‘Not Just Fox!’ Bill Clinton Blames ‘Mainstream Media’ For Hillary’s 2016 Loss By Making Emails The ‘Biggest Issue’
Former President Bill Clinton blamed the “mainstream media” for his wife Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump over its focus on her controversial use of a private email server for official correspondence during her time as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
The saga of Hillary Clinton’s emails dominated headlines during her tenure as a Democratic presidential candidate and first gained national attention in March 2015 when The New York Times reported that Clinton’s private email setup at her home “may have violated federal requirements” and raised alarm among archivists and transparency advocates.
What followed was a years-long investigation, culminating in the FBI’s 2016 conclusion that Clinton and her team had been “extremely careless” with classified information but that no criminal charges were warranted—a decision reaffirmed just days before Election Day. The controversy, however, cast a shadow over her campaign and became a flashpoint in a deeply polarized election cycle.
In an interview recorded Friday and aired on MSNBC on Monday, Bill Clinton took aim at all media outlets – “not just Fox!” – for making the email controversy the election’s “biggest issue” during a ranging sit down with Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough began by reading an extract from Clinton’s new memoir Citizen, in which he described the 2016 election as the “darkest” period that left him “so angry” and prone to “outbursts of rage” for years afterward. Reflecting on what he’d written he said to Scarborough:
It’s easier for us to know what happened in 2016 in some ways than it is what happened in 2024, in terms of all that. Because in 2016, you had two highly unusual things. First of all, the mainstream media told the American people repeatedly that the biggest issue was Hillary’s emails. That’s what they said, not just Fox!
When in fact, even the Trump State Department said she neither sent nor received a single solitary email on her personal advice, marked classified, one. And two, she followed the rules as they then existed. The rules were changed after she left office. And yet the whole story was written as if she had done something hideous and then [former FBI director] James Comey made it worse.
Watch above on MSNBC.
