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Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday Morning. Ten months after her stunning defeat, Hillary Rodham Clinton is telling her side of the story, both in a brand new book and in a talk with us this morning. She was on course to become the first woman president of the United States, but on election night it didn't work out that way. And while Donald Trump went to the White House, Hillary Rodham Clinton went home. Off I went into a frenzy of closet cleaning and long walks in the woods and playing with my dogs and, you know, my share of Chardonnay. I was just gobsmacked, wiped out.

I thought I was going to win. Ahead, Hillary Clinton on Putin, Bernie, Comey, and what went wrong. Should Confederate statues and memorials remain in place or should they be removed as symbols of a painful era?

Turns out it's complicated, as our morocca has discovered. Why does this black church have a stained glass window memorializing a Confederate leader? This is not a memorial to General Stonewall Jackson. It is a memorial to the man Stonewall Jackson. The man fought for slavery. Can we separate the man from his military work? Are there shades of gray in the battle over Confederate monuments later on Sunday morning?

Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. It's an age-old expression that's getting a bit of an update thanks to a relatively new and controversial federal agency. This morning, Erin Moriarty is talking to its chief. Please welcome CFPB director. As director of the government's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray has won nearly 12 billion dollars for consumers.

So why do some members of Congress want him gone? We have now one unelected, one unaccountable individual who essentially gets to determine what mortgages we have, what credit cards we have, what bank loans we get. The battle over the bureau and what it means for you later on Sunday morning. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more.

Play it at play.it. Hurricane Irma is smashing into southern Florida this morning after leaving a path of destruction across the Caribbean. Tony DeCopel in Puerto Rico has the story of paradise lost. Hurricane Irma crashed into the outer Caribbean islands early Wednesday morning, battering island after island and turning a postcard corner of the world into a paradise lost. The storm's 185 mile per hour winds, pounding rains, and powerful waves made landfall on the tiny island nation of Barbuda, where nearly every building suffered damage, a scene Prime Minister Gaston Brown and survivors struggle to even describe. The entire country has been decimated.

I have never seen anything like this before. What we experienced is like something you see in a horror movie. From there, Irma tore into the Dutch and French island of St. Martin, tossing boats like toys and damaging or destroying 70% of the homes. Thousands of Americans were stranded for days on the nearly unreachable island as supplies ran thin and conditions deteriorated. One French minister described scenes of pillaging, a description seemingly confirmed by Dutch television. I see people with my shed and people with cars, trucks, just go.

The police can't stop them. And nothing could stop Irma as it cut a swath of devastation, ravaging the British and US Virgin Islands before delivering Puerto Rico and its 3.4 million American citizens a near miss for the ages. Everybody's going to be out of every room. We're going room by room.

This is like something I thought we'd never experienced. Our crew and about 200 vacationers were evacuated out of our rooms on the island's northeastern coast, but the shelter itself barely held. We're in the ballroom where people are lined up for dinner and suddenly water started dropping heavily from the ceiling and they're afraid now that the roof is going to potentially cave in over here. Nearly a million Puerto Ricans lost power and these scenes of destruction repeated themselves as Irma sideswiped the Turks and Caicos, Hispaniola and Yucatan. Irma sideswiped the Turks and Caicos, Hispaniola and Cuba where Will Grant of the BBC witnessed the storm's impact. Cubans thought they were well prepared for Hurricane Irma, but when she finally hit the island as a category five storm, one of the most powerful to make landfall on Cuba since the 1930s, well it turned out that no amount of preparation was quite enough.

Hurricane Irma has left a wake of death and destruction across the Caribbean, but as people begin to dig out, they're breathing a sigh of relief that Hurricane Jose has seemingly passed them by, at least for now. Ahead, should they stay or should they go? As the time finally come to tear down monuments to the confederacy, as you know, it's a divisive question and as Moraca now shows us, it's complicated. General Thomas Stonewall Jackson was one of the best known commanders of the confederate army and a Virginian, so it's not a big surprise that he's memorializing the memorialized here in this stained glass window at Roanoke's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. That is, until you meet its congregation.

