Hillary Clinton’s New Book/Campaign Post-Mortem Will Be Called ‘What Happened’

Hillary Clinton with memoir about 2016 election loss to Donald Trump, "What Happened"
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Failed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is teasing her latest book. The tome will continue her almost year-long mission of publicly picking through the wreckage of her doomed campaign and already has the title: “What Happened.”

 Publisher Simon & Schuster says that Clinton’s book will detail her loss with “unprecedented candor.”

“In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net,” Clinton writes in the introduction. “Now I’m letting my guard down.”

The promo for the book promises that it will be a “cautionary tale” about what she has repeatedly claimed was Russian interference in the election:

She lays out how the 2016 election was marked by an unprecedented assault on our democracy by a foreign adversary. By analyzing the evidence and connecting the dots, Hillary shows just how dangerous the forces are that shaped the outcome, and why Americans need to understand them to protect our values and our democracy in the future.

In the days after the election, Clinton appeared to have accepted the loss with grace and retreated into solitude at her home in Chappaqua, New York. But eventually, she engaged in a series of events in which she listed off the reasons for her upset defeat to President Trump’s longshot campaign.

Initially, her team went with the narrative that she lost because of a combination of Russian interference and the letter from then-FBI Director James Comey in October announcing the reopening the investigation into her private email server.

However, as the months went by, Clinton’s list of people to blame grew. She would go on to blame the Democratic National Committee’s “non-existent” data operation, bad polling numbers, and “voter suppression” in Wisconsin.

Over the months she has also blamed “anti-American force,” Obama for winning two terms, misogynists and of course, fake news.

So it is unclear what Clinton’s book will bring that is new. A Clinton ally told Axios that the book would be a “bombshell,” but indicated it would be a “why I lost” type book that focuses in particular on Comey and Russia.

“She really believes that’s why she lost, and she wants to explain why in no uncertain terms,” said the ally. “I think a lot of people are going to be really surprised by how much she reveals.”

The promotional blurb for the book indicates it will run along those lines:

Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules.

The book is due to be released on Sept. 12. Clinton has written a number of books, most recently “Hard Choices” (2014) about her time as secretary of state, and “Stronger Together” (2016) that she co-wrote with her vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine — a book that flopped and only sold 2,912 copies in the first week.

Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter:  @AdamShawNY

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