Bill Clinton Casts Blame on Hillary's Presidential Defeat, Explains His Jeffrey Epstein Ties

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Former President Bill Clinton is blaming Russia for wife Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election.

In “Citizen: My Life After the White House” (Knopf), Clinton ruminates on what he’s been doing since 2000. One candid excerpt admits his anger at what happened in 2016, when presumptive favorite Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.

The ex-president says he “couldn’t sleep for two years” and experienced “outbursts of rage” from those results, creating an atmosphere where he “wasn’t fit to be around.”

-snip-

Clinton blames several factors for his wife’s defeat, including former FBI Director James Comey’s email investigations, a hostile press, and particularly Russian influence on social media.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bill-clinton-casts-blame-hillary-222200359.html

[Blue_Tires]

1. K+r

[JohnSJ]

2. Bill Clinton should also include himself. His airport encounter with AG Lynch caused unecessary conspiracy crap from

republicans, which of course the MSM jumped at the chance to propagate the bullshit.

Of course probably the most damage BIll Clinton did was the Communications Act of 1996, which allowed for the mass mergers of media outlets.

[Ferryboat]

5. Beg to differ

Doing away with either Glass Stegal Act or the Fairness Doctrine did more damage.

Others may chime in with a different opinion.

[SnoopDog]

8. And, all the republican trade deals he signed...nt

[SocialDemocrat61]

24. Two friends for over 20 years say hello

and show pics for their grandkids to each other. How egregious!

[choie]

26. How about the "welfare" bill

Oh, and the bankruptcy bill.
And the 1994 Crime Bill
NAFTA

Many, many mistakes that have affected millions of lives for the worse.

[Jit423]

28. Disagree

bankruptcy bill, maybe.
1994 Crime Bill...inner city blacks and church-going black families asked for some kind of crime bill. Black elders and children were being terrorized in their own neighborhoods. Thousands of Neighborhood Crime Watch organizations were formed because black law-biding residents were living in fear of drug dealers, thieves and crooked cops. I blame the propaganda around this bill that purposely set blacks against supporters of this bill.

NAFTA... not so much. Concurrent increases in automation had more to do with loss of good paying jobs than NAFTA. The US actually benefited from some NAFTA initiatives, especially in the auto manufacturing area. Anything good that the Dems did on trade was attacked by the GOP and the media. A lot of dis-information surrounding NAFTA and the PPT

[choie]

29. I disagree with you. The crime bill perpetuated mass incarceration

and enlarged the prison industrial complex.

[Jit423]

37. It did because of the GOP and RW pressure against getting anything done.

I lived through it and remember well the debate. The thoughts by the Clinton adm. was to get it passed and go back and take out or revise the portion leading to 3 strikes. It wasn't done as the politics of the Lewinsky affair took over. I do blame the Dems for not going back when they had the chance to, though slim, to fix it. They still have chances to fix the justice system. But the crime bill of then had a many more good things about it including taking some guns off the street. Living through that era there was a short time when people living in poor neighborhoods felt relief from the rising crime surrounding them.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Yellow political journalism

The press is financially beholden, and they are duped. Free speech is tilted and besieged. Comey should have known enough to seek wise counsel, the way VP Mike Pence did!

[Yavin4]

4. Every Democratic candidate for president faces an electorate that's hostile to them.

The only way to win is to fire up the base and get them to turn out which Obama did in 2008. Democratic campaign consultants and managers always push their candidates to do the exact opposite. They counsel them to win over "swing voters" or peel off Republican support. This does not work.

[markodochartaigh]

12. "...win over "swing voters" or peel off Republican support..."

Yes, if The Lincoln Project's excellent ads, the support of Liz Cheney, and the support of a multitude of generals and former Trump administrators didn't substantially increase Republican support for Harris/Walz then surely we can put the last nail in the coffin of "the Democratic party needs to appeal to Republican voters".

[Yavin4]

14. One would hope so.

But I wouldn't hold my breath.

[Scrivener7]

6. He's right. As usual.

[JI7]

7. He has had to answer for Epstein more than Trump

but we have videos of Trump actually partying with Epstein and nobody asks him about it.

[soandso]

9. Might be a bit of holding back

“I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing,” he wrote. “He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it, and by the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him. I’ve never visited his island.”

That doesn't ring true because Gislaine Maxwell was at Chelsea's wedding (around 2010, I think).

We're never going to get the full story on Epstein and that's probably because he was an intel asset.

[niyad]

11. Please cite sources for maxwell's presence at Chelsea's weddding.

Your post seems to be saying President Clinton lied about never visiting the island.

