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Clinton on Losing 2016 Election: 'They Were Never Going to Let Me Be President'

Hillary Clinton (L) and Bill Clinton / Getty
April 20, 2018

"They were never going to let me be president." That's what two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told her campaign manager, Robby Mook, on election night in November 2016 after he broke the news that she could not win, according to a new book.

The Daily Beast obtained a copy of New York Times reporter Amy Chozick's new bookChasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, which will be released on Tuesday—and highlighted key excerpts from it, including one about election night in 2016. Chozick describes how Clinton's campaign team was distraught when they realized they were not going to win.

"Of all the Brooklyn aides, Jen Palmieri had the most pleasant bedside manner," Chozick writes.

This made Palmieri, Clinton's communications director, the designated "deliverer of bad news" to Clinton. But she told Mook there was no way she could be the person to tell Clinton that she could not win the election. So Mook, who was "drained and deflated," went down the hall to Clinton's suite to deliver the bad news.

"'I knew it. I knew this would happen to me ...' Hillary said, now within a couple of inches of his face," Chozick writes. "'They were never going to let me be president.'"

Clinton and some former campaign aides have spent the last 18 months rehashing the election and blaming several factors for their loss to Donald Trump. In her 2016 campaign memoir, What Happened, released last September, Clinton blamed Russia's election meddling, former FBI director James Comey, and numerous other external factors for her defeat.