Good morning Fifth Avenue. The Stonewall Jackson window has been part of this black church for 125 years, surviving a fire in 1959 that destroyed the rest of the church. This was a monument to the future of the African-American race. But third generation member Joyce Bolden says the window is not about General Jackson, but Jackson the man, who before the war led a bible study for his slaves, including the parents of an early pastor. I believe it's being memorialized for what Stonewall Jackson was as a human being and as a man of Christ, of faith. He defied all the laws of the south by educating his slaves.

He taught them to read and write. The man fought for slavery. That is the man. Can we separate the man from his military work? Current pastor Vernie Bolden isn't so sure.

He joined us along with church elder Ray Williams. And if Stonewall Jackson were right here, what would you say to him? You picked the wrong side of history, man. I would thank him for educating his slaves. I think that's very important.

So it's complicated. The conversation over the window continues, but across the country a legion of Confederate monuments has fallen. Some after the 2015 Charleston massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white supremacist. Then many more came down after white supremacists used the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia as pretext for a rally last month that shocked the nation.

We're having once again for whatever it is, the 17th time, a major racial reckoning in America and we don't know exactly where this one's going. According to Yale University Civil War historian David Blight, most early Confederate monuments were part of an effort to recast the secessionist cause as a noble one and to reestablish white dominance over freed blacks. The first major monument was to Stonewall Jackson, unveiled in Richmond, Virginia in 1875. It was a big coming out. It was the first time Confederate flags were used on any scale. Blacks were only allowed to participate in this at the very back of the line.

The message, says Blight, was clear. We're back in the Union now. Virginians were saying, white Virginians were saying, we're going to show you who our heroes are. Even so, Blight doesn't support the wholesale removal of Confederate monuments. I want to make it clear, I am for removal of some Confederate monuments.

The time has come. Not all of them, not every single one of them, certainly not in cemeteries. I just want the process to be historical, to be a historical process.

I want the process to be historical, deliberative, and based on research. And including the people who live there. Yes, if all politics is local, all memory is also local. A memorial landscape turned minefield is familiar terrain for David Blight and Yale University. Was there some resistance to changing the name? Oh yes, there was resistance to name changing among alumni, alumni, alumni, among alumni. Earlier this year, the university renamed a dormitory dedicated to former Vice President John C. Calhoun, citing what it called Calhoun's primary legacy as one of the 19th century's most ardent defenders of slavery. But determining a historical figure's primary legacy is where things get tricky. I'm sure you've heard this, but this university has a very conspicuous connection to someone who made a lot of money trading slaves.

And his name is? Elihu Yale. Yeah, well, I can assure you, as our previous dean said, the name Yale is not on the table.

Yes, Yale is named for Elihu Yale, a slave trader. So where to draw the line? After all, 10 of our first 12 presidents were slave owners.

Some warn against drawing lines at all. We need to remember this nation exists by the blood and the sacrifice and the courage of many, many men. Many got it correctly.

Many misguided. Virginia Tech history professor emeritus James Robertson isn't new to this debate. In 1961, President Kennedy tapped Robertson to lead the Civil War Centennial Commission.

We need to learn from the mistakes others made, just as well as we need to be inspired by the good things that good people have done. And Robertson believes there was a lot of good in Confederate General Robert E. Lee. People forget that after the Civil War, Lee became the greatest voice for reconciliation in this country.

He preached peace and harmony. Robertson joined us on Richmond's Monument Avenue, a grand boulevard in the once Confederate capital designed to pay tribute to the rebel leaders. This looks pretty clearly like he's being honored for his military service, not as a peacemaker.

It certainly does. My regret is that Lee is not in civilian clothing, which he would have been in his last five years. Half a mile from Lee is the Jefferson Davis Monument, a tribute as much to the secessionist government, it seems, as it is to the former Confederate president.

So Davis leads the South into a war for its independence, very much aware that he was fighting to keep slavery legal. So if one has to go, this is probably the one to go. If we look down and we see Stonewall, Jackson way in the distance, we see all this green space.

Is all that green space one solution? Absolutely. There's plenty of room for monuments here. Monuments commemorating other aspects of the war. Harriet Tubman, Frederick Davis. But simply adding statues of African-American icons isn't a solution, says Bryan Stevenson.

