This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on May 5, 2017 Fin­ish­ing Amie Parnes and Jonath­an Al­len’s en­gross­ing book, Shattered: In­side Hil­lary Clin­ton’s Doomed Cam­paign, listen­ing to Clin­ton of­fer­ing her per­spect­ive on why she lost to CNN’s Chris­ti­ane Aman­pour, and watch­ing FBI Dir­ect­or James Comey testi­fy be­fore the Sen­ate Ju­di­ciary Com­mit­tee in the same week leaves a de­cidedly mixed view of the last elec­tion. The book delves in­to what went wrong in the Clin­ton cam­paign and why, as well as the in­tern­al power struggles and foibles of the key char­ac­ters in Clin­ton World. While I am un­aware of any ma­jor fac­tu­al mis­takes in the book, it made the out­come seem pre­or­dained when it most cer­tainly wasn’t. Where the book is most help­ful is put­ting in­to con­text events that were not fully ap­pre­ci­ated last year. The WikiLeaks re­leases of in­tern­al Demo­crat­ic Na­tion­al Com­mit­tee emails and mes­sages from Clin­ton cam­paign chair­man John Podesta came at crit­ic­al junc­tures. Some sur­faced on the day that Tim Kaine was an­nounced as Clin­ton’s run­ning mate, oth­ers just minutes after the dis­clos­ure of the lur­id Billy Bush-Don­ald

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