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- Abedin told her estranged husband Anthony Weiner on Oct. 28, 2016 that they'd be to blame if Clinton lost.
- That day, the FBI announced it had found Abedin's emails on Weiner's laptop and was investigating.
- Abedin writes that, as time went on, she came to place more blame on then-FBI Director James Comey.
Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's longtime top aide, told her estranged husband, former New York congressman Anthony Weiner, on Oct. 28, 2016 that if Clinton lost the election to Trump, "it will be because of you and me."
Abedin writes in her forthcoming memoir, "BOTH/AND," that she attempted to convince Weiner of the gravity of the situation during a phone call on the day news broke that then-FBI Director James Comey had reopened the agency's investigation into Clinton's private email server. The FBI had found some of Abedin's emails on Weiner's laptop, which was searched by law enforcement while Weiner was being prosecuted for sexting with an underage girl.
Abedin writes that Weiner, who was then in a rehab treatment facility, was initially dismissive of her concerns.
"I am sure it's a mistake and they will figure it out," Weiner told Abedin during the call.
Abedin says she wrote in her notebook that night: "I do not know how I am going to survive this. Help me God." She compares Comey's letter to a "nuclear bomb."
But Abedin writes that eventually she shifted blame for the election loss from Weiner and herself to Comey, who was widely criticized for his unprecedented decision to publicly inform Congress that the FBI had opened its new inquiry. The FBI closed the inquiry two days before the election after determining that the new evidence didn't change its conclusion that Clinton committed no criminal wrongdoing.
"For a long time, Comey was a daily nightmare for me, and even now the thought of what he did sometimes creeps in to torture me," Abedin writes. "But I have slowly come to accept that I am not the sole cause of the 2016 election loss."
She continues, "One man's decision to play God forever changed the course of history. It should not be my burden to carry the rest of my life. It should be his."
Clinton has similarly placed significant blame for her defeat on Comey.
"If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president," Clinton told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in May 2017, while simultaneously insisting she bore "absolute personal responsibility" for her loss to Trump. "I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey's letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off - and the evidence for that intervening event is, I think, compelling [and] persuasive."