He still remembers what it felt like seeing Confederate monuments as a kid. I always thought, despite the fact that they were copper or bronze, that they were screaming at me. They were saying, I don't belong here. This is not your land.

You are still subordinate. Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, is turning a light on one of America's darkest post-Civil War chapters. The nearly 4,000 documented lynchings that happened in the Old South between 1877 and 1950. We are looking at jars of soil that have been collected from the sites of lynchings that took place in the state of Alabama. 363 in Alabama alone. There's even photography, where you'll see thousands of people gathered in a space while someone is being hanged. People would come to these lynchings and they would drink lemonade and whiskey.

And now these jars will be part of a museum that Stevenson is opening, along with a national memorial to victims of lynching next year in Montgomery. He's not worried if it makes some people uncomfortable. I do think that we need to increase the shame quotient in America. I don't think shame is a bad thing.

I think it actually moves you and pushes you to think differently about things. And I don't frankly think we've expressed our shame about slavery. I want us to talk about what it means to honor someone who did something dishonorable. Which brings us back to Roanoke and the Stonewall Jackson window that survived that fire so many years ago. Joyce Bolden doesn't expect others to see it as she does. When I die off and there's no memory of the origins of this window, it probably will be removed. Until that day, she sees the window not as a tribute to the confederacy, but as an unlike connection to her own history. When I see this one day, I see the past of the original church. I see it every time I walk in, because I grew up around that one day.

Nobody else might not see that because they didn't grow up in the frame church that I grew up in. For her, it's complicated. Next, turn right when you get to this corner. On the road, next, turn right when you get to this corner.

On the road, again. And now a page from our Sunday morning almanac, September 10, 1934, 83 years ago today. The day Charles Kuralt was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. An award-winning young newspaper reporter, Charles rose rapidly to become a CBS news correspondent at just 23 years of age.

This is where the St. Lawrence Seaway begins. With an on-air poise beyond his years and away with words beyond anyone else in the business. The World Series is an event in search of a hero. Charles Kuralt masterfully covered every kind of story, such as this report on a North Pole expedition.

The thing about the Arctic and the spring is that you go along with beautiful weather, the sun shining down, blue sky overhead, a gentle breeze, and then a blow like this comes along to remind you where you are. In the fall of 67, Charles began his longest journey yet. His years of travel on the road, looking for the little stories everyone else had missed.

Turn right when you get to this corner. Along the way, he found avid, if unusual, collectors. Nobody could accuse you of wasting any string lately. Not to mention athletes of remarkable longevity. Humiliated by a 104-year-old man. And then in January of 1979. Good morning. Here begins something new.

It was the premiere of Sunday Morning, the broadcast he went on to anchor for its first 15 years. A weekly reflection of his love for our country and our people. His final sign-off in 1994 invoked as only he could the words of the poet Clarence Day. Remember, please, when I am gone, t'was aspiration led me on.

Tiddly-widdly, toodle-oo, all I want is to stay with you. But here I go. Goodbye. Charles Kuralt died just three years later in 1997. On July 4th, no less.

To this day, all of us here at Sunday Morning do our best to keep his memory alive. And to carry on. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more.

Play it at Play.It. Let the buyer beware. Usually good advice.

Even so, it helps if the consumer has someone watching his or her back. Aaron Moriarty of 48 Hours has been talking to the embattled head of the federal agency that's trying to do just that. You all have failed. Failed once again to respond adequately to this subpoena. Of course we've responded.

We've produced another, I think, two or three episodes of documents. Richard Cordray may be the best friend that the consumer has ever had. So why does he seem to have so many enemies on Capitol Hill? Do you feel you have a target on your back? Well, what I feel is that we need an independent consumer watchdog. You have regular people who have problems with big financial companies. How do they get relief? And you need somebody who's going to stand on their side and level the business.

You need somebody who's going to stand on their side and level the playing field for them. Cordray is a former attorney general of Ohio, and thanks to an exceptional gift of recall, a five-time winner of the TV show Jeopardy. It's set in Massachusetts. Richard.

What is the Bostonians? Correct. But he raised hackles of some in Washington when President Obama appointed him director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the CFPB. You're an attorney, and you just said that it doesn't matter what they signed?

It doesn't matter. Since then, he's been rebuked and criticized on Capitol Hill. Who is to protect the consumer from the director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau?

