Longtime Hillary Clinton confidant Lanny Davis recently declassified Justice Department documents to try to make sense of why the Democratic candidate lost the 2016 presidential election. He makes his conclusion clear in the title of his new book named “The Unmaking of the President 2016: How FBI Director James Comey Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency.”
Davis blames both Comey and the Justice Department at large for decisions he believes delivered Trump the White House, The Hill reports.
According to Davis, the Comey letter was maybe the biggest reason why Clinton lost the election. The letter was actually a notification to Congress that the FBI had uncovered another stash of Clinton emails from her time as secretary of State. Even though Comey later said that the emails contained no new information, Davis believes that the damage had been done.
“Trump is resisting allegations of Russian meddling because he doesn’t want to be called an illegitimate president. I can’t prove Russian meddling cost Hillary Clinton the election — how many voters do I know were affected by a Russian Facebook ad? But I can prove by raw statistics that the change in status between the two candidates between the 29th of October and the 8th of November was caused by the Comey letter, because nothing else happened,” Davis said.
The eighth chapter of the book is dedicated to a statistical analysis of all the ways he believes the letter sank Clinton only a few days before the election. According to him, the letter was the reason for the overwhelming shift in negative stories about Clinton, the steady polling drop and the decline in voter sentiment toward the Democratic candidate.
According to marketing data from Engagement Labs, from October 23 to Election Day, consumer sentiment about Clinton dropped 12 percentage points, while Trump’s rating rose by eight points, The Hill reports. Clinton’s forecast lead in the popular vote evaporated from 5.9 points in FiveThirtyEight’s forecast the day Comey released his letter to less than 3 points one week later.
Comey or other people at the Justice Department acted to help Trump win, Davis says, but he believes that overconfidence about a Clinton victory led the officials to unwittingly deliver the presidency to Trump.
“If Barack Obama, Sally Yates or Comey would have ever thought their decision would elect Donald Trump president, they would have acted differently. Comey … was more worried about what the Republicans would say after the election than following the rules and not doing anything to affect the election,” he said.
Davis agrees with Trump on one thing: that Comey should have been fired, but by Obama.
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