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April 28, 2017 9:04 AM By Chris Stigall

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) The authors of the new book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clintons Doomed Campaign, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, talked with Chris Stigall on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, revealing some of the behind the scenes details from Clintons stunning defeat to Donald Trump and laying the responsibility at her feet.

Parnes said, looking back, that the outcome of the 2016 presidential election is still a bit surprising.

She had a definite advantage, within just knowledge of how to run a presidential campaign and the infrastructure and the financial backing and the star power. When you saw Donald Trump, especially towards the end, post Access Hollywood tape, he didnt have many surrogates. Here, Hillary Clinton was with President Obama and Michelle Obama and her husbandHow are they going to lose? She has all these people behind her and they seemed to be doing well. I dont think it was so much that the media chose to close its eyes. It just seemed like the obvious thing.

Allen divulged that on the inside, there were cracks in the facade that Clintons team could never fully come to grips with.

People werent willing to raise problems internally and they werent able to raise problems externally, through the press, which means she was only hearing some of the problems that were going on in her campaign. She wasnt able to fully judge where things were. Its as if there were two different campaign worlds, the one we all thought we were living in and the real one where Hillary Clinton was in deep trouble and Donald Trump was in position to win.

Ultimately, he stated that he reason Clinton is not President today stems from mistakes she made along the way.

You do have to place most of the blame on the candidate when the campaign fails. I think this book sees Hillary Clinton as a fully three dimensional character. There are positives and negatives. Its not really a value judgement about her personality but it does lay the majority of the blame at her feet. The basic analysis of the failure of this campaign is Hillary Clintons failure to come up with a message, her inexplicable use of a private server, her speeches to Wall Street banks, all of those things set the stage for her to lose a campaign that was certainly winnable.

Parnes believes there is something in the book for everyone, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.

For Democrats, we wanted it to be, partly, therapy and, partly, how do we pick up the pieces and move on from here. For Republicans, I think, theyre interested in learning what happened. I think a lot of people didnt expect to win and, clearly, Donald Trump pulled out this victory and they were curious about how it all went down.

Weekdays: 5:30 a.m. - 9 a.m. Chris Stigall brings a contemporary brand of opinionated talk and humor to mornings on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT. Prior to his arrival in Philadelphia, Chriss radio career began in Kansas City where he worked on-air ...

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Authors Detail Hillary Clinton's Stunning Defeat in 'Shattered - CBS Philly

posted at 10:01 am on April 28, 2017 by Ed Morrissey

Did Hillary Clinton become the target of a federal grand jury investigation while running for president?Judicial Watch reported last night that new documents provided in response to a FOIA lawsuit shows that the FBI got subpoenas from a grand jury to seize records of the former Secretary of States communications. It didnt turn up much, but the existence of the grand jury is a new development:

Judicial Watch today released new State Department documents including a declaration from FBI Special Agent E.W. Priestap, the supervisor of the agencys investigation into Hillary Clintons email activities, stating that the former secretary of state was the subject of a grand jury investigation related to her BlackBerry email accounts.

The declaration was produced in response to Judicial Watchslawsuitseeking to force Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to take steps to recover emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other U.S. Department of State employees (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Rex Tillerson(No. 1:15-cv-00785)). The lawsuit was originally filed against then-Secretary of State John Kerry. The Trump State Department filing includes details of the agencys continuing refusal to refer the Clinton email issue to the Justice Department, as the law requires.

According to this new information, however, the DoJ did take some action. The FBI got subpoenas from a grand jury to get records from Hillarys Blackberry accounts at some time in 2016, which JWs release claims was specifically investigating Hillary. However, those subpoenas turned up nothing new:

In the filing Priestap declares under penalty of perjury that the FBI obtained Grand Jury subpoenas related to the Blackberry e-mail accounts, which produced no responsive materials, as the requested data was outside the retention time utilized by those providers.

As recently as last November, critics of the DoJs actions regarding the Clinton administration cited a refusal to empanel a grand jury as one of the-Attorney General Loretta Lynchsmajor failings (although hardly the only one). If Judicial Watch accurately reports the data in these documents (not included in the press release), then it appears that either the DoJdid take its case to a grand jury, or that they had another reason to have a grand jury look into Hillarys activities.