That's just not true. I'm no different from the federal reserve or the FDIC. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created in 2010 as part of legislation designed to rein in Wall Street. The Bureau was actually the idea of Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor at the time, who hoped that a single independent agency regulating all consumer lending would prevent the kind of practices that led to the Great Recession of 2008. We cover banks, we cover auto lenders, we cover mortgage lenders.

Nobody was singularly focused on that before the financial crisis, and it was a gap and a blind spot, and it cost this country terribly. In less than six years, Cordray has turned the fledgling agency into a regulatory powerhouse, rewriting lending regulations and bringing enforcement actions against some of the biggest financial institutions in the country, including Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Bank of America. Still, some members of Congress say Cordray has way too much power. We have now one unelected, one unaccountable individual who essentially gets to determine what mortgages we have, what credit cards we have, what bank loans we get. Jeb Hensarling, Republican from Texas, is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. In a democracy, no one person should have that much power. Outside of Washington, people like Harry Boris and his son, Ari, see it differently.

The Bureau is needed, and it needs to be strengthened, not weakened, and it needs to protect people that can't look out for themselves. Harry contacted the Bureau's Complaint Center in 2011, concerned about a used car loan his 19-year-old son had gotten after joining the Army. He picked me up at the airport in this big Dodge truck. I noticed that he was completely broke.

He didn't have money to eat. Ari got the loan through a program called Miles, military installment loans and educational services. They were going to teach soldiers how to buy an automobile in a responsible way. Because the monthly car payment was deducted directly from his Army paycheck, Ari mistakenly assumed his loan was part of a government program.

You go in the dealership, too, and they have pictures of like the post commander and all these battalion commanders in full uniform shaking the hands of the car dealers, so they really make it look like, and they made it look like, like this is part of the military, like the Army. Ari Boris had agreed to pay three times the blue book value of the truck over the lifetime of the contract. I'm not saying he was right, but they were wrong to allow things like that to happen. Altogether, if he had kept that loan for his $11,000 car, he would have paid $31,405.80.

That's about right. Harry got his son out of the loan and the Bureau got refunds for Ari Boris and 50,000 other members of the military who had signed up for similar overpriced loans. I met two of his friends that had also done the same thing. And incidentally, one of them had asked to go to Iraq or Afghanistan just to get the hazard pay to pay his car loan. Since its inception, the Bureau has collected nearly $12 billion in restitution and fines.

$12 billion. But Congressman Hensarling argues that the Bureau's actions have also hurt consumers, forcing some lenders out of business and making others less willing to make loans. If you have law that is gray as opposed to black and white, what happens is, as one banker told me, I'm just hunkering down in a foxhole and I'm not lending money because I'm afraid of what the CFPB may do. To reduce regulations that he says stifle the economy, Hensarling is now pushing a bill, the Financial Choice Act, that would restructure the CFPB and strip it of much of its enforcement powers. Is it possible that one of the reasons why there are members of Congress who want to get rid of Richard Cordray and his Bureau is that maybe he's just doing his job too well?

That's always a possibility. William D. Cohen spent 17 years as an investment banker and now writes about Wall Street for Vanity Fair magazine. I personally think it just goes back to the antipathy that fellow senators have and Congress people have for Elizabeth Warren. This is her baby.

I think they just want to zing her a little bit. In June, Hensarling's bill passed its first hurdle in the House, despite strong opposition by consumer groups and concerned academics. You received a letter signed by 158 professors from all the major universities in this country, all opposing your bill, all supporting the Bureau. Are all of those professors wrong?

Uh, yes. They are? They're all wrong? Obviously, they don't believe in freedom. They don't believe in capitalism. They don't believe in consumer prosperity. They ultimately don't. They obviously don't believe in markets.

I'm offended. I believe in freedom. Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah, and several of the letter writers met with us at Georgetown University. It seems to me that Chairman Hensarling believes in freedom, but only for big banks and financial institutions.

What about the consumers who end up in debt traps? Patricia McCoy of Boston College. Even the Choice Act would not abolish the Bureau.

Instead, it would just leave it an empty husk. Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law school. We all lived through the financial crisis, and anybody studying the crisis understands that the failure of the federal regulators to protect consumers was the most important government failure that we have seen since the Great Depression.

