Politics

Donna Brazile: When Hillary Wouldn’t Concede At Javits Center, ‘A Shiver Came Over Me’

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Former interim Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Donna Brazile says she shivered when Hillary Clinton refused to concede to Donald Trump on election night of 2016.

The event reminded Brazile, who recounts the election in her new book “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” of former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore’s reaction to the election results in 2000, when Gore refused to concede and demanded a recount after results showed that George W. Bush had won.

Clinton adviser Minyon Moore “told me that at 1:30 a.m. John Podesta was going to address the crowd at the Javits Center and tell them to go home,” Brazile writes. “A shiver came over me, a memory of the Gore defeat, where we had Bill Daley go out and address the crowd because Gore was still wrestling with the results, as I knew Hillary was tonight.”

Clinton declined to address the crowd gathered at the Javits Center in New York City on the night of the election, and John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, addressed the crowd instead. “Several states are too close to call so we aren’t going to have anything more to say tonight,” Podesta told the gathered crowd. “Everybody should head home and get some sleep. We’ll have more to say tomorrow.”

The call with Trump struck Clinton as “without a doubt one of the strangest moments of my life,” as she “congratulated Trump and offered to do anything I could to make sure the transition was smooth,” Clinton wrote in her book “What Happened.”

“It was all perfectly nice and weirdly ordinary, like calling a neighbor to say you can’t make it to his barbecue. It was mercifully brief … I was numb. It was all so shocking,” Clinton wrote.

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