Tom Fitton asks in the press release, Why is this information only being released now? There may be less to that than one imagines, however. If a grand jury was impaneled and found nothing, there would be no reason to publicize that; the DoJnormally does not confirm or deny investigations unless it results in an indictment. James Comey got forced into discussing the Hillary probe publicly because the hidden e-mail scandal got blown up publicly before the FBI even knew anything about it, and it happened in the course of a political campaign. Also, theres a possibility that a grand-jury investigation might still be underway, in which case the DoJ wouldnt discuss it at all although one might think that would be enough for a judge to withhold that FBI statement about the subpoenas if that were the case.

But did a grand jury exist at all? Politicos Josh Gerstein recalls Comeys testimony to Congress last fall, which now looks cagey in retrospect:

Why not impanel an investigative grand jury whereby you have reasonable suspicion that a crime may have been committed, and then you have the ability to get warrants, subpoenasinformation, subpoena witnesses before the grand jury under oath? asked Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.), a former U.S. attorney.

Comey responded by explaining why a subpoena wouldnt have been an efficient approach, although he remained cagey about whether a grand jury had been used at all in the Clinton probe.

Its a reasonable question, the FBI director said. I dont want to talk about grand jury in connection with this case.We know were never supposed to talk about grand jury publicly.

Why did you not decide to go to an investigative grand jury? It would have been cleaner. It would have been much simpler, Marino replied.

I need to steer clear of talking about grand jury use in a particular matter, Comey said again. In general, in my experience, you can often do things faster with informal agreements, especially when youre interacting with lawyers.

What does this tell us about the Hillary probe? The DoJ and the FBI may have taken it more seriously than first thought. If the grand jury returned no indictments, that could either mean that federal prosecutors wound up with nothing, or some might argue that they madesure they wound up with nothing. If the latter was the case, though, Lynch and Comey would likely have cited that as a better reason not to proceed to prosecution than the reasons Comey ended up giving last July assuming that any potential grand jury probe has ended. Now that the cats out of the bag, perhaps the DoJ will clarify this matter a little more, but if its still active, they almost certainly wont.

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Judicial Watch: FBI got subpoenas from grand jury targeting Hillary Clinton - Hot Air

As the end of President Trump's first 100 days nears, some are speculating about what rival Hillary Clinton may have ended up achieving during the period had she won the election.

Some of the highlights outlined by Politico's Matt Latimer include nominating former Vice President Joe Biden to be Secretary of State and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham as Defense Secretary on day two.

Meanwhile, husband and former President Bill Clinton would officially be called "The First Gentleman" and daughter Chelsea Clinton would emerge as the head a White House Women's Empowerment Office and as a senior adviser to her motherwith minimal controversy.

On the Supreme Court front, a similar partisan battle would play out the way it did with Neil Gorsuch, only with Democrats pulling the nuclear option to confirm Senator Cory Booker to replace late Justice Antonin Scalia.

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During Clinton's actual campaign, strategists did indicate that one of her first priorities in office would have been filling the vacant Supreme Court seat, notes The Hill.

She had also given a speech about job creation and indicated an interest in renewable energy, voting rights protections, tighter restrictions on the health care system, immigration, and infrastructure, among others.

Her objectives were quite varied, with Democratic strategist Jamal Simmon saying at the time that "the biggest challenge for her campaign has always been the lack of a clear message, a policy agenda."

Since her defeat, Clinton has slowly re-emerged into the public spotlight including addressing women's groups and declining calls to run for mayor of New York City, notes NBC News.

She has since spoken up on behalf of issues she has supported in the past like a tuition-free college program and LGBT rights.

More from AOL.com: Mark Cuban grades President Trump's first 100 days Trump has spent a quarter of his first 100 days at Mar-a-Lago Public gives Trump low marks for first 100 days: NBC News/WSJ poll

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What Hillary Clinton's first 100 days may have looked like as president - AOL

Last weekend, The New York Times published a long piece about the effect the FBI had on the outcome of the 2016 presidential campaign. As we all know, Donald Trump won a comfortable victory in the Electoral College while falling about 3 million votes behind Hillary Clinton in the popular vote.

