In an angry, unsparing new book, Hillary Clinton said she regretted not striking back at James B. Comey in July 2016, when he accused her of acting recklessly in using a private email account while secretary of state, even as he announced that the F.B.I. would not seek criminal charges against her.
"My first instinct was that my campaign should hit back and explain that Mr. Comey had badly overstepped his bounds," she wrote in the book, her attempt to make sense of her electoral defeat by Donald J. Trump. But, she said, her campaign advisers talked her out of it, convincing her that it was better "to just let it go and try to move on."
"Looking back," she concluded, "that was a mistake."
It is one of a catalog of mistakes — large and small — that Mrs. Clinton lists in a post-mortem titled "What Happened." The book, published by Simon & Schuster and scheduled to come out on Tuesday, has provoked a mix of anticipation and dread from Democrats, many of whom are loath to revisit the election that vaulted Mr. Trump into the White House.
Still, even a week before its publication date, "What Happened" has zoomed to the top of the Amazon best-seller rankings, attesting to the public's enduring fascination with Mrs. Clinton. The New York Times obtained an advance copy.
Unlike Mrs. Clinton's last book, which chronicled her years as secretary of state and was meant to be a launchpad for her candidacy in 2016, this book is the work of someone no longer running for anything. From failing to frame a message that matched the restive mood of the electorate to failing to go after Senator Bernie Sanders more aggressively during the Democratic primaries, Mrs. Clinton accepts her share of blame for Mr. Trump's astonishing upset.
But Mr. Comey's repeated interventions on the subject of her emails, Mrs. Clinton wrote, sapped her momentum, allowed Mr. Trump to paint her as "Crooked Hillary" and turned voters away in the crucial closing days of the campaign. In the dark months since her defeat, she said, she tried not to dwell on how Mr. Comey had "shivved" her.
The painful episode resurfaced again when Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey as F.B.I. director and ordered the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to write a memo justifying his dismissal on the grounds that he had mishandled the investigation of Mrs. Clinton's emails.
"I read Rosenstein's memo in disbelief," she wrote. "Here was Trump's number two man at the Justice Department putting in writing all the things I'd been thinking for months."
Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Comey's actions did not justify his ouster by Mr. Trump, since he later admitted that he fired Mr. Comey because he would not drop the F.B.I.'s investigation of the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. But Mr. Comey still emerges as the biggest villain in Mrs. Clinton's account. Beyond the director himself, she asserts that the F.B.I. was a hotbed of anti-Clinton fervor, declining to confirm the existence of a Trump-Russia investigation even as it disclosed every twist and turn of the email probe.
In one of the book's most harrowing passages, Mrs. Clinton recounted getting the news a few weeks before Election Day that Mr. Comey had informed Congress that the F.B.I. would reopen the email investigation after discovering emails from her on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced husband of her closest aide, Huma Abedin.
"This man is going to be the death of me," Ms. Abedin said, before dissolving in tears in front of her boss.
The news media, and The New York Times in particular, come in for scathing criticism by Mrs. Clinton for covering the email saga obsessively, while playing down evidence of links between Mr. Trump and Russia. The Times, she said, perpetuated the narrative that the Clintons had a penchant for secrecy, adding, "I've always found that charge odd."
Mrs. Clinton characterized The Times's coverage of her as schizophrenic, with reliable endorsements of her campaigns on the editorial page offset by persistently negative news coverage. "I suppose this mini-rant guarantees that my book will receive a rip-her-to-shreds review in The Times," she wrote, "but history will agree that this coverage affected the outcome of the election. Besides, I had to get this off my chest!"
With other targets, Mrs. Clinton was more judicious, if still stinging. She disparaged Mr. Sanders as disruptive and hopelessly unrealistic in his proposals. And she criticized President Barack Obama for urging her not to attack Mr. Sanders during the primaries ("I felt like I was in a straitjacket"). She also mused about what would have happened if he had spoken out earlier, and more harshly, about President Vladimir V. Putin's meddling in the election.
She made a connection between Mr. Obama and what she called her biggest gaffe of the campaign: telling voters in Ohio, "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." Mrs. Clinton insisted that the line was taken out of context, but said Mr. Obama had fed the narrative of Democratic hostility toward coal miners by announcing a plan that set state-by-state targets for carbon emissions reductions, and a framework for meeting them, at the White House, next to the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
While Mrs. Clinton defended the tactics of her campaign — there is scant criticism of campaign aides like Robby Mook or John Podesta — she acknowledged it never developed a message that resonated with voters like "Make America Great Again." She also admitted to an unsettling sense, as she campaigned, that her campaign lacked the passion of Bill Clinton's run for the White House in 1992.
"I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans' anger and resentment," she wrote. "I was giving speeches laying out how to resolve the country's problems. He was ranting on Twitter."
In sorting through the reasons for her defeat, Mrs. Clinton returns over and over to a single explanation: her gender.
Three of her archenemies during the campaign, she wrote, are unapologetic misogynists: Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin, and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, which released thousands of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee to embarrass her campaign — a scheme that she implies was coordinated with associates of Mr. Trump.
"This has to be said," she wrote. "Sexism and misogyny played a role in the 2016 presidential election. Exhibit A is that the flagrantly sexist candidate won."
By her own admission, Mrs. Clinton has not come to terms with losing to Mr. Trump. At a few points, she interrupted her narrative with bitter tangents about the president. In a line that has already attracted attention, she wrote that she considered saying, "Back up, you creep, get away from me," when he hovered behind her during one of their debates.
But she also concluded that Mr. Trump had rare skills as a presidential candidate. "You've got to give it to Trump — he's hateful," she wrote, "but it's hard to look away from him."
And in a passage that will sadden her supporters as much as it satisfies her critics, Mrs. Clinton grappled with her limitations as a candidate and the hatred she generated among Republicans.
"What makes me such a lightning rod for fury?" she wrote. "I'm really asking. I'm at a loss."
New York Times, September 7, 2017
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September 8, 2017
Addendum. This just in! @HillaryClinton returns to #LSSC on 9/19, her first late night television appearance since the 2016 presidential election! pic.twitter.com/HEGcCEpeGH
— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) September 7, 2017