On what do you base your suggestion that epstein was an intel asset?

[soandso]

17. I guess you're not very familiar with the Epstein-Maxwell story

because Maxwell's presence at the wedding is widely known about. Maxwell's father was also rumored to be working for the Mossad and MI6. Obviously, Epstein had some powerful people behind him given how long he was operating and the enormous amount of unaccounted for money behind him. Why was he sold one of the most valuable properties in NYC for one dollar? I don't know but it wasn't just because of the young women around him. I don't know if he was blackmailing people, and for whom, or what but something bigger than what has been revealed was going on.

https://mediaproxy.snopes.com/width/1200/

Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.

“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20190710204140/https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-sick-story-played-out-for-years-in-plain-sight/?ref=scroll

I never said Clinton lied. I said I thought he might be holding some things back. Big difference. It's YOU implying otherwise. Don't try to put words in mouth by saying it "seems" I said this or that when what I wrote is right here. I have no idea about the nature of their relationship. I only know they had one. Jeffrey Epstein cultivated important and influential people. Not just Clinton but leaders in science, technology, finance, including Nobel Prize recipients and, of course, a member of the British royal family. The sex appeared to be a perk for those he cultivated but it was quite obviously not the main reason he was doing what he was doing.

[niyad]

21. Thank you for that helpful information.

[soandso]

23. You're welcome :)

[W_HAMILTON]

32. Seems like you need to brush up on some of the details as well...

...

After Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to Florida state charges of soliciting prostitution and served 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail, Ms. Maxwell moved on, cultivating other high-profile associations and seeming largely unscathed by her long ties to Mr. Epstein. She took up environmental causes and founded a nonprofit intended to save the oceans. She gave a talk at a TED event. And she continued to work the social circuit: attending Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, being photographed with Arianna Huffington and Martha Stewart, smiling next to Elon Musk at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party.

Taken from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/us/ghislaine-maxwell-epstein.html

[soandso]

33. I'm aware of her interest in the oceans

and many connections with the wealthy and high society. She also learned how to pilot a submarine kept at Epstein's island. I'm not sure what your point is.

[W_HAMILTON]

35. My point is...

...that your picture of Maxwell at Chelsea Clinton's wedding doesn't refute Bill's point that he had cut ties with Epstein around 2005 because Maxwell herself apparently had cut ties with Epstein as well by the 2010 wedding, meaning that your original claim that what Bill said "doesn't ring true" is incorrect based on ... the details.

Glad I could clear that up for you!

[soandso]

36. If that's the case

and I don't know because I didn't know them, why the continued relationship with Maxwell, even without Epstein? She was, after all, the one who procured girls for Epstein and where is she now?

All I'm saying is that Bill Clinton likely left out certain things from his book, which is his right. He didn't need to write the book and he wasn't charged with anything related to what Epstein and Maxwell were up to. I'm sure he only brought it up because it all became public and he wanted to distance himself from that sordid mess, like everyone else who spent time with those two.

[Karasu]

10. He's not wrong.

[slightlv]

13. I think the Clintons were among the first of the NeoLiberals.

THAT is what has hurt Democrats the worst, IME. It's been a pox on all of us. It's all basically a repackaged Reagan-Thatcher austerity with a few Democratic symbols thrown in. It's not hard to see it, but it took rank-and-file democrats a while to understand what was going on. Once they saw it, they rebelled against it, and still are. As much as I loved Obama, and was thrilled to death when he won the presidency twice, he was still a student of neoliberalism. At that point, in my mind, it became do we give our money to rich republicans or rich democrats? Cause one thing's for sure, they'll be taking our money, one way or another.

Don't get me wrong... I voted for Clinton and was thrilled when he won. I count his presidency as an extremely successful term in what it accomplished. And, like every other president, there were a lot of things I did not agree with... NAFTA, as the one that hangs on most in my memory, and also the rejiggering of "Welfare." Only a Democrat could have ruined the national safety net, and it was a democrat who made the first huge cut. Republicans have been dipping into it ever since. Oh, we still have welfare in this country... it's just it's welfare for the rich, instead of help for those who need it. Hillary's campaign had a whole lot of issues associated with it. I'm still disappointed she wasn't our first female president. Like her, I come across much to assertive for my gender, I've been told. It's not looked upon well in society... but it is a good trait to have as a country's leader. She would have been a great leader. I did worry about her neoliberalism politics, tho. I was concerned about having another Margaret Thatcher raise her head trying to reorder the economy and society. That may have been just my worrywart attitude. But Thatcher began England's downhill slide, just as Reagan did ours. It was only more evident quicker across the ocean. We're quickly catching up.