Adam Levitan of Georgetown Law. The Bureau has been very careful and selective about its enforcement actions. It's not gone after businesses where there's a close call. The battle over the Bureau isn't over yet. It now moves to the U.S. Senate and the federal courts, where the CFPB has been challenged as unconstitutional. And despite speculation that Richard Cordray may soon resign to run for governor of Ohio, he says his attention remains on the American consumer.

Making sure people are treated fairly in the marketplace, that somebody stands on their side to see that that happens, that's our job, and we're going to keep focusing on it. Even as we await the latest word on Irma from our team in Florida, our thoughts also turn to Texas. How are Houston and the rest of the Gulf Coast region doing in the wake of the storm that hit them just two weekends ago?

Omar Villafranca has a progress report. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the cleanup. More than two weeks after Harvey flooded the Texas Gulf Coast, thousands of Houston residents are still picking up the mess the storm left behind. Tried to get out, did not get out.

Pat Arthur was rescued from his front porch by a boat. His home couldn't escape the storm. Everything's gone. 23 years worth of memories now thrown into a pile in his front yard, ready for the landfill. You do plan on staying? We're going to stay for a while.

So first thing you do is you cut it at four foot and pull the sheetrock out. It was still raining outside when Mike Gregg started gutting his home. Everything soaked by the two feet of water had to be removed and thrown away. Everyone's fine. Everyone's healthy.

And I've got a big support system. But the hardest thing for Mike to get rid of was his wife's piano. It was very valuable.

It was the last thing they splurged on together before starting their family. For Edward Zilton's cleanup crews, the amount of debris seems endless. I've been here for the last two storms, and this one is actually a total catastrophe. It really is. Each truck holds nine tons of debris.

The crews fill up roughly 28 trucks a day. Cleanup is expected to take several months. This is my house underwater. Harvey submerged Sandra Carrasco's home in 10 feet of water. She lost everything. And days after the storm, the mother of two says she hadn't seen a government agency or relief group drive down her street. Do you kind of feel like they're forgetting about you?

Yes, I honestly do. But like many people here, Sandra and her family didn't wait for help. When we caught up with her this past week, her home was already cleared out. There's no waiting. Get the things done and get it done now.

And while national attention shifts to Mother Nature's latest wrath, named Irma, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says there's still a lot of work to do. The cameras are going to move on. People are going to move on. And the attention is going to move on. But the people that are directly impacted, they don't move on. They are left in the position of having to recover.

The city of Houston was built on oil and gas. But what will fuel this recovery is elbow grease. Next, meet the comeback kids. We'll have the latest update on Hurricane Irma coming right up. For young people in Florida, dismayed by the destruction around them, there's possibly some encouragement to be had in our Steve Hartman story of the comeback kids. It's not hard to find a high school football team practicing in Texas. But what amazed us was to find one here. When Harvey came ashore the first time as a Category 4, Rockport, Texas took the brunt of it.

It looked literally like a bomb went off in this town. That's my desk. That's my couch. Like the rest of his teammates, senior safety Johnny Soto returned last Sunday to a house full of useless garbage. It's my dirty clothes.

Heartbreaking. These kids don't have street clothes? Some of them don't have street clothes.

It's the clothes that they got on their back. Which is why offensive coach J.D. Medrano was as surprised as anyone when, even though school is closed indefinitely, the kids just started showing up for practice last week. Why do you think they came? I honestly believe that this is what, this is home to them. This is what they know.

It's the only thing close to being grounded. So now they run plays like it still matters. Still kick at the goal posts Harvey tore down in victory. All in an effort to recover together from the greatest loss of their lives. Just to get through all of this because we can't do it alone. I mean we're all we got.

Gonna carry each other, not gonna let this bring us down. Another part of their therapy is helping the community. Last week they cleared brush from about 60 homes. Wow look at that.

Much to the delight of homeowners like Lucille Wright. Don't you ever doubt yourselves what you've done here today is the heart of a warrior. And I love each of you. The Rockport Fulton Pirates may be down and out but they are clearly off to a winning start.

