President Donald Trump on Wednesday returned to an oft-repeated charge Democrats used the issue of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election as an "excuse . . . when they lost."
In an interview on Fox News' "Hannity," the president said the reason for the loss was a "bad candidate."
"Russia was an excuse used by the Democrats when they lost the election," he said. "They said – they lost the election – they sat in a room and they said, 'Wow, we look bad.'"
"The morning after — in fact it's been written about in various books, or a book — but they said, 'Why did you lose the election?' And they said, 'Ah, it was Russia. Russia,'" he said.
The reference may have been to an incident described in the campaign tell-all, "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign," and reported by Breitbart News last April.
"It wasn't Russia, it was a bad candidate," Trump continued. "It was a candidate that didn't go to Wisconsin and Michigan like they should have."
Trump has lobbed the accusation before, telling a rally crowd in August the "Russia story is a total fabrication" and "an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics."
He has also tweeted the theory several times previously.
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