Bill Clinton still can’t shake it. Nearly eight years after Hillary’s loss in 2016, the former president revealed in his new memoir, “Citizen: My Life After the White House”, that he was consumed by rage and restlessness in the aftermath. “I couldn’t sleep for two years,” he confessed as he described how the emotional toll of the election gnawed at him day after day.
Apparently, the anger wasn’t something he could push aside. It erupted in “outbursts of rage” that created an atmosphere where he “wasn’t fit to be around.” He openly apologized to those who had to endure his volatile moods, acknowledging how his frustration seeped into his personal life. “The whole thing is hard for me to write,” Clinton admitted. “I apologize to all those who endured my outbursts of rage, which lasted for years and bothered or bored people who thought it pointless to rehash things that couldn’t be changed.”
But Clinton’s fury was allegedly rooted in a series of events he believes sealed Hillary’s fate. Chief among them, he argued, was Russian interference. Clinton is convinced that Russia’s cyberattacks, combined with the explosive FBI investigation into Hillary’s emails, flipped the election on its head.
“Almost two years after the election, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a highly regarded social scientist, said Russia’s cyber attacks piled on top of Comey’s interventions were effective enough to persuade voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to vote for third parties or stay at home,” he wrote. Clinton sees these events as a one-two punch that ultimately handed Trump the win.
In his eyes, it wasn’t just the Russians who were to blame. “If so, Putin’s enablers were Comey and the political press,” Clinton wrote. For him, the forces working against Hillary in 2016 were a tangled web of media missteps and political miscalculations that ensured the outcome was never truly in her favor.
The memoir also touches on another controversial aspect of Clinton’s post-presidency: his connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Clinton admitted to flying on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” jet, though he maintained he never visited Epstein’s private island.
“The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward. I wish I had never met him,” Clinton stated. He claimed that while he always found Epstein “odd,” he had no idea about the crimes the late financier was committing. “He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it”. He reiterated that, “By the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him. I’ve never visited his island.”
