Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has stated that Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election was on such an enormous scale that it is the equivalent of a “Cyber 9/11.”
Appearing before an audience in London Sunday evening, Hillary, who has now been defeated twice in her bid to run for office, said she spoke with security experts who compared the 2016 election to the terrorist attacks which are widely believed to have brought down the World Trade Center.
“I think there a lot more connections that have yet to come to light. If I had been elected I would have called for an independent commission to get to the bottom of it. We had really well-respected security, intelligence veterans saying this was a ‘cyber 9/11’ in the sense it was a direct attack on our institutions,” she said. “That may sound dramatic but we know that they probed and tried to intrude into election systems — not just the social media propaganda part of their campaign.”
Clinton, who is currently on a tour promoting her recently published post-election book What Happened , repeatedly remarked on the possibility that there had been interference from Russia in the 2016 race during her talk, tying it to key moments in the campaign that she believes helped Donald Trump win the presidency.
She said that her campaign was not equipped to stand up against the targeted messaging strategy run by, according to Clinton, the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, the Russians. She referenced the data firm that worked with the Trump team to place Facebook advertisements.
Something positive did come from all of this, according to Hillary. She believes her experience in the election made other countries aware of the extent of Russian cyberthreats, helping European governments fend off potential interference during this year’s elections in France and Germany.
“The Russians are not done; this is an ongoing threat,” she said, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin has a “strategic goal that he has followed up on relentlessly” of causing unrest in Western democracies.
The former United States Secretary of State told the audience that her campaign fell apart in the final weeks of the 2016 race, as crucial voters in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin began to quickly lose faith in her candidacy, due in part to the reopening of the FBI investigation into her private email server and the release of her campaign manager’s emails by WikiLeaks.
“You’ve got Trump and his campaign chanting ‘lock her up,’” she said. “You’ve got stolen emails being weaponized, raising terrible doubts about me. A lot of people just didn’t vote, a lot of people stayed at home, a lot of people were turned away. It just tipped against me in the end, thought I had weathered it.”
“There was just too much that went on that created doubts for people.”
[Featured Image by Craig Ruttle/AP Images]
