Gistlite

Former Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, blamed Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Director James Comey for her defeat in Tuesday’s presidential election.

Mrs. Clinton said in a conference call with her top campaign donors on Saturday that Mr. Trump was able to seize on both of Mr. Comey’s statements and used them to attack her, according to two participants on the call.

According to the participants who were on the call, Mrs. Clinton told her supporters on Saturday that her team had drafted a memo that looked at the changing opinion polls leading up to the election and that the letter from Mr. Comey proved to be a turning point.

The memo prepared by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, said voters who decided which candidate to support in the last week were more likely to support Trump than Clinton.

“In the end, late breaking developments in the race proved one hurdle too many for us to overcome,” the memo concluded.

Mrs. Clinton was projected by nearly every national public opinion poll as the heavy favourite going into the race but Republican Donald Trump won the election, shocking many throughout the nation and prompting widespread protests.

Mrs. Clinton has kept a low profile since her defeat after delivering her concession speech on Wednesday morning.

She said Mr. Comey’s decision to go public with the renewed examination of her email server had caused an erosion of support in the upper Midwest, according to three people familiar with the call.

Mrs. Clinton lost in Wisconsin, the first time since 1984 that the state favoured a Republican candidate in a presidential election.

Although the final result in Michigan has still not been tallied, it is leaning Republican, in a state that last favoured the Republican nominee in 1988.

Mr. Comey sent a letter to Congress few days before the election announcing that he was reinstating an investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information when she used a private email server while secretary of state from 2009 to 2012.

The FBI’s director announced a week later that he had reviewed emails and continued to believe she should not be prosecuted, but the political damage was already done.

While the second letter cleared her of wrongdoing, Mrs. Clinton said that reinforced to Trump’s supporters that the system was rigged in her favour and motivated them to mobilise on the election day.

A spokesperson for the FBI could not immediately be reached for comment.
On the phone call, Dennis Chang, who served as Clinton’s finance chair, said her campaign and the national party had raised more than $900 million from more than three million individual donors, according to the two participants who spoke to Reuters.

Professor Wole Soyinka, has berated online commentators for attacking him over his threat to tear his United States of America, USA, Green Card on the day the US-President elect, Donald Trump would be sworn-in.

Recall that the Nobel Laureate has come under serious attacks over the threat to tear his Green Card.


Reacting to the attack, the playwright, in a statement he signed
titled, “Red card, green card– Notes towards the management of
hysteria”, said he would carry out his threat but not at a time fixed
by his critics.

According Soyinka, those asking him to carry out his acclaimed threat  were ignorant of whatever they comment on.

He said, “Let me end with a Red Card to those noisome creatures, the
nattering nit-wits of Internet: maybe Trumpland is not as despicable
as the Naijaland you impose on our reality from your secure cesspits
of anonymity.

“Go back to school. Your problem is ignorance, ignorance of whatever subject you so readily comment upon. Learn to study your subjects before opening up on issues beyond your grasp.

“Sometimes you make one feel like swapping one green for another out of embarrassment for occupying the same national space as you.’’

‘‘If it even becomes convenient to bring it forward, I intend to do
so, but please don’t come at me with plaints of time imprecision.

“I never discussed it with you, nor invited you to a private decision
whose execution was already in the making.

“Do not try to browbeat me. It’s a waste of time – all you have to do
is immerse yourselves in my antecedents. It will not attempt to deal
with the notion of an exit time-table as conceived by others.’’