MSNBC host Joe Scarborough ripped Hillary Clinton as "pathetic" Wednesday for her array of election defeat excuses she gave in an interview in New York City.
While Clinton said Tuesday that she took personal responsibility for her 2016 loss to Donald Trump, she went on to say she was heading toward victory before FBI Director James Comey's letter to Congress shortly before the election about her private email scandal was publicized. That, along with a combination of the WikiLeaks hack of Democratic emails and Russian meddling in the election, cost Clinton the election, she said.
Scarborough played the clip on "Morning Joe" and looked disgusted, hitting her for saying as a "throwaway line" that she took responsibility.
"That was pathetic," he said. "I'll say it ... I'll get killed. Everybody I've talked to, Democrats, independents, Republicans, and the like said that was pathetic."
The new book Shattered gives an inside look at the Clinton campaign as one beset by dysfunction, infighting, and poor communication. Clinton said she is writing her own book on the election, adding that it would be a "painful" experience reliving the campaign.
After reading Shattered, Scarborough said, he came away wondering how badly a Clinton administration would have looked if her campaign was run that poorly, going over her infamous decision to ignore states like Michigan and Wisconsin, blue states that Trump turned red.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Clinton's litany of woes "doesn't help her, it doesn't help the Democratic party, it doesn't help the country's debate."
Liberal co-host Mika Brzezinski supported Clinton in the election, but she also served as a thorn in her side over her email scandal. She did not hold back on Wednesday, saying Clinton's words a day earlier betrayed a sense that she felt she should have been handed the presidency.
"The fact that she is so strongly saying this now so many months after the election, it shows that this arrogance and the sense that this was a coronation was so engrained in her, that she still can't believe it today," she said.