Hillary Clinton said members of the media have told her they "overdid it" with their 2016 campaign coverage of her private email server and expected her to win.
Clinton, in an interview airing Saturday promoting her 2016 election memoir What Happened, told MSNBC host Joy Reid she made the "original mistake" with the server at the State Department, but the media bore the blame for its coverage.
"What do you say to reporters who say, 'Well, the email scandal was not the media's fault, it was your fault,'" Reid asked.
"Oh, I made the original mistake, but people running for office make all kinds of mistakes," Clinton said. "I mean, Trump had a million mistakes that he made before he ever ran and that he made once he declared to run. That didn't matter."
Clinton said she had spoken to members of the press in the aftermath of her loss, although she didn't give specific names.
"Here's what members of the press have basically said to me: 'First of all, yeah it was a legitimate subject to cover. We overdid it,'" she said. "And I couldn't agree more."
Clinton said it wasn't voters' fault they didn't know she had a "gangbusters" plan to fix health care and improve college affordability because the media's coverage of her emails drowned it out.
"It was way overhyped, and again, there was this attitude like, 'Well, you're going to win anyway and so we have to vet you harder. Trump is the reality TV show candidate, and you're going to be the next president,'" Clinton said, calling that a "terrible assumption."
Clinton at one point called using the email server a "really dumb mistake" that became an even "dumber scandal."
However, she repeatedly uttered falsehoods about the server beginning in 2015, such as repeatedly claiming she never sent or received classified information on it.