All right. So never mind that they lost their opener this weekend. These guys say no matter what happens their season will be a success. Nothing will stop the way we work as a family and it's just it's amazing. You said family not team. No we're not a team anymore.

We're always going to be together as a family and we're going to get through everything. Let's get a prayer. Whoever said football is just a game never needed it like these kids. Let's go. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment and more.

Play it at Play.It. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for and I'm sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country. Hillary Rodham Clinton delivering her concession speech the day after losing last year's presidential election. She looks back on her campaign in a new book out this week, What Happened, published by Simon & Schuster, a CBS company.

On Friday, I sat down for a talk with Mrs. Clinton at her suburban home outside New York City. So I'm wondering how are you? I think I am good, but that doesn't mean that I am complacent or resolved about what happened. It still is very painful.

It hurts a lot. Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent the last 10 months trying to figure out why she isn't president of the United States. Can we talk about election day? Mm-hmm. Did you have any clue what the outcome of that day would be?

No. As the polls closed, Clinton supporters gathered in a New York City convention center, expecting to see history being made. But as the returns came in, the celebratory mood began to fade. You know, I just kind of went in the bedroom, laid down on the bed, and I felt like I was going to have to wait this out, but then midnight, I decided, well, you know, it looks like it's not going to work. After midnight, she called Donald Trump, the president-elect, and then she called the White House. You called the president?

I did. I felt like I had let everybody down. Morning came, and the nation was in a hurry. Morning came, and the nation was waiting to hear from her. I had not drafted a concession speech. I'd been working on a victory speech. Our best days are still ahead of us.

And then on what she thought would be her first day as president-elect, Hillary and Bill Clinton headed back home to Chappaqua, New York. I just felt this enormous letdown, this kind of loss of feeling and direction and sadness. And, you know, Bill just kept saying, oh, you know, that was a terrific speech, trying to just kind of bolster me a little bit. Off I went into a frenzy of closet cleaning and long walks in the woods and playing with my dogs and yoga, alternate nostril breathing, which I highly recommend, trying to calm myself down. And, you know, my share of Chardonnay, it was a very hard transition. I really struggled. I couldn't feel, I couldn't think.

I was just gobsmacked, wiped out. Weeks passed, but she couldn't remain in seclusion forever. You know, after the first of the year, I had a big decision to make. Was I going to go to the inauguration? Well, defeated candidates don't necessarily show up, but you're a former first lady. But I'm a former first lady, and former presidents and first ladies show up. It's part of the demonstration of the continuity of our government.

And so there I was on the platform, you know, feeling like an out-of-body experience. And then his speech, which was a cry from the white nationalist gut. This American carnage stops. What an opportunity to say, okay, I'm proud of my supporters, but I'm the president of all Americans.

That's not what we heard at all. Clinton had been so sure she'd be the one giving that inaugural speech. You specifically bought this house for a reason.

I did. And this was to be? Well, I know a lot about what it takes to move a president, and I thought I was going to win.

The Clintons had acquired the house next door to accommodate White House staff and security during a second Clinton administration. And doesn't it kind of haunt you? No, I'm very happy we did it. At a dining room table in that house, she wrote about what happened. I couldn't get the job done, and I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life.

So what did happen? Hillary Clinton was supposed to make history as the first woman president of the United States. I started the campaign knowing that I would have to work extra hard to make women and men feel comfortable with the idea of a woman president. It doesn't fit into the stereotypes we all carry around in our head.

And a lot of the sexism and the misogyny was in service of these attitudes. Like, you know, we really don't want a woman commander in chief. I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.

I tell you that. Her opponent? Real estate billionaire and reality TV star, Donald Trump.

You're fired. A political novice who had previously defeated 16 GOP primary challengers. We will make America great again. He was quite successful in referencing a nostalgia that would give hope, comfort, settle grievances for millions of people who were upset about gains that were made by others. What you're saying is millions of white people. Millions of white people.

Yeah, millions of white people. And then the Russians. American intelligence began picking up signals that Moscow was attempting to influence the election in Trump's favor, both by hacking into Democratic National Committee emails and by spreading false information online. The forces that were at work in 2016 were unlike anything that I've ever seen or read about.