I believe that Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate who failed to energize the Democratic Party base and who failed to deliver to the electorate a principled reason to vote for her. Yet when the Times reporters asked her why she believes she lost the race, she gave several answers, the first of which was the involvement of the FBI. She may be right.

Here is the back story.

In 2015, a committee of the House of Representatives that was investigating the deaths of four Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, learned that the State Department had no copies of any emails sent or received by Clinton during her four years as secretary of state. When committee investigators pursued this -- at the same time that attorneys involved with civil lawsuits brought against the State Department seeking the Clinton emails were pursuing it -- it was revealed that Clinton had used her own home servers for her emails and bypassed the State Department servers.

Because many of her emails obviously contained government secrets and because the removal of government secrets to any non-secure venue constitutes espionage, the House Select Committee on Benghazi sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, which passed it on to the FBI. A congressionally issued criminal referral means that some members of Congress who have seen some evidence think that some crime may have been committed. The DOJ is free to reject the referral, yet it accepted this one.

It directed the FBI to investigate the facts in the referral and to refer to the investigation as a matter, not as a criminal investigation. The FBI cringed a bit, but Director James Comey followed orders and used the word "matter." This led to some agents mockingly referring to him as the director of the Federal Bureau of Matters. It would not be the last time agents mocked or derided him in the Clinton investigation.

He should not have referred to it by any name, because under DOJ and FBI regulations, the existence of an FBI investigation should not be revealed publicly unless and until it results in some public courtroom activity, such as the release of an indictment. These rules and procedures have been in place for generations to protect those never charged. Because of the role that the FBI has played in our law enforcement history -- articulated in books and movies and manifested in our culture -- many folks assume that if a person is being investigated by the FBI, she must have done something wrong.

In early July 2016, Clinton was personally interviewed in secret for about four hours by a team of FBI agents who had been working on her case for a year. During that interview, she professed great memory loss and blamed it on a head injury she said she had suffered in her Washington, D.C., home. Some of the agents who interrogated her disbelieved her testimony about the injury and, over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, asked Comey for permission to subpoena her medical records.

When Comey denied his agents the permission they sought, some of them attempted to obtain the records from the intelligence community. Because Clintons medical records had been digitally recorded by her physicians and because the FBI agents knew that the National Security Agency has digital copies of all keystrokes on all computers used in the U.S. since 2005, they sought Clintons records from their NSA colleagues. Lying to the FBI is a felony, and these agents believed they had just witnessed a series of lies.

When Comey learned what his creative agents were up to, he jumped the gun by holding a news conference on July 5, 2016, during which he announced that the FBI was recommending to the DOJ that it not seek Clintons indictment because no reasonable prosecutor" would take the case. He then did the unthinkable. He outlined all of the damning evidence of guilt that the FBI had amassed against her.

This double-edged sword -- we wont charge her, but we have much evidence of her guilt -- was unprecedented and unheard of in the midst of a presidential election campaign. Both Republicans and Democrats found some joy in Comeys words. Yet his many agents who believed that Clinton was guilty of both espionage and lying were furious -- furious that Comey had revealed so much, furious that he had demeaned their work, furious that he had stopped an investigation before it was completed.

While all this was going on, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clintons closest aide, Huma Abedin, was being investigated for using a computer to send sexually explicit materials to a minor. When the FBI asked for his computer -- he had shared it with his wife -- he surrendered it. When FBI agents examined the Weiner/Abedin laptop, they found about 650,000 stored emails, many from Clinton to Abedin, that they thought they had not seen before.

Rather than silently examine the laptop, Comey again violated DOJ and FBI regulations by announcing publicly the discovery of the laptop and revealing that his team suspected that it contained hundreds of thousands of Clinton emails; and he announced the reopening of the Clinton investigation. This announcement was made two weeks before Election Day and was greeted by the Trump campaign with great glee. A week later, Comey announced that the laptop was fruitless, and the investigation was closed, again.