[leftstreet]

19. +1

[Sancho]

15. There is a significant part of the US who will not vote for a woman...

...until something changes, it will be impossible to win no matter how bad the opponent. There is no comparable subset who refuse to vote for a man.

[Wavelight]

16. I remember saying "oh f&@k..." when it happened

For me, that a-hole Comey’s letter was the spark that set off a chain of events culminating in Donald Trump’s enduring influence on American politics and his 2024 return. Clinton's momentum stopped dead in its tracks, and began receding… Without that, Trump would've been relegated as a footnote in political history, the landscape today would look dramatically different.

[Karasu]

20. While Comey's last-minute BS stunt certainly didn't help, I agree with Bill's point that the Russian propaganda...

...on social media that year (Facebook in particular) was actually the biggest factor. Meta/Facebook got off way too easy for all that--once it came out, they got what was effectively a financial slap on the wrist. Frankly, that should have spelled the end of social media's influence on politics (or at the very least, the end of Facebook), but here we are, 8 years later, and the problem has only gotten worse.

[karynnj]

34. If their internal polling matched the public polling, she was winning until nearly the end

This makes the two Comey interventions, to publicly reopen and then to close the email story fit better with the view from those polls. Ironically, Comey closing the case a few days before the election hurt. why?

It brought the whole HRC email thing back, with the story of how the FBI found Clinton email on his computer they were examining because he again sent inappropriate stuff to minors. In the last days of the campaign as you are summing up the case for yourself you don't want the news to be the email stuff and Anthony Weiner.

I know they are close to her, but you wonder if the Clintons were appalled she downloaded HRC email on a shared personal computer.

[irisblue]

18. In 2015 Bill Clinton was talking to apricothellbeast about his political future.

Source-https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bill-clinton-called-donald-trump-ahead-of-republicans-2016-launch/2015/08/05/e2b30bb8-3ae3-11e5-b3ac-8a79bc44e5e2_story.html

snip-"Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape."


snip-"The talk with Clinton — the spouse of the Democratic presidential front-runner and one of his party’s preeminent political strategists — came just weeks before Trump jumped into the GOP race and surged to the front of the crowded Republican field."

snip""“Mr. Trump reached out to President Clinton a few times. President Clinton returned his call in late May,” a Clinton employee said. “While we don’t make it a practice to discuss the president’s private conversations, we can tell you that the presidential race was not discussed.”

One Trump adviser said Clinton called Trump, but the adviser did not provide specifics about how the call came about."


More there



Second citation

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-clinton-encouraged-trump-to-run/


title-Bill Clinton ‘Encouraged’ Trump to Run


There were several articles in 2015 about former Pres Clinton calling the apricothellbeast.

[Autumn]

25. Stormy Daniels said Hillary called Trump to discuss plan about the 2008 election.

In her new tell-all book Full Disclosure, porn star Stormy Daniels claims that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton once plotted about the 2008 election in a phone call that took place while he was in a hotel room with Daniels.

Daniels — who alleges she had an affair with Trump starting in 2006 — writes that she was in a hotel room watching a Shark Week television special with the businessman in 2007 when he received the call from Clinton, who was then running against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. (Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.)

“Then, to make it crazier, Hillary Clinton called,” Daniels writes in Full Disclosure, according to The Guardian, which obtained a copy of the book, out Oct. 2. “He had a whole conversation about the race, repeatedly mentioning ‘our plan’…

https://people.com/politics/stormy-daniels-hillary-clinton-called-donald-trump-2008-election/

[Bigerhalf]

22. Get a real democrat with some show business piazzas to be our pied piper!

From my sales days the saying was; "If you can't Dazzle them with Brilliance, Baffle them with Bullshit".
Vet our showman to see if he or she has integrity and scruples along with charisma, then pay them well to be our entertainers for the non serious voter. Lord knows we spent enough on our campaigns to afford getting them early.
We already have the clear thinkers but that doesn't seem to be enough in this wacky America!
Nit-wits need to be entertained and dazzled with ridiculousness, not bored with pure logic and facts.
Adults don't have a following of adolescents and low IQ voters.
Just look at the trump clown show!

[OLDMDDEM]

27. Best president in my lifetime. imho!

[Polybius]

31. Same here!

[Polybius]

30. On Epstein:

“I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing,” he wrote. “He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it

While I tend to believe that Bill Clinton never got involved with underage girls, I'm very surprised that Epstein never offered them to him.