It was a perfect storm. I should have used two emails. But there were serious self-inflicted wounds, too. Were there things that had you not, but for that might be the president? Oh, I think the the most important of the mistakes I made was using personal email.

I never sent or received any classified material. A stream of explanations for her decision to use a private email server while she was secretary of state never satisfied critics or the press. I've said it before. I'll say it again.

That was my responsibility. It was presented in such a negative way and I never could get out from under it and it never stopped. Not even after the director of the FBI, James Comey, cleared her of any criminal charges. We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.

While adding a postscript that's done. There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information. I don't know quite what audience he was playing to other than maybe some, you know, right wing commentators, right wing members of Congress, whatever. The email investigation appeared to be over until late October. Any reaction to the FBI investigation with early voting already underway in some states. Traces of Clinton's emails were discovered on a home computer of the estranged husband of her close aid, Huma Abedin. Anthony Weiner was the former congressman who was being investigated in a sexting scandal. Eleven days before the election and it raised the specter that somehow the investigation was being reopened.

It just stopped my momentum. Now remember this too, Jane. At the same time he does that about a closed investigation, there's an open investigation into the Trump campaign and their connections with Russia.

You never hear a word about it. And when asked later, he goes, well, it was too close to the election. Now help me make sense of that.

I can't understand it. No new improprieties were discovered, but Clinton believes Comey's 11th hour intrusion cost her the election. And then there was the harm she believes was done by Bernie Sanders, her fiery populist primary opponent. She has given speeches on Wall Street. She writes, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump's Crooked Hillary campaign. Oh, she's crooked, folks.

She's crooked as a $3 bill. But Hillary Clinton looks inward too, acknowledging a tone that didn't fit the political landscape of 2016. I understood that there were many Americans who, because of the financial crash, there was anger and there was resentment. I knew that, but I believed that it was my responsibility to try to offer answers to it, not to fan it. I think, Jane, that it was a mistake because a lot of people didn't want to hear my plans. They wanted me to share their anger and I should have done a better job of demonstrating.

I get it. There were some memorable verbal gaffes too. You could put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Why do you think that word deplorable had been circulating in your mind? Well, I thought Trump was behaving in a deplorable manner. I thought a lot of his appeals to voters were deplorable. I thought his behavior, as we saw on the Access Hollywood tape, was deplorable. And there were a large number of people who didn't care. It did not matter to them.

And he turned out to be a very effective reality TV star in our presidential campaign. You said basket of deplorables. You energized. No, but they were already energized.

But you offended some people who didn't personally feel deplorable at all. I don't buy that. I don't buy that. I'm sorry I gave them a political gift of any kind. That was a gift.

But I don't think that was determinative. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the ****.

You can do anything. As the campaign entered its final month, the now infamous Access Hollywood tape surfaced. Melania said this was okay. Two days later, Clinton and Trump meet in their second debate.

After we heard him admitting and laughing about sexually assaulting women and being able to get away with it because if you're a star, you can do anything. So in my debate prep, we practiced this. The young man playing Trump would stalk me. And I practiced keeping my composure. I practiced not getting rattled. Well, it's one thing to practice it. It's another thing to be in front of, you know, 50, 60, 70 million people and having him scowling and leering and moving up on me.

And it was so just...combobulating. And so while I'm answering questions, my mind is going, okay, do I keep my composure? Do I act like a president? What he said was extremely unwise. Or do I wheel around and say, get out of my space.

Back up, you creep. Well, you know, I didn't do the latter, but I think in this time we're in, particularly in this campaign, you know, maybe I missed a few chances. Is your political career over?

Yes. As an active politician, it's over. You will never be a candidate for office. I am done with being a candidate, but I am not done with politics because I literally believe that our country's future is at stake.

You represent the best of America, and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life. In the end, Hillary Rodham Clinton still seems gobsmacked by what happened. She dishes out blame, and she accepts responsibility. But while she's proud of her effort, she writes, she was running a traditional presidential campaign, while Trump was running a reality show. We have a reality show that leads to the election of a president. He ends up in the Oval Office. He says, boy, it's so much harder than I thought it would be.

This is really tough. I had no idea. Well, yeah, because it's not a show. It's real. It's reality for sure. And please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. And we can usually figure it out. What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters, wherever you get your podcasts.