Jennifer Palmieri, who served as Hillary Clinton's communications director during the 2016 presidential campaign, reflected on her campaign experience in a new book by revealing a joke she told Clinton about the candidate "being hounded by four men."
A day after then-FBI director James Comey sent a letter to Congress in late October 2016 announcing the bureau was reopening the investigation into Clinton's private email server, Palmieri said she joked to the candidate about her increasing number of opponents.
"Flying back from Florida on Oct. 29, 2016, the day after the infamous Comey letter came out, I joked with Hillary about what seemed to be her ever-growing number of opponents," Palmieri wrote in an excerpt from her upcoming book. "It felt like we had four men running against us — Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, and Jim Comey."
In the excerpt from Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World, Palmieri went on to say that Clinton, the first female nominee of a major party in a presidential race, was being "hounded by four men" because she was a female candidate.
"I don’t believe it is a coincidence that the first woman nominee of a major party ended up being hounded by four men, all taking actions that would influence the campaign in ways never before seen in our country’s history. Maybe that’s just how presidential campaigns are in the 21st-century. Or maybe there was just something about her the four of them didn’t like," Palmieri said.
Palmieri's published book excerpt follows Clinton's controversial comments last weekend at the India Today Conclave in Mumbai, India, where she blamed white men for their female relatives and acquaintances not voting for her.
"All of a sudden white women, who were going to vote for me and frankly standing up to the men in their lives and the men in their workplaces, were being told, ‘She's going to jail. You don't want to vote for her. It's terrible, you can't vote for that,'" Clinton said. "So, it just stopped my momentum and it decreased my vote enough because I was ahead. I was winning, and I thought I had fought my way back in the ten days from that letter until the election. I fell a little bit short."
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. Clinton released her 2016 campaign book, What Happened, last September, where she blamed Russia's election meddling, Comey, and numerous other external factors for her defeat.