transcript could not be loaded. 
 
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 This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. ||||| Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent four decades in public service as an advocate, attorney, First Lady, U.S. Senator and U.S. Secretary of State. In 2016, Clinton became the first woman nominated for president by a major U.S. political party; she won the national popular vote, earning the support of nearly 66 million Americans. She is the author of five best-selling books, including "It Takes a Village." 
 
 Watch her live interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher on Wednesday, May 31 at 12:05 pm PT / 3:05 pm ET. You can follow our live blog of Clinton’s interview here.
– Hillary Clinton spoke with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at Recode's CodeCon on Wednesday, and she did not hold back. In Vox's view, she spared her campaign but heaped plenty of blame on others, including Russia, the media, and the DNC. "I get the nomination, I'm now the nominee of the Democratic Party," she explained. "I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party," she says, emphasizing the word "nothing." Asked Mossberg, "What do you mean, nothing?" She continued, "I mean, it was bankrupt; it was on the verge of insolvency; its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it, the DNC, to keep it going." Donald Trump, on the other hand, did nothing himself related to data, she said, but inherited a $100 million "tried-and-true, effective" data foundation from the RNC. More: "I take responsibility for every decision I made, but that's not why I lost," Clinton said, per CNBC. "I was the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win." But that's not all. Politico reports she made the case, as she has done in the past, that former FBI Director James Comey's letter to Congress was part of her undoing. "The overriding issue that affected the election that I had any control over—because I had no control over the Russians—was the way the use of my email account was turned into the greatest scandal since Lord knows when. This was the biggest 'nothing burger' ever." And yet the media covered it "like it was Pearl Harbor," she said. As for the Russians, "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." Vox points out that much of that statement is based on unconfirmed reports. Speaking of the Russians, "I thought it was a hidden message to the Russians," Clinton quipped about President Trump's "covfefe" tweet, reports Politico. "You’ve got all kinds of stuff happening. Why? To divert attention. It’s like 'covfefe'—trending worldwide. Maybe for a minute you'll forget the latest accusations about them conspiring with Russia or their trillion-dollar mathematical mistake in their budget or depriving 23 million people of health care." Mossberg asked Clinton why, if she knew she was going to run, she took on paid speaking engagements from Goldman Sachs. She shot back, "Why do you have Goldman Sachs here?" Replied Swisher, "Cause they pay us." Said Clinton, "They paid me."