Bill Clinton blames 'mainstream media,' leaked emails for his wife's 2016 presidential loss

In an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough on Monday, former President Bill Clinton blamed "mainstream media" coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy for her 2016 election loss. In his new book, which he was discussing with Scarborough, he said he was infuriated by the loss.

"It’s easier for us to know what happened in 2016 in some ways than it is what happened in 2024" because "in 2016, you had two highly unusual things," Clinton said, discussing a passage from his latest book, Citizen, in which he detailed the rage he felt after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election loss to Donald Trump.

"First of all, the mainstream media told the American people repeatedly that the biggest issue was Hillary’s emails. That’s what they said," Clinton told Scarborough. "When in fact, even the Trump State Department said she neither sent nor received a single solitary email on her personal device marked classified."

"And two, she followed the rules as they then existed," he said. "The rules were changed after she left office. And yet, the whole story was written as if she had done something hideous."

A piece published in May 2017 by then-CNN Editor-at-large Chris Cillizza said that Clinton’s "'email' problem was bigger than anyone realized," noting a word cloud based on results from polling which asked voters whether they had heard anything about the 2016 candidates. By far, the largest response was about Clinton’s emails. 

"As you can see, 'email' drowns out every other term mentioned about Clinton. It was, without question, the dominant narrative of the election for her – at least in the five months that this paper documents. And, according to the study, the mentions of email correlate directly to negative views of Clinton," Cillizza wrote.

During Trump's presidency, when the Democrat "resistence" was underway, they frequently and sarcastically used the phrase "but her emails" when citing what they saw as much larger violations of Trump's administration.