At about the same time that the House Benghazi Committee sent its criminal referral to the DOJ, American and British intelligence became interested in a potential connection between the Trump presidential campaign and intelligence agents of the Russian government. This interest resulted in the now infamous year-plus-long electronic surveillance of Trump and many of his associates and colleagues. This also produced a criminal referral from the intelligence community to the DOJ, which sent it to the FBI.

Yet this referral and the existence of this investigation was kept -- quite properly -- from the press and the public. When Comey was asked about it, he -- quite properly -- declined to answer. When he was asked under oath whether he knew of any surveillance of Trump before Trump became president, Comey denied that he knew of it.

What was going on with the FBI?

How could Comey justify the public revelation of a criminal investigation and a summary of evidence of guilt about one candidate for president and remain silent about the existence of a criminal investigation of the campaign of another? How could he deny knowledge of surveillance that was well-known in the intelligence community, even among his own agents? Why would the FBI director inject his agents, who have prided themselves on professional political neutrality, into a bitterly contested campaign having been warned it might affect the outcome? Why did he reject the laws just commands of silence in favor of putting his thumb on political scales?

I dont know the answers to those questions. But the American public, and Hillary Clinton, is entitled to them.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.

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Andrew Napolitano: Hillary Clinton and the FBI...again - Fox News

On the eve of his 100th day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a self assessment of his administrations achievementsand Russia is unimpressed.

Washingtons evaluation of its foreign policy particularly irked some of Russias top parliamentarians, with some saying Hillary Clinton, Trumps bitter rival for the presidency, would be proud of such a record. The boast that the White House has further isolated Syria and Russia at the United Nations through successful diplomacy with President Xi Jinping of China, opened the floodgates of pent up disillusionment with the candidate Moscow once hoped would be more amenable to Russian ambitions.

Senators criticizing the statement claim Trump is shaping up to be as bad a president for Moscow, if not worse, than his predecessor Barack Obama.

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Senator Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee called Trumps assertion that Russia is isolated totally untrue on Facebook and accused the U.S. of putting China in a highly awkward position by speaking on their behalf.

Through claims about isolating Russia in the U.N. the Trump administration is on the same course as Obamas and it will arrive at the same failure, Senator Alexey Pushkov chimed in on Twitter. This is self-deception. A false, impossible goal.

Read More: Russias foreign minister sees harder times for U.S.-Russia ties now than during the Cold War

Today his administration is following Clintons line, Pushkov added on Twitter, after saying Clinton would likely be in awe of Trumps achievements so far and decide that their disputes during their respective campaigns were in vain.

Trumps pro-Russian statements during his campaign and his pledge to get along with Russia, earned him criticism, both from within his own Republican Party, usually the hardliner on Russia in U.S. politics, but also from Clinton and the Democratic Party.

However, despite investigations into the Russian links of some of his campaign aides, the Trump administration has completed a firm tilt against Russian foreign policy. Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley have reiterated U.S. support for NATO, Ukraine and maintaining sanctions on Russia until it reigns in its insurgency in its southern neighbor, and have criticized Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Trump ordered a strike on the regime earlier this month that prompted the Kremlin to deem ties between Moscow and Washington worse now than under Obama.

Senator Franz Klintsevich, head of the Committee on Defense, argued that the White House statement shows Trump not only failed to overcome the anti-Russian trend of U.S. foreign policy he did not even try to, state news agency RIA Novosti reported.

Now it would not be an exaggeration to call him more Catholic than the Popewith regard to Russophobia he surpassed even his predecessor, Klintsevich said.

The speaker of Russias top federal assembly Valentina Matviyenko issued a more optimistic note on Friday, telling RIA that she believed U.S-Russia relations were not beyond redemption and would improve, but not quickly. The Russophobic inclinations ruling Congress and a large enough part of the American establishment will not change with a mere stroke of a pen, she said.

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Donald Trump's First 100 Days: Hillary Clinton Would Be in Awe, Says Russian Senators - Newsweek